Our community, the Effusion Group, is a rich, diverse group of business people with a wide range of technical and business interests. What draws us together is our shared desire for collaboration rather than competition and our generally preference for openness. We all value open standards in technology, and generally prefer open source technologies. We like to work together, with some interesting groupings forming to meet the requirements of specific projects. We also socialise a fair bit, and local eateries, cafes, pubs, and other third places smile when they see us coming en masse. Here's a sketch of the current group membership - it's a fairly fluid situation, which keeps things interesting:

• Seradigm - Julian Carver provides knowledge management and IT strategy for NZ's larger businesses and organisations
• Groupsense.co.nz - Principal Dan Randow - these guys are all about online collaboration.
• IOPEN Technologies - Principals Brian Chatterton and Richard Waid are Linux and open source gurus specialising in process management, networking, wireless, email and other collaboration technologies. They build amazing things with tools like Python, Zope, and PostgreSQL.
• Flourish Communications - Christine Moore helps businesses clarify their "message" and then helps them put it into the best words possible.
• Onlinegroups.net - this service is the product of a long-term collaboration between Groupsense and IOPEN Technologies: an impressive collaboration platform which provides all of the functionality of Yahoo! Groups while fixing many of its annoyances.
• Hunt Design - although much of his time is spent working closely with us on Egressive projects, Jonathan Hunt also flies under his own banner, particularly for project management and business analysis related work
• MetaSolutions - Norm McKenzie and his team develop impressive corporate and professional branding and web design - along with imparting much marketing wisdom and search engine optimisation savvy.
• Encode - Marek Kuziel is a PHP wizard and and software architect who has done development both with Egressive and some of our customers like PlainsFM 96.9, New Zealand Tourism Online, and Firetrust. His skills in building complex web applications integrating many disparate technologies are legendary as is his photography.
• Myelin - Phil Pearson work on new web technologies with companies both in NZ and overseas. We're still not completely sure what, exactly, he does, but he seems to do it a lot.
• Aphid - Andrew Groom is an accomplished developer who works with Zope/Python, PHP, ASP, and XUL among other web technologies. Andrew is also committed to sustainability and rethinking the urban environment - see his Reurbanise efforts.
• ZYPE - although he's also a full time lecturer in computing at the School of Computing at Hagley Community College in Christchurch, Josh Campbell still keeps his hand in the game. He's always been a master of markup (HTML, CSS, XML, XSLT, etc.) and a strong advocate of web standards. More recently he's a convert to Ubuntu Linux and open source software in schools and has taken to Drupal development like a duck to water. He also designed the Effusion Group's branding among many other things.

Of course, our group is largely focused on our shared space, Kenton Chambers, a heritage building of substance (Christchurch's first reinforced concrete building!), which itself is inextricable from the Central Business District of Christchurch...