Adelindie is a wikid name. Committee. GDC partnership

[axon]

The Name

Recently it has come up that "Adelindie" isn't the best name. It's a big thing to change names and I haven't really wrapped my head around the implications. In any case, I thought it might be intersting to whip up some discussion about it.

Should Adelindie be renamed? To what?

Here's a few ideas to kick things off:
Adelaide Game Makers
What are we? Are we "Makers", "Developers", "Hobbyists", "Group", "Club", "Society", "Community", other?
AGM
AGDC

I notice that http://www.gdc.org.au (Game Dev Club at Adelaide Uni) are up and running. They've even had a guest speaker from Microsoft. They've got drive. Where do we sit alongside them? If they've chased IGDA recognition (and they should) then will IGDA recognise Adelindie. Is IGDA membership something we should chase?

Forming a Committee

On a more sombre note. Personally, maybe it's time I hand this over to some fresh blood. I love games but in the many years I've been part of Adelindie I guess my ambitions have become more clear... that I'm really passionate about simulation... not games. Similar tech. Just doesn't sit well for me to be solely responsible for a Game Dev society when this is a secondary interest which I have increasingly less justification to put time into.

In order to liven up Adelindie and give it life we need some nominations for committee members. These are people who can give a couple hours a week or thereabouts to organise events, maintain the web-prescence etc. Please PM me with your details if you're interested or can suggest someone who is.

[Weesals]

I quite like the name Adelindie myself, not really into acronyms.

[Andrew]

I cant say i love adelindie, but im not sure there is a need for a change - unless its an awesome name

as for committee - I am happy to help out where I can, not sure how committed/diligent I can be due to time etc perhaps its something worth discussing at the meet up

[Andrew]

Hey - nice meeting people today

I was doing some unrelated searching and came across this which might be useful in terms of profiles/portfolios etc.. not sure
http://elgg.org/

[axon]

good find. we'll need to deploy it somewhere and see exact;y what it can do. this also might be useful http://community.elgg.org/pg/plugins/SG ... ion-plugin

Or, as weesals suggested, use phpbb to do better user profiles by giving each profile a private thread. since you can attach images etc this would do most of what;s needed.

[Shrubber]

Personally I always thought the adelindie name was quite cool (Smushing words together to combine one is always very cool and unique in my book XD). Definatly a better name then GDC, seriously the number of times I've stuck things into the wrong folder and can't find it

We (gdc) haven't currently chased up IDGA recognition though I think it's been talked about on our forums and our IRC channel. I think if you guys are doing it, we'll be more then happy to contribute since I think adelaide is so small that its pointless if we don't combine together.

As for the two groups of interest, I'd be more then happy to see the GDC and adelindie work together on various things, and its kinda good since we have a more student base, whereas I see Adelindie has alot more experienced members. I think the two groups have a lot to teach each other. (Well, maybe not teach, but contribute, since it seems students have far more time then developers).

As for events and talks, I'd love to see you guys come to any of our events if your interested (like for instance maybe another meet & greet that we had or a "adelindie / gdc at the pub") where everyone can get to know each other (if they don't already, adeliade is freakishly small >.>)

Right now for profiles (which we haven't stuck on - yet) we've allocated space for them on a wordpress site. HyperNexus has been trying to get everyone to type up their own profile, so far he's gotten about 3. Facebook is another good site for putting a name to face... since if your anything like me you generally call people by their online names >_> . Another advantage of the wordpress site is you can easily display events / happenings.

So yea! *Hope it helps* Sorry for the ramblings >.>
(ooh and if you don't know me I was the girl on Saturday's meeting... / also pres person of the gdc) >.> just incase I seem a bit random

[Weesals]

I'm down for a pub gathering, perhaps for dinner and drinks this time?

I like the idea of somehow linking in facebook data. I'm sure theres an API or URL that can be generated to grab the current facebook image of a user and maybe use that as a users profile picture if they dont have one specified. We could probably grab their friends and link them with other forum accounts.. but I'm not sure what we could use all that data for except for building some kind of network.

I would also like to see some more integration between Adelindie and GDC, although its going to be quite hard with different servers and different requirements of the two groups (GDC having its Adelaide uni connection, Adelindie with all the content we dont want to lose).

If we were to merge, I think Shrubblers right with how students seem to have much more free time, and it would probably be good to have the forums run by students; but we need to ensure the mature members are not left out. This means writing up some rules about what content is acceptable (I am really not impressed that such an offensive post as the "Jew Hunter" idea was allowed onto the GDC forums. I think this gives a bad impression of GDC for the more mature audience (and people like me, who just have a problem with racist remarks)). Perhaps the extra man-power would allow us to create something more than just a forum installation, as I assume both sites are striving to have.

[axon]

sounds good. I agree that the 2 communities should be more tightly connected. For now I'd like to propose a simple banner exchange to get the ball rolling. By cross-linking the 2 forums it will make it easier to cross-pollinate and generally assist members of both communities. We might also be able to use something like Magpie RSS to list the recent-posts from the alternate forum on the current one.

I'd like Adelindie to come up with a (revised) "Mission Statement" to clarify what the community's objectives are, why were here, and what audience we cater to (and how). Here's a template for your input:

Community Objectives: To foster innovation in homebrew game development and the transition into the industry.
Our audience: students of relevant disciplines. homebrew game developers, game designers, and game artists. industry representatives
What we provide: networking, mentoring, resources, events

Feel free to elaborate and modify the above to fit with what you rekon Adelindie is about. At some stage we can lock it in and stand by it.

A pub dinner would be great. When? Mid Jan 2010?

A coordinated application (with GDC) for IGDA recognition would be great. IGDA will want to deal with a single entity though.

[Andrew]

good to see some discussion on this

firstly I gotta agree with Weesals with the jew thingy, I believe in free speech (and would fight for that right) but stuff like that is just no-go on a public forum, and the fact it has currently reached 3 pages of serious discussion is a little disconcerting for me.

Just think, you might invite a guest speaker, they sus out what GDC is about, see that thread, maybe they are Jewish (even if they aren't)... need I say more?

anyways

Can we not just create an IGDA chapter that is not Adelindie, and is not GDC, but just an SA thing ?

Pub meal would be good, although it would also be good to have a meetup that doesn't require us to sit around a table, unfortunately i didn't get to really meet/talk to anyone down the other end of the table before I had to go

[Steve]

Good to see new life has been breathed into this community. I think a merger is an excellent idea as long as there are enough events that M-F 9-5 workers like me can attend, otherwise us oldies will be left out. Advance notice of events is always good. I agree that we should have a clear mission statement.

[Shrubber]

Bah, I keep forgetting to press send, then I close the tab XD.

The Jew Hunter thread has been removed, but donno has archived it incase people get curious (and its asked on request). Which everyone seemed to think was the best option. (As I agree, I like public speech but there is issues being on a public forum, and its not just if its jewish being sensitive, it could have been about the armenian genocide (where the turks killed christians) or the bosnian genocide (christians killing muslims), and I think that disheartens both sets of people and it doesn't belong on a student run forum.

I've asked about merging forums, most people say it can be done but its too fiddely and annoying and I think they should be kept seppertly , however merging events would be good. More people the merrier I say (since I think last thing you want as a guest speaker is to have like 5 people rock up), we've been lucky to have 20-30+ people at our events. All of our events have been held 4:00+, most of our guest speakers have been 5:00 or latter, since we do have alot of people who don't actually go to the uni and thats the best time for them, there is also issues with lecturer clashes - and if they are held at night its always fun to go out and get pizza or pancakes afterwoods.

The other thing that we encourage is absolutely anyone can give a talk on anything, we had a talk on particle systems this semester which went great (unfortunately we had another one planned as well however I was super sick so we couldn't plan alot of things for those 2 weeks).

Generally for events we found that a months notice works well, then we send out emails and give another reminder on the forum webpage. Also we have a FB event which generally seems to work out really really well as we have a really good idea of numbers (and we can plan ahead).

As much as I know some of you guys dislike fb, it actually is REALLY useful for event planning as most people check FB more then their emails (which is kinda sad >.>)

As for our latest event (which everyone is able to participate in) is a week long games jam (thingy), which is probably going to be the week of dec 28th, (which is basically make a game within a week, with the given topic, using anything you like), and after thats done we'll have a dinner / look / night where everyone can see each others interpretation of the topic /work (which is also open to anyone who didn't participate in the actual competition itself). The date for the end of the week hasn't been planned, since well nexus is in melborne so after he comes back we should be able to confirm it (we'll be likely putting in 2 weekends for workers) ie, friday -> monday.

But yea.... Sorry for the ranty ravy post

Oh and as for the IGDA chapter, I totally agree that it shouldn't be just one group that is sticking it in, it should be a combined entry.

*PLEASE READ*
In regards to the jew hunter thread, people have given me a lot of shit for removing it so I started a pole.

http://forums.gdc.org.au/viewtopic.php? ... 05&start=0

please vote, and even state your opinion.

[HyperNexus]

Personally I suggest keeping the Adelindie name. I loved the name when I first discovered these forums years back and still do. My brother use be to be rather active around these parts under the name DanielPrimed.

As for a partnership with the GDC. As the Vice President of the GDC, I fully support that but I would like to state the position of the club. We've essentially been running for one University semester which has acted as a proof of concept for us. Through the events that we have had there has been much support from interested people. Starting from the beginning of the next University year we will be focusing hard on ramping up the activeness in the club. One thing to note though is that as a University club we have to have at least half(I think) of our members from Adelaide Uni. As a club though our focus is to push things forwards in general while acting within these requirements.

I'd like to echo Shrubber's open invitation to Adelinide members to our club events, forums and general community. I've added a link back to Adelindie on our website. We will be looking into the IDGA membership in the future.

[axon]

Weird... the PHPBB update that I recently applied to this forum meant I needed to manually "Approve" the last post. Sorry for the delay... it kinda inhibits lucid discussion. Maybe you used too many rude words?!

Cheers for the link-back. Will take a look and reciprocate as soon as I can.