We are still finding our feet at the weekly Melbourne OKau meet ups. But after roughly two months of regular meetings it’s fair to say we have momentum and a regular turn-out of about fifteen people.

OKMelb have decided on a format of sorts. Every other week, if possible, we will have a domain expert talking for as long as is required – between 15 minutes to an hour, depending on topic – followed by a break-out into project work of attendees choosing. These nights will be punctuated by the “Shut up and Hack” nights in which people focus on their project(s) of choice specifically.

Tonight’s Shut Up and Hack was a great success. Matt and I worked on the OKau mission statement – a rough first draft that needs a lot of work but is a starting point. Andrew and Matt looked into the CKAN API, Fiona learnt Latex from Ruth, Mediawiki from Steve, and then proceeded to add to the global knowledge. The impressive OpenMRS team are regular attendees and worked on the “what’s next” problem, looking at, amongst other things, the amazing Kenyan projects from iHub – Ushahidi, software that collects realtime data for visualisation; BRCK, rugged internet for people; and Umati – social media scraping software for hate speech analysis.

As per every week, there was the vegan friendly snack time, networking opportunities and space for those that just wanted to share knowledge verbally.