Looks like my email footer is about to grow by a couple of lines: late last week I accepted an offer to take on the role as project leader for the Social Media project in the Smart Services CRC, following the swift footsteps of Darren Sharp, who's moving on into an industry position. I've already been involved as a researcher in a number of projects within the CRC - and our first few outputs from this work should become available on the CRC Website in the not-too-distant future -, but in this new role I'll have a great deal more responsibility for seeing our current Social Media projects through to completion, and supporting the development of the next round of projects.
This being a CRC involving several high-profile industry partners (Fairfax, Telstra, Suncorp, SAP, ...), I won't be able to blog too openly about our progress unless and until it generates public outputs, but the new role also gives me the opportunity to push for such outputs (published wherever possible under Creative Commons licences, of course). We're dealing with the intersection between smart services and social media here - it's difficult to avoid the realisation that we'll be best able to generate ideas and innovations if we encourage user involvement as much as possible.
Another piece of important recent news is that the lifetime of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation - or CCi, for short - has been extended following a very successful review and rebid. In the first place, that's strong testament to the fabulous work done by this interdisciplinary, multi-institutional team led by my QUT colleagues Stuart Cunningham and John Hartley - but it's also great news for me, because it means that (along with my colleague Terry Flew) I'll be able to join the CCi team as a new Chief Investigator, officially from next year.
That's if I'm still standing by then...
