From The President June 2020

David Stonier-Gibson

I hope you are all holding up OK in “iso”. It strikes me that those of us who are retired are the lucky ones, or at least best placed to cope with the potential disruption to our lives. To be honest, not that much has changed for me in my daily routine, except for not having had a haircut for a while!

May monthly meeting

The strange circumstances opened up a possibility that would not have existed BV (Before Virus). I was able to get together a pretty high powered discussion panel that included two AO recipients and people in Canberra and Sydney, as well as here in Melbourne. It also allowed me to try my hand as a panel discussion moderator. For the first 20-25 minutes, I found myself having to push and prompt the panellists, but then the discussion on society after Corona took on a life of its own and I was able to pretty much sit back and enjoy.

A big thank you to Hugh Macdonald for (once more) being the virtual control room operator, and to Chris Hayes for consulting on the technical setup and being standby control room.

The meeting recording is available at https://youtu.be/G9tEnSe__lU

May monthly meeting plan

For the June meeting, I have persuaded Kirsten Greed, our newest committee member, to have a go at organising speakers. We will have a number of our own SIG leaders talking about how they have been handling the challenges of running a SIG under “iso”. Kirsten has asked me to be moderator/MC. This should also serve as a timely reminder that all members are entitled to attend all SIGs. I am sorry we have not got our act together to publish links to virtual meetings, but if you are interested in one you should be able to get a link from the SIG convener, who you can identify on the website SIG list at https://www.melbpc.org.au/sigs/about/sig-list#  There may be things there like genealogy or video that you couldn’t get to in person – here’s your opportunity to tap in from home.

Special projects

I have abandoned several special projects due to lack of support.

The transition away from Microsoft web services

The engineering team on the transition project have been working quietly behind the scenes, and will soon have a solid, tested plan in place. The general intention is to transition members in several tranches in a way that will in most cases be close to transparent to individual members. A couple of test transitions have already been done.