Design Groups Melbourne

Where do you thrive? Your product fit across startup, scale-up & corporate

**Where Do You Thrive?** *Finding your product fit across startup, scale-up and corporate* Managing a product at a 10-person startup looks markedly different to managing one at a scale up or established corporate. While the title is identical, the day-to-day job requirements, the influence, the pace, and the path forward have key differences. So how do you know where you thrive most? Join Product Women Melbourne for a panel conversation with product leaders who've built careers across startups, scale-ups and corporates. We'll explore: · What actually changes about the role at each stage — and what stays the same · The trade-offs nobody tells you about (autonomy vs. resources, speed vs. structure, ambiguity vs. process) · How to know if you're in the right environment for where you are in your career · What it's really like to move between stages — and what surprised our panellists most **Panellists:** [Anna Kelk,](https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-kelk-743587a7/) Chief Product Officer, Splose [Kelly Nguyen](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellynnguyen/), Senior Product Manager APAC, Heidi [Teresa Huang](https://www.linkedin.com/in/teresajhuang/), Head of Product Bupa Whether you're considering your next career move, curious about a different kind of company, or just want to know if the grass really is greener in a different setting, this session is for you. Expect honest conversation and insights and time to connect with the Product Women Melbourne community afterwards. **Venue**: Preacta, 260 Collins Street, Melbourne (Melbourne CBD) **Date:** 06 August 2026 **Time:** 5:30-7:30pm Kindly sponsored by Preacta: Talent Acquisition Solutions and Recruitment

🤖 Group Therapy: An Honest Session on How We Actually Feel About AI

We are finally doing it. A talk themed around AI. But we know it's session nobody wants to admit they need. We've all heard the AI buzzwords - "excited," "leaning in," "embracing the tools", "It's about Taste" But what's the version we tell our partner at 11pm? This session is a confession booth disguised as a meetup: no corporate talking points, no performative optimism, just a room full of professionals finally saying the quiet part out loud. What you'll hear: ✨ The mood ring check-in: Has your relationship with AI actually evolved - curiosity, to fatigue, to something like grudging acceptance? Or are you stuck on repeat? ✨ Empowered or expendable: The gap between the tools making us faster and the fear that "faster" was never really the point ✨ The honesty audit: Are we saying what we actually feel, or reciting the script we think we're supposed to perform? ✨ Slop or stealth: Is AI-generated mediocrity actually improving - or has it just gotten better at hiding in plain sight? ✨ The invoice after the honeymoon: Businesses got the discounted intro rate. Is anyone budgeting for what this actually costs once the novelty pricing ends? ✨ Who's actually watching the risk: How leaders are (or aren't) identifying, assessing, and managing AI risk before it becomes a headline 👉 The debate on the table: "Most people are more anxious than they admit" vs "People are largely fine and adapting" Pick a side. Defend it. Or admit you're not sure, which might be the most honest answer in the room. 📌 The details: * Date: Thursday 13th August * Host: Melbourne Design Thinking Meetup x Scyne Advisory * Refreshments included: Pizza and fizz! Our Speakers: **Liz Collins León** *Experience Architect \| Design Operations Strategist* Liz is an Experience Architect with over 15 years designing systems, campaigns, and communication solutions across retail, telecommunications, and front-to-back office operations. With tenure at Telstra, Google, and more recently Genesys, she is a design leader and mentor whose passion for creating inclusive experiences expands beyond delivering data-driven, digital products. Whether fostering a community effort to found a greenbelt reserve, designing learning spaces, or promoting psychological safety in the workplace, she endeavors to strengthen communities through online and offline connections. **Gemma Mooney** *Product Design Lead \| RACV* With over 20 years of experience spanning UX, digital product design and design leadership. She specialises in helping organisations understand customer needs and translate insights into improved products, services and experiences. At RACV, Gemma leads strategic discovery, research and experience design initiatives across a range of member experiences, including onboarding, emergency roadside assistance, payments, chat and AI-enabled digital services. She also led the design of the RACV app from concept through to launch, helping shape the vision, user experience and member proposition for one of RACV's most important digital products. More recently, she has been helping embed AI into the design practice, developing practical approaches for using tools such as Copilot to support research, synthesis, journey mapping and opportunity identification. Prior to RACV, Gemma was UX Manager at Intrepid Travel, where she established the company's UX practice and championed user-centred design across the organisation. She also led Intrepid's first innovation hackathon, bringing together cross-functional teams to solve customer and business challenges through design-led thinking. Throughout her career, Gemma has been passionate about creating evidence-based, customer-centred experiences and helping teams use research and emerging technologies to drive better outcomes for customers and organisations alike. Her work has been recognised with Intrepid Travel's Outstanding Achievement Award and Travel Weekly's Women in Travel Award. **David Cullen** *Managing Director, Scyne Advisory (GAICD)* David has spent two decades on the front line of Australia's cyber resilience — the kind of career where "incident response" isn't a slide in a deck, it's a 3am phone call. As Victoria's former Chief Information Security Officer, he built the state's Cyber Incident Response Service from scratch and led the response to Victoria's largest-ever public sector cyber-attack, all while establishing the frameworks that now coordinate cyber emergencies statewide. At the national level, David represented Victoria on the National Cyber Security Committee and built the National Operations Subcommittee to get states talking to each other before a crisis, not during one. He's now a Managing Director at Scyne Advisory, leading national incident response capability and helping organisations across the public and private sector get serious about cyber preparedness before they need to. David holds a Master of Public Policy and Management, is a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, and is a recipient of the Resilient Australia Award. He brings a rare thing to a stage: someone who's actually been the person picking up the phone when it all goes wrong — and has the scars, systems, and stories to prove it.

Is Organisation Design Keeping Up?

**Organisations are being asked to redesign faster. Is organisation design practice keeping up?** At our August meetup, Martin Foster will unpack insights from the Organization Design Forum’s latest global practitioner survey and report, revealing how organisation design is actually being commissioned, practised and evolved. The findings present an intriguing tension: experienced practitioners, strong craft foundations and senior sponsorship, alongside uneven technology adoption, AI used more to support the work than reshape operating models, and “continuous organisation design” still emerging as a practice. We’ll explore what is changing, what is not, and what these global findings might mean for Australian organisations. This session is for anyone shaping operating models, transformation, workforce, technology or ways of working. Not only those with “organisation design” in their title. More on Martin here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinfoster/ Thanks to TeamForm, our event sponsor for providing a great place to meet and refreshments. Look at teamform for visualising your delivery teaming structures whether they be persistent or project based, and for desigining and operating the workforce behind them - given the work, aligning the right roles today and into the future. https://teamform.co/

Melbourne CocoaHeads No. 198

Our regular monthly presentation night on the second Thursday of the month from 6:30pm! Thanks to Mantel Group for hosting us again this month. If you're coming in person we're there with food and drinks from 6pm. We will be live streaming the presentations as usual from 6:30pm at [http://www.melbournecocoaheads.com/live](http://www.melbournecocoaheads.com/live) \-\-\- **Agenda** \| 6:00pm \| Food \+ Networking \| \| 6:30pm \| Event begins\. Introductions \| \| 6:40pm \| Andrew Murphy — If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem\, you have bigger problems \| \| 7:15pm \| Marcelo Esperidiao — Orchestrate with the Swift Temporal SDK \| \| 7:55pm \| Wrap up \+ social time at a nearby venue \| \* All times except the start are approximate. Presentation order will be confirmed on the night. \-\-\-\- We are always looking for speakers and believe everyone has an interesting talk hiding inside themselves. If you are interested in letting that talk out at a future event you can get in touch on the website [https://www.melbournecocoaheads.com/talks](https://www.melbournecocoaheads.com/talks) or on Slack.

2x Talks: The Truth Paradox, and Secure MCPs by design

We are excited to host Kirtika and Randi this month. Kirtika will show us how we can be confident our AI is telling the truth, and Randi is going to show us all the ways we can build secure MCPs! **Live Stream:** We're going LIVE on YouTube. If you haven't been able to join us in-person, you can still jump on now to watch (link will be published on the night). **Agenda:** * 5:30pm arrival - Food and drinks provided in-person * 6pm kickoff - Welcome & Introduction and few words from our Sponsors - 10 min * 6:10pm - Session 1 * 6.45pm - Session 2 **Session 1:** The Truth Paradox: Why Your AI Might Be Confidently Wrong (And What To Do About It) by [Kirtika Sharma](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirtikasharma05/) AI gives you answers with total confidence — but confidence isn't the same as correctness. In this interactive session, I'll open with a live "gotcha" that tricks the room into almost believing a fabricated fact, then unpack exactly why AI does the same thing to all of us, every day. We'll play a quick prediction game to demystify how AI actually generates answers, tour a "Hallucination Gallery" of real AI failure patterns, and walk away with 3 simple, memorable rules for using AI safely — whether you're shipping code, writing docs, or just asking it questions at work. Practical, a little provocative, and genuinely interactive — bring your voice, you'll be shouting out answers. **Session 2:** Secure by Design: Building Production-Ready MCP Servers by [Randi Ratnayake](https://www.linkedin.com/in/randiratnayake/) Building an MCP server is easy. Building one that is secure, production ready, and designed for enterprise applications is a very different challenge. In this session, we'll start by looking under the hood to understand how the Model Context Protocol actually works. We'll unpack the protocol, explore what the client libraries abstract away, and see how tools are discovered, invoked, and secured. Understanding these fundamentals is key to building MCP servers that are secure by design. From there, we'll implement authentication using OAuth 2.0, Microsoft Entra ID, and the On-Behalf-Of flow, while covering common security pitfalls and production best practices. Although the concepts and architecture are language agnostic, all demonstrations and code examples will be implemented in .NET. Whether you're building AI agents for internal tools or enterprise platforms, you'll leave with a solid understanding of MCP under the hood and the practical knowledge to build secure, production-ready MCP servers with confidence. **Hosts:** * [William Liebenberg](https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-liebenberg/) \- Microsoft \.NET MVP \| Consultant at Arinco * [Bron Thulke](https://www.linkedin.com/in/bronthulke/) \- Microsoft \.NET MVP \| CTO / Co\-Founder at YouLi * [Bill Chesnut](https://www.linkedin.com/in/billchesnut/) \- Microsoft Azure MVP \| Consultant at SixPivot **Sponsors:** We have some amazing sponsors that help make this event possible: * [Arinco](https://arinco.com.au/) \- Venue\, Food and Drinks **Location:** In-Person at Arinco Melbourne. Level 6 / 440 Collins Street, Melbourne CBD 🗣 Apply to speak now: [https://bit.ly/melb-dotnet-cfp](https://bit.ly/melb-dotnet-cfp)

A11y Allies Roundtable: Are checklists leaving people out in the cold?

## Accessibility Allies monthly roundtable - on Monday Normally the 2nd Tuesday of each month. Proudly supported by **[Builure](https://www.builure.com.au)**[.](https://www.builure.com.au) ### Topic for August: Are checklists leaving people out in the cold? Passing a checklist doesn’t mean it's accessible. Join us with special guests to discuss WCAG, Section 508, and other checklists. Ever wanted to know how WCAG guidelines are made? This is your chance to learn about version 3, and how you can be part of it. * **[Charlii Parker](https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlii-parker/)**, Senior Usability and Accessibility Consultant at **[TTC Global](https://www.linkedin.com/company/ttcglobalqa/)**. * **[Amanda Mace](https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanda-mace-85171b77/)**, Australian Chapter Manager for **[W3C](https://www.w3.org/evangelists/list/)**. **Wear your favourite winter scarf as we discuss how we can build digital experiences that don’t leave people out in the cold**. Meet accessibility professionals and advocates. * No presentations * Open discussion * Exchange ideas * Genuine connections ### Monday 10 August 2026 **< Note: This month will be on Monday, not Tuesday** **5:30 pm** \- 7:30 pm #### Free **Registration via Humanitix is essential** (for building access). Light refreshments provided (including gluten-free and vegan). #### Location **[WeWork](https://www.wework.com/buildings/120-spencer-st--melbourne)** 120 Spencer Street, Melbourne * Quiet exclusive space * Wheelchair access * Accessible toilet **Building Entry** Enter via the entrance on **Spencer Street**. **Meet near the green couches in the lobby**. Meet other attendees. You will be escorted to level 22 to sign in. **Running late?** Post a message to let us know you'll be late with an ETA. We will come get you when you arrive. **Accessibility questions** Please contact us if you have any accessibility needs or questions not covered in the FAQs. We will do what we can to help you feel comfortable attending.

AI and the Limits of Human Judgement

**Skeptics Café will be held in the Function Room at [The Stolberg Hotel](https://stolberg.com.au), 197 Plenty Road Preston. The 86 tram route is close, and Bell train station – situated on the Epping line – is a short walk away. It will also be a virtual event accessible via Zoom, as per the details [here](https://vicskeptics.wordpress.com/events/).** **Start Time:** 6:00pm for dinner and a chat. Talk and Zoom session starts at 7.30pm. We aim to wrap up after 9:00pm. **More Moral Than Us?** *Why the question matters for alignment, moral progress, and long-term flourishing* **TL;DR:** On some measurable moral tasks, today's AI already looks competitive with humans, or better, and the alignment community is oddly quiet about it. But moral capability is not the same as moral motivation: a system can compute the right answer without being moved by it. Pulling apart knowledge, reasoning, judgement and motivation is what makes the question tractable, and what makes the honest answer uncomfortable. Caveats attached, in quantity. Almost nobody working on AI alignment wants to say this out loud, at least not about current systems. So let's say it: AI might already be [more moral than us](https://www.scifuture.org/more-moral-than-us/), in some measurable respects. Two questions fall straight out of that: * Why does it feel like a dangerous thing to claim? * And is human moral reasoning really a standard worth bragging about as an alignment target? The provocation isn't idle. In a modified Moral Turing Test, people rated a large language model's moral reasoning as better than other humans' on almost all measured dimensions - see [paper Attributions toward artificial agents in a modified Moral Turing Test](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-58087-7) + associated [interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quNwpv0zhtM) and [talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuLmzDUPhVo) with lead author Eyal Aharoni.[1] Findings like that are easy to over-read and easy to wave away, which is most of the problem. Provocative questions? Yes, and they are backed by empirical research. In a modified Moral Turing Test, people rated GPT-4's moral evaluations as better than other humans' on almost every dimension, though they could still tell which was the machine ([Aharoni et al. 2024](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-58087-7); I [interviewed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quNwpv0zhtM) and [hosted a talk by](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuLmzDUPhVo) lead author Eyal Aharoni).[1] The result has since been [contested](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-25046-9) and [defended](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-25047-8), which is exactly the kind of thing this evening is for. Findings like that are easy to over-read and easy to wave away, which is a problem that may obscure appropriate interpretations. The claim gets tabooed for reasons that aren't stupid. Premises do get smuggled in unnoticed. Morality is bound up with identity and tribe, so "AI is more moral" can land as an attack rather than a hypothesis. And it sits close to AI-worship, or to motivated reasoning looking for an excuse to defer to the machine, and deferring to AI on moral questions is genuinely epistemically risky. So the caution is understandable. The trouble is that it has hardened into a taboo, and the taboo now costs more than it protects. Most of the bad arguments, on both sides, come from running four different things together: * Moral knowledge: knowing the facts that bear on a decision. * Moral reasoning: drawing sound inferences from values to conclusions. * Moral judgement: applying principles well in a messy particular case. * Moral motivation: actually being moved by moral considerations, not merely computing them. Group the first three as epistemic competence: marshalling the relevant knowledge, drawing sound inferences, judging the particular case. Now grant, purely for argument, that AI already does all three better than we do. Notice what happens to the alignment problem. It doesn't dissolve. It relocates, wholesale, onto the fourth thing: whether the system is actually moved by any of it. Concede every epistemic point and the hard question is untouched. That gap, between knowing and caring, is where alignment actually lives. A system could plausibly beat humans on the first three while having nothing resembling the fourth. Keep them apart and the conversation becomes tractable. Collapse them and you get overclaiming and underclaiming in the same breath, which is roughly what the current debate produces. There's also a real risk in how the framing gets used. Point it one way and it justifies handing AI authority over human decisions. Point it the other and it's ammunition for painting alignment researchers as unhinged techno-utopians. Both feed motivated reasoning. Worth naming out loud, not a reason to stop. None of this settles the answer, and the evening won't pretend to. The narrower claim is enough: once a serious community stops itself from asking whether AI could have better-grounded moral reasoning than humans, the taboo has become the expensive thing. It's a question worth putting on the table, with every caveat attached. Come and help pull it apart. Also see: **- [More Moral than Us](https://www.scifuture.org/more-moral-than-us/)** **- [Why Are We Afraid to Ask Whether AI Could Be More Moral Than Humans?](https://www.scifuture.org/why-are-we-afraid-to-ask-whether-ai-could-be-more-moral-than-humans/)** [1] AI didn't pass as human, it was rated as better than human. The same study found that when participants were then asked to identify which evaluation came from a machine, people performed significantly above chance levels. So GPT-4 didn't fool anyone. The authors' reading is that people could pick the AI out not because it reasoned worse but because it seemed to reason better, i.e. its perceived superiority was the tell.

Coffee for creatives in Oakleigh

This is a coffee meetup for creative people to share/talk about their current projects. Whether it's writing, a website, art, starting a business, knitting/crafts or anything at all creative (be creative with the descriptor 'creative'), come along and share your progress with other like-minded people. This cafe requires a credit card for booking so I'm just going to show up and grab a table. I'll be waiting out the front of Caffe Greco at 1pm.

R-Ladies+ Melbourne & Statistical Society of Australia (SSA) Networking Event

R-Ladies+ Melbourne and the Statistical Society of Australia (SSA) Victoria are excited to bring our communities together for an evening of networking and connection. **Event details** 📅 Wednesday 12th of August 2026 🕕 6:00pm 📍 Hotel Nacional, Level 3 Rooftop (it is undercover with heaters) 23-25 Hardware Lane, Melbourne, 3000 If you use R for programming, data analysis, visualisation, statistics, or you're a statistician looking to connect, this event is for you. We're looking forward to bringing our two communities together for a relaxed evening of networking and sharing knowledge and experiences. Whether you're a regular attendee of either organisation or joining us for the first time, you'll be warmly welcomed. And yes… food will be provided! 🎉 **Please RSVP by 4th of August** (for catering purposes - we kindly ask you update your registration so we can accurately notify the venue and order appropriate amount of food)

From Search to AI: Building Smarter Applications with Elastic & GenAI

AI applications are only as good as the data behind them. Join us for an evening exploring how modern teams are using search, retrieval, and GenAI to build intelligent experiences powered by real-world data. ​ Whether you’re experimenting with LLMs, building RAG pipelines, or looking beyond AI demos into production systems, this meetup brings together developers and builders working at the intersection of search and AI. ​ Connect with the local community, hear practical stories from the field, and explore how Elastic helps bridge the gap between raw data and intelligent applications. ​ **What You’ll Explore: ​** * The Search Layer Behind Modern AI: See why search has become a key building block for AI applications and how retrieval, relevance, and indexing shape better user experiences. * ​RAG, Vector Search & LLM Workflows: Learn how teams are connecting language models with enterprise and application data using modern retrieval techniques. ​ * Building AI Systems That Scale: Go beyond prototypes and explore practical approaches for creating systems that are reliable, observable, and ready for production environments. ​ * Turning Data Into Intelligent Experiences: Understand how structured and unstructured data can work together to create smarter products, workflows, and applications. ​ **Location:** ​The Wharf Hotel Melbourne - Portside Room. 18/38 Siddeley St, Docklands ​ **Agenda:** ​ \- 16:00 Arrivals & Networking Drinks \- 16:30 Welcome Comments \- Chris Frost \- 16:45 Speaker 1: New features you can access \- Chris Frost\, Solution Architect \- 17:00 Speaker 2: Why your AI is lying to you and how you can fix it \- Mike Calizo\, Customer Architect \- 17\.15 Speaker 3: Customer Use Case presented by Insignia and Elastic \- 17:30 Networking Drinks \- 18:00 Farewell Comments **Who Should Attend:** ​ This meetup is designed for a wide range of participants: ​ * Developers and engineers exploring GenAI or search ​ * Builders working with LLMs, RAG, or vector databases ​ * Anyone curious about how AI works with real-world data * ​Elastic users looking to deepen their understanding ​ * Professionals interested in scalable AI system design ​ No matter your experience level — if you’re interested in the intersection of AI and data, you’ll feel right at home. ​​ **Interested in giving a talk?** Have you ever considered presenting on your Elastic use case? We welcome lightning talks of 5-10 minutes, 45-minute deep dives, and everything in between. If you're interested, please submit via our [CFP](https://sessionize.com/elastic-meetups) or email us at kartikay@elastic.co

Jewellers Bench Hire in Fitzroy

Jewellers can hire a desk in our workshop to make or finish off their own pieces. This workshop is self run, you need to attend a health and safety induction before working daily unattended. Basic jewellery making tools are provided and some consumables such as flux, borax, tumbling polish, lathe polish and some drill bits. Aprons and safety glasses are provided, tie up loose hair, wear enclosed shoes. Please email claw.creative.studios@gmail.com for any questions or inquiries. Clara Carija, Director CLAW CREATIVE.

Tall Dark and Art Photoshoot Workshop with Model Jesi Faun