McBlog

It’s gone 11pm and I’m in Sydney for the APC Asia Regional Conference. This is a gathering of representatives from the Asia/Pacific APC member organisations and some of the APC staff. We’re here to give member reports, review the APC strategic plan (a 4 year plan that we’re half way through) and start preparing for the next plan.

I arrived in Sydney yesterday arvo and came to the hotel we’re staying at (above the Great Southern Hotel), meeting up with some of the team, a few of whom I’d met at previous sessions in Korea and Melbourne. I got to work setting up the wireless router I’d brought with me, getting it patched into the hotel’s network and accessing its gateway (not as easy as it should have been due to security on their end). There was much rejoicing among the team when I got it working and they could use their laptops to get onto the ‘net at last :)

Instead of heading out to dinner with the other APC crew, I headed into Newtown to a pub to meet up with friends, staying and drinking for a while before walking back to the hotel. Great fun and I’m really pleased we all managed to catch up again.

Today has been the first of the three meeting days – we went through the introductions, expectations and member reports. At the end, we had a quick session mapping out relations between the various member organisations and APC initiatives then an overview of the strategic work we’ll be doing tomorrow.

Once the day was over, we headed to the pub and then walked into Newtown for a good Italian dinner. Given the food we’d eaten, a few of us decided to walk back as well (and introduced Bobby to Ginger Beer :)