Welcome to Canberra

Saturday, October 17th, 2009 by Nathanael Boehm

My proposal to become UXnet local ambassador for Canberra, Australia was accepted last week so in my first post as ambassador for my city I would like to introduce myself and my local UX community.

I have been working in the web industry for ten years and currently label myself a web user interaction designer - what I consider to be a half-way hybrid between a web user experience strategist and a front-end developer/coder.”Interaction” focusses on the detail of the user interface aspect of experience design, specifically websites and web applications. I recently blogged more about this in “What is a user experience designer?“. You can also read more about me in my professional profile/bio or on LinkedIn.

I’m fairly active in the Australian web industry and have a sizeable professional network of colleagues who I’ve met and connected with at conferences such as Web Directions, Edge of the Web and UX Australia plus BarCampCanberra (which I’m an organiser of), BarCampSydney, Public Sphere, Web Standards Group and many other local and interstate professional & social events.

We were fortunate to have the inaugural UX Australia conference here in Canberra which was nice as most of the good conferences are held in Sydney and Melbourne, with Edge of the Web being held in Perth, although UX Australia will be in Melbourne for 2010.

One of the interesting things about Canberra is that it’s a medium-size city with a population of 320,000 but it’s also the only city in the Australian Capital Territory. So not only does Canberra have its own local government it also accommodates most of the infrastructure and administrative capacity of Federal Government and the Australian Parliament including the Australian Public Service.

So if you live in Canberra as an IT professional or indeed in any number of professions then you’re either working directly for government or working for an agency that’s working for government; my career is a good example of that. 90% of my work over the past decade has been for government.

Another good thing about Canberra is that due to the size of the city and the interconnectedness of such a large proportion of the workforce directly or indirectly engaged with government the web and design community here is quite open and not competitive. I don’t claim to know every user experience design professional in Canberra; there are people who don’t work in my field, who choose not to engage with their local community or just move in different or smaller circles. But of the people I do know I tend to connect with and converse with on a regular basis - plus we all seem to go to the same conferences and events.

I coordinate the local Canberra Twitter Usergroup meetings or rather I used to until I set up a mailing list and convinced others to be proactive and organise events. It’s not really about Twitter any more, it’s just a label for any sort of social event for my community … like today’s picnic down at the Cotter. So that’s a good place to catch up with other web professionals although we’ve had some success in enlarging the scope of it to include non-web people and even non-techs.

There’s other events like Open Coffee and Social Media Club … but the other regular event in Canberra of significance to my community is the UX bookclub, where we meet every month to discuss a book about user experience and design. The events themselves are a great opportunity to discuss some very interesting design, psychology and human-computer interaction topics in detail but I’ve found UXbookclub has been a great excuse to add to my bookshelf.

I try and add all local web events to the Oz IT Calendar hosted by Pollenizer, but if you want to know what’s happening in town then please feel free to contact me: nboehm@purecaffeine.com or follow me on Twitter: @NathanaelB.

We have some amazingly talented people in Canberra who are active in the web and design community, who regularly present at conferences both local and internationally and have been published online and in print. So if you’re a UX professional and live in Canberra, thinking of moving here or visiting and aren’t already connected with our fantastic professional community then come along to one of our events or at least connect with some of our members online:

PS: This list may be amended in future to include people I inadvertently ommitted.

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