Are we automating inequality in Aotearoa? – Wellington – 18 March 2019

What

Renowned US author of Automating Inequality Prof. Virginia Eubanks and University of Auckland Prof. Tim Dare (a specialist in Ethical Analysis of Predictive Risk Modelling) will lead a panel discussion on how data is being used around the world, and how we can use it responsibly in New Zealand.

In her new book, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, Eubanks explores how data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models are increasingly affecting vulnerable people in society – the poor and working-class.

This will be a rare opportunity to meet Prof. Eubanks – who is visiting New Zealand for the first time – and hear her perspective on how data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models are increasingly affecting vulnerable people in society – the poor and working-class.

Tohatoha, in association with InternetNZ, is hosting events in Auckland and Wellington where attendees can meet Prof. Eubanks and hear her perspective on how the issues raised in a USA context in her book may also be applicable to New Zealand.

“In an age where New Zealand is increasingly moving towards automation of public systems and social services, this is a prime opportunity to hear from a specialist on the subject and consider whether inequality is becoming automated in New Zealand, why it matters and what can be done about it,” says Tohatoha CEO, Mandy Henk

The discussion and Q&A will be led by Jordan Carter, CEO of InternetNZ, with input from Mandy Henk, CEO of Tohatoha Aotearoa Commons (formerly Creative Commons Aotearoa NZ)

About Professor Virginia Eubanks
Virginia Eubanks is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. In addition to Automating Inequality, she is the author of several other books, including Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age; and co-editor, with Alethia Jones, of Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith. Her writing about technology and social justice has appeared in Scientific American, The Nation, Harper’s, and Wired. For two decades, Eubanks has worked in community technology and economic justice movements. She was a founding member of the Our Data Bodies Project and a 2016-2017 Fellow at New America. She lives in Troy, NY.

About Professor Tim Dare
Tim Dare is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland. He worked briefly as a lawyer before doing his PhD in the philosophy of law and starting his academic career in the early 1990s. His publications include books and articles on the philosophy of law, legal ethics, immunisation programmes, the significance of judicial disagreement, parental rights and medical decisions, the proper allocation of the burden of proof, and the use of predictive analytics in child protection. He is employed by New Zealand’s Ministry of Social Development to provide data ethics advice and to develop privacy, human rights, and ethical review processes for proposed uses of client data. He has provided ethical reviews of a number of predictive risk modelling tools in New Zealand and the US. He is principal investigator on a NZ Royal Society Marsden Grant (2018-2020) investigating the ethics of using predictive risk modelling tools in social policy contexts, and sits on a number of local and national research and clinical ethics committees.

When and Where

18 March, 2019
4pm – 6pm

Rangimarie Room, Te Papa Tongarewa,
55 Cable Street, Te Aro, Wellington.

How Much

$25 (waged) or $10 (unwaged). Get tickets here.

More

US author Virginia Eubanks to visit NZ in March. Press release on 25 February 2019 by Tohatoha.
Are we automating inequality in Aotearoa? Prof. Virginia Eubanks in discussion with Prof. Tim Dare.

Are we automating inequality in Aotearoa? – Auckland – 15 March 2019

What

US-based professor and writer Virginia Eubanks will visit New Zealand in March for a series of events promoting her new book Automating Inequality and discussing the impacts of technology and big data on the poorest people in society.

In her new book, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, Eubanks explores how data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models are increasingly affecting vulnerable people in society – the poor and working-class.

Tohatoha, in association with InternetNZ, is hosting events in Auckland and Wellington where attendees can meet Prof. Eubanks and hear her perspective on how the issues raised in a USA context in her book may also be applicable to New Zealand.

“In an age where New Zealand is increasingly moving towards automation of public systems and social services, this is a prime opportunity to hear from a specialist on the subject and consider whether inequality is becoming automated in New Zealand, why it matters and what can be done about it,” says Mandy Henk, CEO of Tohatoha Aotearoa Commons (formerly Creative Commons Aotearoa NZ). Discussion and Q+A to be led by Tohatoha CEO, Mandy Henk.

About Professor Virginia Eubanks
Virginia Eubanks is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. In addition to Automating Inequality, she is the author of several other books, including Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age; and co-editor, with Alethia Jones, of Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith. Her writing about technology and social justice has appeared in Scientific American, The Nation, Harper’s, and Wired. For two decades, Eubanks has worked in community technology and economic justice movements. She was a founding member of the Our Data Bodies Project and a 2016-2017 Fellow at New America. She lives in Troy, NY.

When and Where

Friday, 15 March, 2019
3pm – 5pm

GridAKL,
12 Madden Street, Wynyard Quarter, Auckland.

How Much

$25 (waged) or $10 (unwaged). Get tickets here.

More

US author Virginia Eubanks to visit NZ in March. Press release on 25 February 2019 by Tohatoha.
Are we automating inequality in Aotearoa? An afternoon with Prof. Virginia Eubanks.

Open Banking & Event-driven Microservices using Apache Kafka – Auckland – 13 March 2019

What

Details
Event driven architecture in microservices and Open Banking driving APIs and microservices.

Agenda

Meet and greet

Talk 1: What Open Banking is driving with APIs and Microservices
Damian Harvey – Partner at Deloitte NZ https://www.linkedin.com/in/damianharvey

Damian presents on why Open Banking is fuelling the move towards APIs and Microservices in Banking, and what the future may look like in an Open Banking world.

Refreshments!
(Caviar and pickled fish canapés or pizza and beer … still deciding)

Talk 2: Event-driven Microservices using Apache Kafka
Andrew Schofield – Chief Architect, Event Streams at IBM
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjschofield/

Microservices usually communicate synchronously, often using REST APIs. There is an alternative way using events. By adopting an event-based approach for intercommunication between microservices, the microservices applications are naturally responsive (event-driven). This approach enhances the loose coupling nature of microservices because it decouples producers and consumers.

When and Where

Wednesday 13 March 2019
5:30pm to 7:30pm

Amazon Web Services
Level 1
139 Pakenham St West
Wynyard Quarter
Auckland

How Much

Free

More

Open Banking & Event-driven Microservices using Apache Kafka
Auckland API and Microservices Meetup

Play by Play conference – Wellington – 26-27 April 2019

What

Play by Play is a New Zealand games conference with a difference, run mid-April each year in the beating cultural heart of the country – Wellington. Since our inception in 2016, we’ve grown exponentially, proving that there’s a vibrant community of gamers, enthusiasts and curious folk in the play sphere. Further to our flagship conference, we host networking events and professional development workshops for industry players.

A game development summit like no other, the Play By Play conference brings game developers of all skill levels together for two days of low-pressure learning and sharing. We aim to engage delegates with a fun, light-hearted atmosphere and a playful approach to improving our craft.

This year’s theme is “The Power of Many” and reflects our strength in community, diversity and the impact our craft can make when we work together.

With Play by Play now being under the NZ Games Festival banner, we’ve made some changes to the structure of our industry events:

  • As the perfect accompaniment to our conference, we’re bringing back Treat and Greet, a networking event for all of our sweet conference attendees <3
  • For our last course, we’re serving up the delicious Pavs! Our new and improved Awards evening!

These are just some of the many amazing events happening around New Zealand Games Festival. For more events, including workshops, our NZ games exhibition, tabletop sessions and the wildly popular quiz night, please check out our website: nzgamesfest.com

When and Where

Main Conference
10am – 4:30pm 26-27 April 2019
Soundings Theatre, Te Papa, Wellington

Treat and Greet:
6:30pm Onwards, 26 April 2019
Our networking event will be held at Prefab Hall.

The Pavs
7pm Onwards, 27 April 2019
The awards ceremony location will be advertised shortly.

How Much

Earlybird Pricing – Ends 12 March

All Access, all events $95
Student, all events $65
The Pavs awards only $25

More

Play by Play Conference Website
Registration for Play by Play



Knative: Building serverless experiences on top of Kubernetes – Auckland – 28 March 2019

What

Presented by
Craig Box — Cloud Native Advocacy Lead at Google Cloud.

5:30 – Networking, drink and nibbles
6:00 – Presentations

You’re following DevOps or SRE best practices, perhaps even with containers and Kubernetes. You might even have implemented Istio! But are you exposing this system to your programmers? Wouldn’t they rather just write code, and have the system figure it out for them?

Knative is a platform for allowing just that. In this talk, Craig will tell you about the Knative platform and its three primary components — build, serving and events — and how you can offer serverless experiences to your users, but on top of all those servers you still love.

Auckland Kubernetes Meetup

A group for people interested in talking about and hacking on Kubernetes, Google’s solution for scheduling and orchestrating containers at scale.

We’re excited about microservices, containers, the distributions that run them and the solutions that deploy, manage, and extend them. Any skill level is welcome; we’re all new to Kubernetes and we want to create an open, welcoming environment for other Kubernauts.

When and Where

Thursday, 28 March 2019
5:30pm – 8pm

Clearpoint Ltd
Level 3, 7-9 Fanshawe Street,
Auckland

How Much

Free

More

Knative: Building serverless experiences on top of Kubernetes
Auckland Kubernetes Meetup

AR 101 for Business: Engagement on steroids – Auckland – 13 March 2019

What

Want to dip your toes into the world of experiential tech’ including Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (XR), Gamification and Edufication? Then you’ve come to the right place. The way we learn, work and engage is changing fast.

Pop-ups may include strategy and actual case studies, but you’ll also get to talk with real people who know stuff, and play with cool real-world examples to take away.

Schedule:

5:29 Welcome
5:45 Latest world news
6:15 tic-toc workshop
6:45 SME speaker
7:00 the greater good project
7:30 Close

Capped at 25 people. RSVP is required to access the security floor.

When and Where

Wednesday 13 March 2019
5:15pm – 7:15pm

EY Building
9th Floor
2 Takutai Square
Britomart
Auckland CBD

RSVP. See Concierge on arrival for access to security floor. Please arrive 5:15 latest as you can not get access to secure floor after 5:30

How Much

Free

More

Augmented Reality Experience Auckland
AR 101 Meetup event

Koordinates 2019 Roadshow – Auckland – 6 March 2019

What

Koordinates is going on the road! We’re travelling Aotearoa New Zealand to host events, meet data users, and demo-ing the Koordinates platform

This year, our theme is ‘The Next Ten Years of Geospatial Data,’ with a special focus on better open data, smoother data supply chains, and simpler data collaboration.

This theme dovetails with some of the work we’re doing here at Koordinates. Our platform is already a key resource for Aotearoa New Zealand’s data users. Our customers include some of the most successful data projects in the world, including the LINZ Data Service and the InternetNZ Broadband Map.

Now, we’re expanding our product to solve some of the most intractable problems in geospatial data management, distribution, and collaboration.

Come along for a lively discussion, detailed demonstration, and quick Q&A with the Koordinates team—and stick around afterwards for drinks and nibbles.

When and Where

Wednesday, 6 March 2019
4:00 pm – 5:00 pm NZDT

Lysaght Building, GridAKL,
101 Pakenham Street West, Auckland 1010

How Much

Free. Reserve seat here.

More

Organised by Koordinates. Twitter @koordinates and facebook.
Announcing the Koordinates 2019 Roadshow.
Eventbrite event.

Writing Big Data Pipelines: the Apache Beam Project – Wellington – 14 March 2019

What

Apache Beam (https://beam.apache.org/) is an open-source project for writing big-data pipelines.

In the first part of this talk, I’ll describe Beam from a non-technical perspective – what it is, why you would use it, how it compares to other technologies in the big data space.

In the second half of the talk I will go into a high-level overview of the technical aspects of Beam. In particular, its heart is a programming model that unifies both batch and stream processing, allowing the programmer to separate the what, where, when, and how of processing. What actual processing is performed on the data. Where in event time is that processing done – how are event times windowed. When in processing time to materialise results. How are updates of results (due e.g. to late data) combined. Beam also provides several language-specific SDKs that instantiate the model for particular languages. Currently Java and Python are available and Go is under development.

Beam also provides a portability framework that allows pipelines to be run on a variety of execution technologies. Beam itself provides a reference runner. There are also efforts to develop runners based on Apache Flink and Apache Spark. Google provides a commercial managed runner on its Google Cloud. Beam builds on the work of Map Reduce, Hadoop, Flume, Spark, and Flink.

Speaker Bio

Neal Glew is a software engineer in the Flume project at Google, where he mostly works on the shuffle system. He previously worked at Intel on parallel programming models within Intel Labs. He has a PhD in computer science from Cornell University and a BSc(hons) in computer science from Victoria University of Wellington.

Data Driven Wellington Meetup Group

There’s so much going on in the world of data that it can be hard to keep up with what’s happening in your own speciality area let alone make connections to others who might have complementary skills or interests. This Meetup is intended to make it easier to stay informed and to make those connections. Its focus is on what people working with data in Wellington-based public, private, non-profit, and academic organisations are doing, what challenges they’re experiencing and what they need help with. It welcomes members who spend their days capturing, storing, manipulating and analysing data as well as those who use data generated by others for decision- and policy-making.

When and Where

Thursday, 14 March 2019
5:30pm – 7:30pm

Rutherford House
23 Lambton Quay
Wellington

Rutherford house is the tall building between the Beehive, Railway Station, and Old Government Building; The Meetup will be in VicBooks Cafe, on the Bunny Street side of the ground floor.

How Much

Free

More

Writing Big Data Pipelines: the Apache Beam Project
Data Driven Wellington Meetup

Davin Ryan “The future of IT labour and should I go contracting?” – Wellington – 5 March 2019

What

Wellington.js is a meet up for those interested in all things JavaScript. Client side, server side, we love it all!

Over the last few years, I’ve been learning and asking questions about being employed in IT and how to get the most fulfillment from it. This has led me to seek out alternatives such as contracting, and associate or partner status in contrast to permanent employment. This presentation is a brief story about what I’ve learned, tips/tricks and my own journey from permanent to contracting to something else. I’m also going to talk about a movement underway which I don’t think we can ignore about the way we are engaged for our services of which Cloud and automation have been significant enablers. It’s about the transition of software as a commodity to software as a service and what it means to be a Software Efficiencer and whether this should be our next career move.

When and Where

Tuesday 5 March 2019
6pm – 8pm

BNZ
Level 2
1 Victoria St
Wellington

How Much

Free

More

The future of IT labour and should I go contracting?
wellington.js Meetup Group

2019 NZ Meccano Convention – Inglewood – 19 – 21 April 2019

What

Meccano is a model construction system created in 1898. The system consists of reusable metal strips, plates, angle girders, wheels, axles and gears, and plastic parts that are connected together using nuts and bolts. It enables the building of working models and mechanical devices.

The New Zealand Federation of Meccano Modellers is a communication network to establish a magazine and to hold national meetings from time to time to enable modellers to show off their skills to fellow modellers and to be able to display to the public what MECCANO was / is all about.

The biennial convention/exhibition of the NZFMM is held over the Easter weekend at different locations around New Zealand in odd numbered years, and is generally hosted by one of the major New Zealand Meccano clubs on behalf of the NZFMM

Registrations for exhibitors close 15 March 2019. The Convention Displays will probably be open to the public, dates and hours to be advised.

When and Where

Easter Weekend
19 April – 21 April 2019
Exact times to be advised

Iglewood Town Hall,
34 Cutfield St.
Inglewood,
Taranak

How Much

Registration $25

Public access price TBA

More

2019 Convention Registration form
The New Zealand Federation of Maccano Modellers