The KAREN Services Working Group is opening their May meeting up to all KAREN members to get your input on collaboration and shared infrastructure services over KAREN.

REANNZ recently established two Working Groups bringing together representatives from academia, science and information technology from across our Membership to provide an agreed, community-owned way forward on the development of KAREN and associated services.

Recordings from the Fall 2009 Internet2 Member Meeting on network-based collaboration are now available for your viewing pleasure.

New Zealand schools are invited to participate in a global education initiative, The Four Nations Classroom.

The Centre for Global Education

The Centre for Global Education facilitates programming for over 10,000 students every year from every corner of the planet. These programmes break down the traditional barriers of time, culture, and location, creating a truly global classroom.

John Hine, Victoria University of Wellington, has returned home from the Spring 09 Internet2 Member Meeting with news on developments in identity management, collaboration platforms, health research networks and more...

Video conferencing is revolutionising the way people are communicating over distance. Like with any new enabling technology, there are learnings and challenges to be had along the way. This session will provide advice on how to get the best from your video conferencing experience, from room set-ups and managing technology failures to VC etiquette.

Tomorrow at 10am - 11am, Ian Darby will host a video conference exploring the technology and capabilities of video conference endpoints (standalone VC units). This session will cover:

Join us tomorrow to hear Julia Charity, Scion's KAREN champion, share her strategies for increasing video conference usage among Scion's research community.

Video conferencing is an easy and effective tool for supporting research collaboration and outreach.

The Social Science Research Centre would like to thank those of you who completed the online survey about use of video conferencing technology. The results so far have been very interesting. For those who did not get a chance to fill it out, the survey is still open, if you would like to express your views.

Breaking Down Barriers: Global Connections

Beginning in the early hours of tomorrow morning NZ time, Megaconference X will showcase the latest real-world uses of videoconferencing for research and education, while using videoconferencing to do so. You can watch the streamed sessions for free.

Video conferencing is a readily available and accessible tool for collaboration across KAREN members and internationally. There are many video conferencing and collaboration products in use across the KAREN community.

David Thorns and his team at the University of Canterbury invite KAREN members to participate in an online survey on the user experience of video conferencing.

Missed out on eResearch Australasia? This video conference is your chance to hear highlights of the event from New Zealand researchers.

On Tuesday 21 October, Stuart Charters from Lincoln University and Nicky Gardner from ESR will present highlights from their attendance at eResearch Australasia 2008 conference. Stuart will also share highlights from the GPU (graphics processing unit) Computing workshop.

eResearch Australasia attendees (or any other KAREN members who happen to be in Melbourne next week) are invited to attend this event that will explore opportunities for eResearch collaborations across the Tasman.

AARNet are broadcasting each keynote session from their Real Time Communications Roadshow, and you can participate via video conference.

HIT Lab's researchers are developing a 3D plug in for remote visualisation over AccessGRID.

Media release

International connectivity

“REANNZ warmly welcomes the Government’s initiative to invest in additional international telecommunications capacity to meet the future needs of the research and education sector. This will provide a step-change in opportunities for the KAREN community to collaborate and innovate”, said Donald Clark, REANNZ Chief Executive, today after the Government budget announcements.

The National Information Society Agency (NIA) in Korea has issued an invitation for international partners in network technology and applications research and working groups.

If wireless security or video room design are your thing register to participate in an Ozeconference.

The consultation period on the Draft Digital Strategy 2.0 has been extended to 5.00pm Friday 23 May, 2008.

Share knowledge and make suggestions on KAREN and eResearch related services, applications projects and strategies at the new KAREN wiki.

ResearchChannel has invited New Zealand researchers to take part in the public beta test of Research1.

Is the internet changing science? Yes, according to Ben Shneiderman, a University of Maryland computer science professor. It's time for science to incorporate social networking and collaboration too.

Final call for papers for International Conference on Computer Mediated Social Networking (ICCMSN - 2008)

Dunedin, New Zealand
11-13 June 2008
http://www.business.otago.ac.nz/infosci/conferences/isn2008/

Webcasts of all key presentations at the recent 'Building effective virtual organizations' workshop are now available online.

Virtual organisations, entities linked by electronic communication tools to support collaborative relationships in distributed work environments, are increasingly central to collaborative projects across all disciplines.

26-28 November, University of Auckland

Research coordination and collaboration for geoscience in New Zealand is leaping forward with the recent initiation of the SCENZ-GRID project to establish a grid infrastructure for geoscientists in New Zealand and the larger scale NCRIS funded AuScope project in Australia.

Registrations are now open for the second of two technical workshops on advanced video conferencing and collaboration over KAREN - 23 November, 9:00am - 5:00pm, University of Canterbury, Christchurch.

Thanks in part to KAREN, Victoria University is the first New Zealand university to supervise a PhD totally 'In World'.

This Wainhouse Research paper "Using conferencing and collaboration to achieve carbon neutrality" is designed to encourage organisations to use online conferencing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions resulting from travel.

Presentations from the International Workshop on Virtual Research Environments and Collaborative Work Environments are now available online.

Building KAREN Communities for Collaboration 2 - 5 July 2007

Excitement is mounting as registrations for this forum pour in from wide and far across the research, education, innovation and government sectors.

A key drawcard of the Building KAREN Communities for Collaboration forum is the ex-pat New Zealander and aptly known 'father of the Grid', Ian Foster.

Last Friday (18 May) BeSTGRID demonstrated for the first time in New Zealand live remote teaching on KAREN using EVO (Enabling Virtual Organisations).

Through REANNZ's international partnership with Taiwanese network, TWAREN, and Singaporean Network, SingAREN, KAREN members now have improved access to their peers in these countries. KAREN recently signed Memoranda of Understanding with TWAREN and SingAREN confirming peering arrangements, and as a result widening the reach of KAREN and speeding up access to international collaboration partners in these countries.

Peering is an interconnection of separate networks or groups of networks allowing the exchange of traffic between network customers.

AARNet High Definition (HD) Video Conferencing session

AARNet will hold an Ozeconference/information session on High Definition Video Conferencing at 2.00pm AEDST on Tuesday 13 February 2007.  An invitation to KAREN members to also participate has been kindly extended by James Sankar, AARNet's Director of Applications and Services.

The HIT Lab NZ is holding an invitation only workshop on Next Generation Collaboration on February 8th.
The workshop will focus on key video conferencing methods, collaboration and applications that are available now in New Zealand over high speed IP networks. With the launch of KAREN (Kiwi Advanced Research & Education Network) late last year bringing Gigabit bandwidth speeds to Universities and Research Institutions in New Zealand, next generation collaboration can now be achieved at a higher quality and larger scales.