So what does freedom mean to you? We’ve had some interesting interpretations. There are, of course, a fair number of blue skies and beaches, which our country has in abundance.
We’re free to have our asses whipped at cricket, and free to drink beer.
A little sex in the city is always a freeing experience, and one can only wonder how the red corset helps Mike to be free! 🙂 Perhaps he’s going to hang it on the bra fence!
You’ve given us some wonderful images here. We thank you, and best of luck to all the Webstockers in the competition for a Nintendo Wii.
My responsibilities include maintaining our clientele database, website and also designing the webpage.
I hope this Webstock Conference will enable me to explore more acquired knowledge in this field.
My other interest includes outrigger canoeing, aerobics and tennis.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the organising committee for accepting our submission to attend and looking forward to meeting all the participants.
The Webstock team want to improve how websites are built — and not just in New Zealand. While we’re keeping our plans for world domination under wraps just now, we have already made a move into the Pacific, starting with Samoa.
What we wanted to do was to bring several people to Webstock from Samoa, with the idea that when they get home they’ll be able to spread some of the enthusiasm and quality they’ve ‘caught’ from all the other participants and from the speakers.
We gathered our resources, and made a couple of ‘Samoan’ scholarships available, paying most of the costs of travel and registration fees. Scholarship winners still have to pay for their own accommodation and miscellaneous expenses. We’ve already profiled scholarship winner Nynette Sass.
Thanks to InternetNZ
We’ve been able to do this because of support from InternetNZ (The Internet Society of New Zealand Inc), who generously donated funding to bring two people from Samoa.
InternetNZ is a non-profit organisation dedicated to keeping the Internet open and uncaptureable, protecting and promoting the Internet for New Zealand. Their objective is “high performance and unfettered access for all”.
They also manage the .nz domain name system through the Domain Name Commission, and own the .nz domain name registry — .nz Registry Services.
APNIC is the Regional Internet Registry for the Asia Pacific region, representing 56 economies. It is responsible for allocating Asia Pacific IP addresses, AS (Autonomous System) numbers, and “in-addr.arpa” domain delegations.
The meeting will be held at the Christchurch Convention Centre from August 26 – 29, 2008 and will include a range of technical presentations, tutorials and special interest workshops, finishing with APNIC’s annual member meeting. …
“APNIC meetings focus mainly on policy development issues and information sharing.
We’d like to thank InternetNZ for their generous support. We love being able to spread our wings.
We’re aware that there’s an environmental cost to Webstock. We’re flying a lot of speakers to New Zealand – that’s one of the things about living here in the South Pacific. And there’s going to be over 400 people at the conference, so that’s a lot of domestic travel, and a lot of stuff to provide everyone. So, what to do, what to do?
We didn’t want to not run the conference, of course. And video conferencing with some speakers seemed, well, not quite as good. Webstock is more than seeing people speak – it’s also about the interaction and connection that happens face-to-face.
We wanted to do something, though, to help the environment and to just give something back to the world. So we’ve decided on a couple of options, one close to home and one international. For each ticket sold, we’ll be donating $5 to Project Crimson and $5 to Kiva.
Project Crimson is a charity protecting New Zealand’s native pohutukawa and rata trees. They have been responsible for the planting of hundreds of thousands of new trees, with consideration given to locally source and plant trees native to each area of New Zealand. The money donated by Webstock will be used to help plant and protect native trees throughout New Zealand
Project Crimson Trust Executive Director Bridget Abernethy is very thankful for the support we’ll be giving, noting “The Christmas-time flowering of pohutukawa and rata are icons to all New Zealanders, and thanks to the generosity of Webstock, we can continue our goal of ensuring future generations will experience a country full of fantastic natural heritage”.
Kiva is a site where loans are made to entrepreneurs and small businesses in the developing world. It’s a micro-financing model and a number of separate loans are likely to make up the amount someone is requesting through Kiva. It’s web 2.0 that’s more than fluff!
Once the conference has finished, we’ll set up an account on Kiva and start lending some money. We’ll keep you posted here on how it goes.
So, yeah, we could have done a wiki, but like, who actually knows how to use those things? They’re just weird. And we do have a Facebook account, but you need to be on Facebook to use it.
So we’ve gone low-tech with a blog entry. Here’s how it works.
You want to meet up with others? Connect with people from out-of-the-way places like Auckland and Australia? Arrange that liaison with fellow insect-lovers? Just say hi to other Webstock peeps?
Use the comments below. Tell us you’re coming, who you want to meet, where you’d like to hang out, what your interests are. Let’s see how it goes.
Taffy wrote: 
We’ve been able to do this because of support from