Civic Engagement Sydney

Impact Hackers Co-Working Day

Dear Hackers for Kindness, For those who run solo businesses, freelancers or can work from home, we would like to share a co-working event day on the last Wednesday of the month at a nurturing venue called Impact Story Lab. Students are welcome too! This group has been quiet for some time. Check out the description as to why I saved the group. Impact Story Lab is becoming a safe space for a number of impact groups to meet. And a great place to welcome Random Hacks Of Kindness. In an age of AI and misinformation, it's important to reconnect with like-minded positive people. Hence, this meetup event You can either join for the day or join for lunch! You can choose what works for you. We are supporting the Not-For-Profit Impact Story Lab Space. Here is the usual format: "Once a month, the Impact Story Lab opens its doors for a day of focused work, meaningful conversations and new collaborations. Whether you're building a social enterprise, working in a purpose-driven business, freelancing, studying, campaigning or simply looking for a more inspiring place to work for the day, you're welcome. Come for an hour, stay all day, or join us after work for this month's featured community event. *** What to expect Our coworking days are intentionally relaxed. Bring your laptop, settle into the space, meet other people working for impact and enjoy a productive day alongside a growing community of storytellers, creatives, researchers, community builders and changemakers. Throughout the day you'll find opportunities for: • Focused work • Informal conversations • New collaborations • Meeting people across sectors • Coffee, lunch and community There are no forced networking activities—just good people sharing a great space." Here are the details to [BOOK](https://events.humanitix.com/impact-co-working-day-or-29-july) I'll update these each month. **Costs** First time is FREE! If you are looking to book the co-working space, they have various packages. You do have to pay for a meal if you want catering. **Getting there** 10-15 minute walk from Kings Cross Station or Town Hall Station. That's about it! I look forward to seeing new and familiar faces for these wonderful co-working sessions. Remember, anything is possible. Together, we can make a better world probable. Kindly, Bob Sudharshan

AI Engineering Day, DataEngBytes

**🔖 TICKETS — Before you read any further** Tickets for the AI Engineering Day must be purchased via Ticket Tailor: * Single day (AI Engineering Day only): **$299 AUD** * Both days (Data Engineering Day + AI Engineering Day): **$499 AUD** 👉 **[Get your tickets at tickettailor.com/events/dataengbytes](https://tickettailor.com/events/dataengbytes)** *** **About the Day** The AI Engineering Day is Day 2 of DataEngBytes Sydney (Wednesday 29 July) — Oceania's largest community-run data engineering conference. This is a full day dedicated to the engineering side of AI: not the hype, not the pitch decks — the real patterns, trade-offs, and production experience from practitioners who've actually shipped. Two tracks run in parallel across the day, with everyone converging for keynotes in the morning and the Town Hall close in the afternoon. **What's on** The day opens with two keynotes covering the fundamentals that underpin serious AI work right now. The first makes the case for **context engineering** as a proper engineering discipline — moving beyond prompting to systematically designing what flows into a model. The second digs into **Model Context Protocol (MCP) in production**: gateway patterns, security realities, and where the standard is heading after its rapid rise to Linux Foundation governance. From there, two tracks run in parallel across the day covering: * **Evals and testing** — building evaluation pipelines that catch regressions and don't require a PhD to interpret * **Agents in production** — the reliability patterns, failure modes, and oversight requirements that separate a demo from something your organisation trusts * **AI coding tools** — what the research actually says about productivity gains (the numbers might surprise you) * **RAG at scale** — chunking, embedding freshness, retrieval quality, and what real RAG infrastructure looks like beyond the prototype * **The 80-to-95 gap** — why getting an AI system from demo to production-grade takes disproportionate effort, and how to close it * **LLMs in the transform layer** — where they genuinely help inside data pipelines and where they introduce risk * **skills.md** — encoding domain knowledge and workflow patterns into reusable, versionable LLM interactions for your team * **LLM gateway patterns** — routing, rate-limiting, cost control, and audit at the organisational level * **Vector databases in production** — the real-world messiness behind the benchmarks * **Fine-tuning vs prompting** — a practitioner's decision framework for when fine-tuning is actually worth the complexity * **AI agents for data quality** — automating anomaly investigation, schema drift triage, and incident summarisation * **AI pipeline security** — data poisoning, prompt injection, MCP tool abuse, and what defensive architecture looks like * **Autonomous data agents with Apache Flink** — stateful stream processing as a foundation for long-running, event-driven agents The day closes with a **Town Hall** — an open, community-run discussion on the topics that matter most to practitioners in the room. This is a practitioner-led, vendor-neutral event. All talks go through a competitive CFP process and are selected on technical merit. No marketing sessions. *** **🔖 TICKETS** Tickets must be purchased via Ticket Tailor — this Meetup page is for discovery only. * Single day (AI Engineering Day only): **$299 AUD** * Both days (Data Engineering Day + AI Engineering Day): **$499 AUD** 👉 **[Get your tickets at tickettailor.com/events/dataengbytes](https://tickettailor.com/events/dataengbytes)**

Winter Greenups - Ethical Finance and Money

**Ethical Finance: Finding the Light in this Hazy Shade of...Winter** **[TICKETS ON HUMANITIX](https://events.humanitix.com/greenups-winter-2026)** In 2026, Greenups is meeting quarterly and using the seasons as our guide. For the Winter gathering Greenups will bring together voices from Australia’s ethical and sustainable finance sector to ask: **What does finance look like in the cold winter light of climate risk, ecological limits and social responsibility?** Finance is the hidden system shaping our future. It determines what gets funded, what gets protected, what gets scaled, what gets retired — and what kinds of futures become possible. After a packed Autumn gathering at UTS exploring biophilia, biomaterials and regenerative design , we now turn to Winter — a season of clarity, contraction, resilience, hard choices, protection, repair and preparation - to look at our Finance and Money systems - are they getting us where we need to be, and soon enough? This will be an accessible, grounded conversation covering ethical investing, ESG, superannuation, climate risk, transition finance, disclosure, stewardship, anti-greenwashing and impact investing — while also making space for deeper Greenups-style questions: * What should capital help sustain? * What should it help transform? * And what should it help us let go of? (and how) **What to expect** Expect new ideas, new connections, new faces — and plenty of friendly old faces too ;-) We’ll create an inclusive space for grounded conversation. Greenups is a diverse group of people from different fields, but aligned in our care for each other and this beautiful, fragile planet. Together, we’ll share the stories, find the voices, and forge the pathways toward systems of resilience and regeneration — with room for care, compassion, purpose, meaning, art, and beauty along the way. **Light refreshments and drinks thanks to the generous support of [SIX](https://www.six-invest.com.au/) and [UNLESS](https://www.unless.financial/),** Drinks from Rosnay Wines + Young Henrys and food thanks to Parliament on King. **Contributors include:** --- * **[Justin Medcalf](https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinmedcalf/)** — (Panel MC) Co-Founder + Financial Adviser at UNLESS Financial. Before co-founding UNLESS, Justin was a Financial Adviser at Ethinvest, Responsible Investment Association Australasia (RIAA) board member, co-founder the Ethical Advisers’ Co-op and led The Emerald Club, where he launched Australia’s responsible investment platform for retail and wholesale clients. _ * **[Adam Verwey](https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-verwey-77668913/)** — SIX (Sustainable Investment Exchange) Australia's first share trading app to combine activism with investing. Adam is also a founder and former MD of Future Super - Australia’s first 100% fossil fuel free superannuation fund. _ * **[Persephone Fraser](https://www.linkedin.com/in/persephone-fraser-75a132108/)**[ ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/persephone-fraser-75a132108/)\- Ethical Research & Climate Policy Lead at Australian Ethical\. Before joining Australian Ethical, Persephone worked in research across the Climate Justice Initiative, Common Capital, Reconciliation Australia, and the Greens. _ * **[Dr Stella Whittaker](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-stella-whittaker-36b39123/) -** Climate Change, Adaptation and Resilience Lead in Haskoning Australia. A PhD in climate finance, Stella has more than 30 years of experience in climate change, climate finance, environmental policy, sustainability, circular economy and environmental planning, and recently the founder of the Climate Adaptation Finance Activation Group.

Sydney Data Eng Day at DataEngBytes

🎟️ TICKETS — Before you read any further Tickets for the Data Engineering Day must be purchased via Ticket Tailor: * Single day (Data Engineering Day only): $299 AUD * Both days (Data Engineering Day + AI Engineering Day): $499 AUD 👉 Get your tickets at tickettailor.com/events/dataengbytes *** About the Day The Data Engineering Day is Day 1 of DataEngBytes Sydney (Tuesday 28 July) — Oceania's largest community-run data engineering conference. This is a full day dedicated to the craft of data engineering: not the hype, not the vendor roadmaps — the real trade-offs, production war stories, and architectural decisions from practitioners who are building and running data platforms at scale. Two tracks run in parallel across the day, with everyone converging for keynotes in the morning and the Town Hall close in the afternoon. What's on The day opens with two keynotes. The first maps the Iceberg catalog wars — Polaris, Glue, Nessie, S3 Tables — and the trade-offs every team building a serious lakehouse needs to understand right now. The second is the ClickHouse keynote on real-time analytics at warehouse scale: how ClickHouse fits the modern stack and when it belongs at the centre of your analytics platform. From there, two tracks run in parallel across the day covering: * Data contracts in practice — what enforcing contracts as interfaces, not just documentation, actually looks like in production * Migrating off Spark — a production Polars story: where it wins, where it doesn't, and the gotchas nobody warns you about * Kafka to Iceberg — the journey of a record from topic to analytics table, covering schema evolution, exactly-once guarantees, and late-arriving events * FinOps for data teams — how to instrument, attribute, and act on cloud spend, and why the best optimisations are architectural * Schema evolution without tears — practical strategies across Iceberg, Avro, Protobuf, and JSON * Data quality as the AI bottleneck — why years of investment in data quality tooling still hasn't fixed the number one blocker for AI initiatives * Platform engineering for data — building the internal tooling and abstractions that let teams move fast without creating chaos * uv: modernising your Python data toolchain — replacing pip, virtualenv, and pyenv with a single Rust binary that's 10–100x faster * Real-time OLAP in 2026 — a clear decision framework for matching workload characteristics to the right engine * CDC patterns beyond Debezium — what comes next a decade on from when Debezium commoditised change data capture * Tearing down the modern data stack — the case for radical simplification, with real numbers from teams that did it * Data mesh: an honest retrospective — what the pattern actually delivered, where it failed, and what a pragmatic middle path looks like * Building observable data pipelines with OpenTelemetry — instrumenting pipelines across Airflow, Spark, and query engines The day closes with a Town Hall — an open, community-run discussion on the topics that matter most to practitioners in the room. This is a practitioner-led, vendor-neutral event. All talks go through a competitive CFP process and are selected on technical merit. No marketing sessions. *** 🎟️ TICKETS Tickets must be purchased via Ticket Tailor — this Meetup page is for discovery only. * Single day (Data Engineering Day only): $299 AUD * Both days (Data Engineering Day + AI Engineering Day): $499 AUD 👉 Get your tickets at tickettailor.com/events/dataengbytes

Delightful Vegan Festival [Maroubra]

Agentic Engineering Meetup, August Edition

Hey everyone, join us for the August edition of the Agentic Engineering Meetup! We'll have two exciting talks, great discussions, and plenty of opportunities to connect with fellow engineers, AI practitioners, and technology enthusiasts. 🎉 Seats are limited, so RSVP early to secure your spot. 🏠 **Location** Nimbly Darling Park, Tower 1, 201 Sussex St Sydney NSW 2000, Australia 🍕 **Food & Refreshments** Kindly provided by Nimbly😊 **Schedule** 🕠 5:30 PM – Doors Open, Refreshments & Networking 🕕 5:45 PM – Welcome & Announcements 🎤 5:50 PM – Talk 1: Objective Truths Over Oversight: How We Let AI Agents Ship Correct Code. 🎤 6:05 PM – Talk 2: The Token Tax on Autonomy: why agentic coding is a capacity problem, not a licence. 🎤 6:40 PM – Talk 3: Plug-In, Optimise, Ship: Scaling Open-Source Agent Infrastructure with NeMo 🤝 7:10 PM – Networking 🚪 7:30 PM – Event Close **Speakers:** \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- 🎤 **CHRIS BALLMENT**, Co-Founder & Chief Architect, Nimbly **Talk Title**: Objective Truths Over Oversight: How We Let AI Agents Ship Correct Code. **Talk Summary**: The instinct when handing work to an AI coding agent is to watch it closely - to review every step and pull it up the moment it drifts. That doesn't scale, and it wastes the very thing that makes agents useful: their autonomy. This talk makes the case for the opposite approach. Instead of oversight, we give agents agency - bounded by objective truths they can't argue with. \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- 🎤 **CHRISTOPHER SIMUSOKWE**, Head of Data Engineering, TPG Telecom **Talk Title**: The Token Tax on Autonomy: why agentic coding is a capacity problem, not a licence. **Talk Summary**: Most teams still price AI-assisted coding the way they price software: seat price times headcount, book the number, move on. That worked when the assistant autocompleted a line at a time. It does not survive contact with agents. An agentic coding task is not one request. It is a loop. The agent reads files, reasons, proposes an edit, re-reads, runs something, sees an error, tries again, and every turn re-sends a growing slice of context. That loop is what you are actually buying, and it behaves like compute, not like per-seat SaaS. Here is the part that gets missed. Two teams on the same model, running the same workload, routinely see bills an order of magnitude apart. The gap is not commercial. It sits in retrieval, tool design, and how much context you carry per turn. The cheapest token is the one you never send, and deciding which tokens you never send is an architecture decision. What you will leave with: \- A working mental model for where tokens actually go inside an agent loop \- The four cost drivers\, and which ones you control in architecture rather than in billing \- The levers that close the 1x to 10x gap\, and the order to apply them in\. \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- 🎤 **MARKO SLABAK**, Senior Solutions Architect, NVIDIA **Talk Title**: Plug-In, Optimise, Ship: Scaling Open-Source Agent Infrastructure with NeMo **Talk Summary**: Building agents is getting easier. Running them reliably, efficiently, and securely in production is less so. In this session we’ll look at how two open source projects from NVIDIA tackle that challenge: \- NeMo Agent Toolkit for profiling\, evaluation\, and multi\-agent orchestration across any framework\, \- NemoClaw for zero\-trust agent runtimes with security baked in\. No framework migration required\, no vendor lock\-in\. We’ll close with a walkthrough of the NemoClaw for LangChain Deep Agents Code blueprint available on build.nvidia.com. This blueprint serves as a starting point to spin up and customise open-model coding agents whether cloud-hosted or on your own hardware. \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- We look forward to seeing you there!

tekFoundation: Reconnect with Sydney's Purpose-driven Community

Charities are doing extraordinary work, but many are held back by outdated systems, limited budgets and stretched resources. ***tekFoundation*** closes that gap by connecting charities with skilled volunteers and powering an ecosystem around that support. Join ***tekfoundation*** for a casual after-work hang at El Loco at Slip Inn, Sydney CBD - the perfect spot to reconnect with Sydney's purpose-driven community! **What makes this special:** * **Real conversations**: We've officially relaunched! Hear what's new at tekFoundation - including our charity membership program, now live - and tell us what you're working on. * **Opportunity spotlight**: Share if you're hiring, seeking volunteers, or offering help. We'll have name tags and colour-coded stickers. * **Network with heart**: Charities, volunteers, companies, supporters - past, present, future - all welcome. Bring a friend! This is a low-key, high-impact vibe: get to know the tekfoundation extended community over tacos and margaritas at one of Sydney's iconic spots. **Free Entry -** cover your snacks and beverages. **Optional Donation** to tekFoundation helps fuel our mission matching Aussie charities with skilled volunteers to amplify impact (not tax-deductible). **Why come?** Escape the week, spark ideas, and leave inspired to amplify impact. See you there :) 🎟️ Register to attend: 👉🏽 [https://events.humanitix.com/tekfoundation-tech-for-good-happy-hour-be4ub4ex](https://events.humanitix.com/tekfoundation-tech-for-good-happy-hour-be4ub4ex) **ABOUT** ***tekFoundation*** is a digital capability engine for community impact to build the ecosystem of people, skills, and support that turns limited resources into lasting impact for charities.

National Tree Day

Human Hearted Sydney is committed to contributing to our community. We are planning to participate in National Tree Day for 2026 by joining Strathfield Council’s National Tree Day event at Hudson Park Strathfield where we'll help plant some native seedlings. More information and registration details at https://events.humanitix.com/strathfield-council-national-tree-day-2026 We warmly welcome others to participate by volunteering with us. If you’d like to join us please register through the registration page at the url above. Please note there are several sessions on the day, and we are registering for the 9.00am session. Once you've registered please RSVP for this meetup and then post a comment here that you have registered. Then we’ll know who is coming and how many people to look out for. We don't have a precise location other than Hudson park, which has a golf range. We'll provide more info when we have it. We also don't know how many places are left for this event so register soon if you can. We hope to see you there.

Human hearted community of practice (COP)

**Event summary:** The monthly human hearted community of practice (COP) is both a support group, and a mutual encouragement group, for people who want to explore living a more human hearted life. The COP is part of Human Hearted Sydney's goal of building community. Please feel free to join us for a session if you're interested. **Who is the COP for ?** The COP is for people who dislike the alienation and emptiness of our modern finance driven society, and are looking for a new form of community - one based on the reality of our human social capacities such as sympathy and friendship, rather than based on returning to religion and other traditional practices. If you would like to be part of building a supportive community for living out socially positive values in today’s world we encourage you to come along and check it out. **Some background: The meaning problem modern society faces -** The development of modern society has seen the destruction of earlier systems of meaning, like religion and tradition. They have not been replaced by a new set of ethics or community, but by market values and hyper individualism. This has created a world of material wealth in which far too many people feel insecure, alone, and unlikely to succeed. We now live in an atomised society in which each person suffers alone and there is no form of community, or meaning other than material wealth, to sustain them. This has led to substantial increases in loneliness and mental health issues like anxiety in modern society. Now there is even a category called ‘[deaths of despair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disease_of_despair#:~:text=The%20three%20disease%20types%20are,%2C%20West%20Virginia%2C%20and%20Delaware.)’ that refers to people whose reliance on drugs, alcohol etc. to numb their isolation from society leads to their early death. **More background: The solution we will look at -** The obvious solution to the collapse of values in modern society is to build alternative forms of community. Many groups try to achieve this by calling for a return to religious values, or building new religions. As humanists we do not turn to religion but the best of the human potential to provide a foundation for community groups. [Human heartedness](https://web.archive.org/web/20240109160949/https://areomagazine.com/2022/05/05/a-human-hearted-modernity/) is an approach to life which sees humans as inherently social beings. It is backed both by many famous thinkers of the past, and by the findings of recent neuroscience and evolutionary studies which show the path to human happiness and fulfillment is more dependent on building good relationships and positive social connection than on competition and being purely ‘rational’. So one part of the solution to the existential emptiness of modernity is for people to build small communities; groups of like minded people who want to live in a more human hearted way, and support each other to live better in the face of modernity’s onslaught. There are other parts of the solution of course. However in relation to this event our focus is on setting up a COP to support each other to practice living in a more human hearted way, and to provide communal support generally in today’s disenchanted world. **Basic structure of this meeting:** The meeting will be facilitated by a member of the Sydney humanist community and will involve a brief talk explaining human heartedness and the problems of modernity. Then we will proceed to conduct our regular COP meeting. The meeting will finish with a Q/A and discussion period, followed by a lunch and more informal discussion. **Donations:** While this event is free, we would be grateful if you chose to make a [donation](https://www.humanistsaustralia.org/donate) to sustain Humanists Australia which would help it to continue delivering events that serve the community in Sydney. **Please note Date Time and Venue:** In August 2026 the meeting will be held on the second Sunday of the month (August 9th) at 11:00AM. The venue is level one of Darling Square Library. The room we'll be in is called Idea Space 2 **Directions:** The venue is a ten minute walk from both Town Hall and Central station. The Darling Square Library is part of a hive-shaped building called The Exchange. The Idea Spaces are on level one of The Darling Square Library which is accessible via elevators facing towards Darling Square and stairs which are on the other side of the building. Please ask the library staff if you need assistance finding where we are in the library.

Doco Discussion: The Origin of Democracy

\| Join us for an evening of documentary viewing and thoughtful discussion as we explore one of humanity's most influential political ideas: democracy\. We'll watch[ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEElF63sphw)*[The Origin of Democracy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEElF63sphw)* and discuss the historical, philosophical, and practical questions it raises. How did democracy emerge? What conditions made it possible? Why has it spread across so much of the world, and what challenges does it face today? This is an open, respectful forum for people with diverse perspectives. Whether you're deeply interested in politics, history, economics, philosophy, or simply curious about how societies organize themselves, you'll be welcome. **Discussion Topics:** * What were the origins of democratic government? * How have ideas of citizenship and political participation evolved? * What is the relationship between democracy, free speech, and equal rights? * Are modern democracies living up to their founding ideals? * What reforms, if any, could improve democratic institutions today? **Format** * Brief introductions * Documentary viewing * Facilitated group discussion * Open Q&A and networking **Who Should Attend?** Anyone interested in: * History and political thought * Free speech and civil liberties * Equality before the law * Democratic institutions and reform * Civil and constructive dialogue The Sydney Open Forum encourages curiosity, critical thinking, and respectful conversation. You don't need to be an expert—just bring an open mind and a willingness to engage with different viewpoints. | | | --- | |

Lunch and Co-Working

Unhurried Conversations - Saturday

Bring yourself along, we explain how it works.