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Tag Archives: local government

From gender equity to gender equality …

.id informed decisions provides demographic analysis from the Australian Census data for local government. Cartoon illustrating their latest blog post Interactive chart: new data brings new opportunities for gender equity analysis.

Making the city great!

A video for the City of Port Phillip, Victoria, encouraging the community to tell what is important to them in keeping their city great. The feedback helps guide the annual budget preparation and Council Plan. Read more here.

Voiceovers by Max McHenry and Ellie Parnell, music by Tom Kneebone.

Getting council approval

This is a short animation for the Adelaide City Council to show the benefits of the Placemaking approach.  At present,  local businesses seeking approval to put a structure on the footpath, in this example a planter box,  may need to present the proposal to up to seven departments at their local council. With the Placemaking approach the process would be simplified and is about empowering local businesses.

Guitar and sound effects by Tom Kneebone.

Power to the People Conference – cartoons

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One of the Municipal Association of Victoria’s annual conferences is its national two day The Future of Communities: Power to the People conference.  I was there as cartoonist, listening and trying to get as much of the sessions into cartoons as I could.  The cartoon above does sum up my impression of the conference.  At first it didn’t have the ‘Woohoo!’  Without it the the cartoon seemed to say ‘Oh oh, what have we done?’; that wasn’t what I saw.  Adding the ‘Woohoo!’ DOES express what the 250 upbeat and enthusiastic conference participants and presenters showed over the two days.  It was a great experience!

The event was facilitated by the quite amazing Peter Kenyon, director of The Bank of Ideas. The complete set of cartoons can be found on their Facebook page. Here are a few of the cartoons…

 

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Graphic recording at World Cafe session

Conference poster

Conference poster

The Local Government Managers Australia (SA Division) 2014 conference Active Citizenship – The Future of local Government had a facilitated ‘World Cafe’ as its final session. There were two tables for each of five key questions and participants ‘speed dated’ their way around the tables; the responses to the questions reported back to the conference at the end of the hour session. It is an intense brainstorming process and an effective way of collecting the feelings of the group, at the end of a conference, on the main issues.

Although I do cartoon/illustrate as a form of recording at conferences I don’t specialise in graphic recording – recording people’s responses on the spot, in real time, in a coherent graphic. There are a number of very skilled graphic recorders around. So for me, I needed to do some preparation for recording the responses at the end of the Active Citizenship ‘World Cafe’.

Knowing the five questions beforehand, I was able to get a graphic in mind for each. The facilitator suggested basing them on conference’s ‘people tree’ poster image – a great suggestion as it was a good image to borrow and play with. Once the session started I moved around, listening in on each table, to get a feel for what was being said. From this I saw that three of my graphic ideas seemed to fit, but I had to rethink the other two. In the times when participants were changing tables I drew up my images on butcher’s paper – leaving room to add in the actual responses. This paid off. Although it was a rush as the reporters read out their lists, I was able to get down most of the responses to each question, incorporating them into each graphic.Here are three of them…

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