NetHui – let’s hit the road
It’s a new year and many people have been asking about NetHui 2016.
The InternetNZ team and Council have received such great feedback about the five successful national NetHui events and two NetHuiSouth events held with the community since 2011.
One of the common themes of feedback over the years is that NetHui needs to stay in touch with the community, so we’ve worked to constantly evolve NetHui to do just that. In that spirit we have some ideas for NetHui in 2016 and 2017 which we’d love your feedback on. If you care about NetHui and events for the Internet community in New Zealand, help us shape NetHui’s future.
What is NetHui for?
NetHui is a collaborative platform for the New Zealand Internet community. It’s a place where we learn, share, discuss and expand our networks on the future of the Internet and surrounding issues. We believe the consistently huge attendance and enthusiastic participation in NetHui shows that the Internet really is everybody’s business, and that the community should play just as big a part as government or big companies in contributing to its future.
We’re asked by a range of people after every NetHui if their local community could host a NetHui – people from regional centres in the North and South Island have been keen to see more NetHui events outside the main centres.
NetHui for 2016 and the future
So for 2016, we have some ideas for NetHui which will allow more of the community to join the discussions and activities which contribute to the development of the Internet for New Zealand.
Our idea is to focus on two activity streams:
1. NetHui One Dayers in regions of NZ – a series of three one day events in October 2016.
2. Collaboration with other events – we want to bring a bit of NetHui to events where the community is already going – including other tech related conferences and events in New Zealand.
Rather than one big NetHui event in 2016, we’d like to try something different and make NetHui more accessible to different communities and people across the country.
This wouldn’t be the end of the big three day NetHui national event – we know people love that and it’s not going anywhere. So we are proposing that NetHui 2017 be planned as a NetHui ‘classic’ (a three day event in either Wellington or Auckland ). Depending on how the regional events go, we could move to a two year cycle of regional and national events.