One theme that remains central to a Sourced way-of-life, is supporting others in the community wherever possible and having a little fun along the way.
New for 2023 we wanted to see if we could help our local community in a new way. A quick look online at Volunteer Canterbury and found the Christchurch City Council Off The Wall Graffiti Programme. Everyone that was in the office that day (including the dog) grabbed some gear that was supplied to us and we headed down to correct some ‘artwork’. While the wall didn’t stay clean for long, we are onto it and will continue to address it as needed.
This year has been busy with our 10th in-person Canterbury Tech Summit held at the new Te Pae convention centre, CIO summit in Auckland this year and sponsor of the same event 12 months ago (in Canterbury for the first time in a while).
The Tech Summit is an annual highlight for us and this year with the new space and room for fun, we added a little Shuffleboard competition for those that were keen. It was great to see the Tech community all in one place again (post Covid).
In late 2013, we launched the first South Island Hacktivate event ‘Mile High’ (in conjunction with Orion Health) and brought together the local technology industry in a competitive programming competition. This event welcomed professionals and students alike to join in a festive night of fun and competitive software development and most importantly engaged professionals and students in networking.
We sponsored and helped to organise (Jason sat on the committee from 2012 – 16) the Canterbury Software Summit, the largest IT conference for professional development and education in the South Island, which we continue to sponsor (every year since 2012).
We have also hosted and sponsored the Canterbury Women in Tech meet-up, hosting a panel discussion on mentoring which resulted in a formal mentoring programme being born.
Back into the swing of things post-COVID, we’ve resumed running our Ronald McDonald House evening series. RMH is an incredible facility for families of children who are in hospital. As many as 26 families could be staying at Ronald McDonald House (South Island) on any given night. For some, it is just an overnight stay, while for others it is a ‘home away from home’ for many months and frequent visits. As you can imagine, cooking is often the last thing they have on their minds after a long day at the hospital. We help by gathering a group of volunteers from our core clients to cook an evening meal at the House through the Family Dinner Programme. It is an extremely rewarding exercise and ensures that families can enjoy home-cooked meals without taking precious time away from their children. This is something we are very passionate about.
Sourced has encouraged the early development of skilled IT people. We have been key sponsors of Code Club Aotearoa, a national movement bringing primary school students together to learn software development.
In 2015, Sourced was a program sponsor of Christchurch’s Lightning Lab Digital New Zealand’s premier business accelerator programme that supports, and invests in, early-stage entrepreneurs and their tech startups. The first series was held in late 2015 with highly successful results in helping high-growth startups to excel in their markets.
We have sponsored for the sixth year running, Startup Weekend, it’s an event designed to encourage new and emerging entrepreneurs with a technical bent. Startup Weekend is a global grassroots movement of active and empowered entrepreneurs who are learning the basics of founding startups and launching successful ventures something that is very needed in a nation where IT is in demand.
We’re regularly getting our clients out of their comfort zones, holding group client events like:
We recently corralled all of our contractors, clients and families together for an advanced screening of Finding Dory, with all proceeds going to the Cholmondeley Children’s Centre.
Jason Bishop, our Managing Director, has sat on the committee of the Canterbury Software Cluster (now Canterbury Tech) from 2012-2016, the RCSA NZ Council from 2016-2019 and is regularly called upon as an industry advisor, participating on boards and task forces in areas such as addressing the critical skills shortage, skills attraction and retention, branding, social media, and emerging communication technologies. As a regular poster on LinkedIn, you can keep up to date with some of the things we are thinking about through him here.
In mid 2013 we began working together with a leading survey response software company to measure seasonal trends within the Canterbury IT Recruitment market. This has enabled us to put some definitive evidence around what we often report as the state of the market. The biannual report features the results of a six-monthly survey sent to a hand-picked database of Christchurch IT employers, employees and job seekers, registered with Sourced. As of 2017, the report will also be set to cover the Auckland area, reflecting Sourced’s recent growth in the region.
Post the 2020 Covid period, we noticed that the Tech community was engaging with us in a different way than previously and as a result were looking for something different to surveys and heavy data. Tech Shapers came from a pivot where we felt the information we were promoting should be very specific to our knowledge and current – something that surveys cannot really do due to the time it takes to collect, review, and present the data. Tech Shapers has been published twice a year and is specific to the challenges industry and job seekers are facing right now:
FLUXNZ is a national initiative dedicated to providing news, data and insights relating to the growing New Zealand technology community. Founded in 2013, Flux is an initiative focused on providing candidates and clients with refined data, trends and analysis of the IT field and a map of businesses within the industry. The response has been extremely positive from users of the FLUXNZ report.
To ensure we’re providing a high-quality service, we need to be experts on our client’s market. We maintain and build our knowledge of the IT industry by immersing ourselves in it and have been recognised with the following awards:
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