LIANZA 2008 Day 4 summing up

It's weird that it's now over and moreover I'm not just back at home with my cat (who cuddled up to me all night) but also back at work. Day 4 was as great as all the rest.

Marilyn Waring started off talking about her work with various communities, and how quantitative "objective" research just isn't sufficient to work out what the underlying problem is in a lot of cases - you need to talk to the people living the experience and get them involved in the research.

Meg Upjohn and I talked about our Library on Location trials. Kris liveblogged our talk and the questions and answers. We really enjoyed presenting and the audience was great.

At lunch I went to the Aotearoa People's Network presentation -- it was really inspiring hearing how the implementation has affected so many communities which would otherwise be left out, or at least left for last, in a market-driven majority-rules approach.

Helen Mandl talked about the extension built onto their library and the ensuing refurbishment. There was nothing revolutionary but we did get to see how the 'learning commons' ideas could be applied in a practical way.

Dylan Horrocks gave the last keynote, bookending the conference - talking about how the stringent anti-piracy laws don't actually benefit the artists, but rather the corporations; and how peer-to-peer file-sharing is going to become more and more predominant and change the economic model. Did I mention he's a great speaker and very entertaining?

I kept up the liveblogging: see Waring and Horrocks and Aotearoa People's Network and Mandl (you'll need to scroll down as this link contains three days' worth of stuff now).

Food report for the day: I forget morning tea as we were preparing for our talk. Another buffet lunch - took it into a lunch session so had somewhere to sit while eating. Small scones with jam and cream to taste for afternoon tea - very tasty though the jam was quite sticky to spread.