Work_Life

Meet our Interns

March 16, 2013 By kayemaree Leave a Comment

The Enspiral crew put together an internship experience tailor made for social entrepreneurs to use the tools of business to make a positive social and environmental impact, applying their unique skills & passion to the work that matters. We purposely sought change makers with fires in their belly for social justice, environmental health and economic brilliance. Now half way though, our interns have had the unique ability to co-construct their own learning curriculum where Enspiral helped to ‘provide the ingredients, not the recipe’ for the ultimate internship experience. Please … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Featured, Staff Stories, Work_Life

#LeanComms – Communications for the way the world is now

March 6, 2013 By sam 1 Comment

This article is written by Sam Rye As a Marketing & Communications practitioner at Enspiral & Bucky Box, I found myself drowning in the multi-channel, fast-paced industry in 2011 and 2012. Since then I've met many others who admit the same thing. Times are changing fast. As a sector, we've moved from a slow and steady format of channels such as newspapers, magazines, TV and radio which required reasonably long lead times for content publishing, to an explosion of channels and possibilities with the rise of digital technology and social media. Communication … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Comms & Marketing, Staff Stories Tagged With: Agile, Beta, bucky box, Chalkle, Communications, Communications Strategy & Planning, Content Marketing, Content Planning, Lean Comms Canvas, Lean Communications, Lean Startup, LeanComms, Marketing, Media, new technology, social media, Strategy

Why overpaying your developers is the cheapest thing to do

February 13, 2013 By Will L. 1 Comment

One of the crew posted up an article citing the Mythical Man Month today. This concept first came to me through an old co-founder who was a smart PhD type, he'd just read the book in the 1990s and I based all of my startup recruitment around this idea - it worked fab. Pay people who are brilliant "way too much" because it's the cheapest thing to do... I use a rough square law to extrapolate something more useful... simple project → 1 year, 1 coder complex project → 2 years, 1 coder → 1 year, 4 coders Or pu another way, if you can get a good engineer who is 2x as productive, … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Engineering, Programming, Working Life Tagged With: bucky box, developers, management, pay, projects, salary, startups, teams

The dystopic future of Loomio?

November 2, 2012 By joshua 1 Comment

One of the things I love most at Enspiral is the way playfulness and creativity seep into every aspect of our work. We've had a fair bit to decide as a collective recently so I've been putting a fair bit up on Loomio - maybe it was excessive, maybe it wasn't. I'm on the side of the wasn't but everyone's free to their own opinion :P Instead of a 'Hey Josh, ease up on the loomio' Will Lau (one of the Bucky Box founders) chose instead to post this up on Yammer which is some of the most creative feedback I think I've ever received. THE LAST LOOMIOT. I'm thinking about writing a … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Staff Stories, Work_Life

Exciting beginnings

July 31, 2012 By Anthony Leave a Comment

New beginnings are always exciting times. I’ve been behind a desk at Enspiral Wellington barely a month and with the boundless enthusiasm colliding and overflowing in every direction the amount of ideas being generated here is almost crippling.But ideas are cheap - the core value of this network is the way it enables action.On my first day Chalklewas an idea for an open platform for people who have a skill or passion, to teach it to people interested in learning it. A way for local communities to rethink education and lower the barriers for anyone to learn almost anything.Chalkle was born as … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Companies, Working Life, Work_Life Tagged With: Chalkle, new business, startups

An opportunity to Stand Up

April 13, 2012 By joshua 5 Comments

Sometimes an opportunity comes along that nudges its way up your todo list and makes you stand up and take action - today I got nudged. A few months ago some volunteers approached me about launching a New Zealand version of GetUp! - for those of you who don't know about GetUp I'd recommend you take the time to read through their site - they have had a pretty big impact in Australia. I found their disclosure page particularly useful in understanding what makes the organisation tick. The core idea is a member funded organisation independent of any political party that runs a continuous series … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Work_Life

Reflection on my internship at Enspiral

December 12, 2011 By Nicolas Leave a Comment

As part of my studies in computer science, I had the chance to take part in three professional experiences in the past three years. Each experience really helped develop my skills further, as well as gaining self-confidence and finding my technical interests in the IT world. Even then, I was missing something, without which, I felt absolutely uncertain about my future: that was a Purpose. I like making websites mainly for their ability to reach out many people and to give birth to strong communities with comparatively little effort. I see the Web a bit like a big jam session where everybody … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Reflections, Staff Stories, Working Life, Work_Life

Developing at Enspiral

December 9, 2011 By rob 2 Comments

“Always be the worst guy in every band you’re in. - so you can learn. The people around you affect your performance. Choose your crowd wisely.” ― Chad Fowler, The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development I came to Enspiral in March this year. When I first met JV I told him that I wanted to come to an environment where I could sharpen up my programming skills and learn from people better than me. It did not take long. Pretty soon Joshua, Allan, Will and I conducted our own kind of ‘Skunk Works’. It went like this: We travelled to a … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Programming, Staff Stories Tagged With: bucky box, goalpost

Inspired by Festival for the Future

December 5, 2011 By guyryan Leave a Comment

If there was one thing you could do to change the world – and you knew you couldn't fail, what would it be? A good friend once asked me this. Now it's a question I ask myself almost every day. This time last year we proposed the Inspiring Stories project to the Vodafone NZ Foundation: imagine if we connected up young filmmakers around New Zealand with young Kiwis making a difference. Imagine if we gave those young filmmakers hands on training and support, and connected them up with creative industry mentors. Imagine the stories they could tell. Imagine the people and projects we could … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Reflections, Volunteer, Work_Life Tagged With: festival for the future, inspiring stories, volunteer

Enspiral Engineering

November 30, 2011 By jonathon.avery 3 Comments

During a Kite Boarding holiday on the pacific atoll, Aitutaki (near Rarotonga), I read the book “The Ecology of Commerce” by Paul Hawkens. The sadness it evoked in me for how we have devastated the planet and it's ecosystems soon transformed into a deep passion to do something about it. I spent a few months searching the Internet, reading, networking and imagining how wonderful life here would be if we worked with nature instead of against it. I dreamed of ways in which we could create a restorative or circular economy and learned about concepts such as Cradle to Cradle Design and … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Engineering, Staff Stories, Work_Life