
Philip Verner
Director · Event IT & large-scale deployments
- Context
- Ran IT for AJ2025, the 26th Australian Scout Jamboree at Maryborough Showgrounds and Equestrian Park in January 2025. Ten days, nearly 10,000 participants, a temporary township stood up on a showground site that ordinarily has no permanent enterprise infrastructure. Activities ranged from zip-lining and water sports to onsite catering, medical, retail, and 24/7 site operations. Every one of those teams needed connectivity, point-of-sale, radios, CCTV, or all of the above.
- Diagnosis
- The hard part was not the technology, it was the scale and the timeline. Roughly five weeks of build, ten days live, then everything packed back into shipping containers. WiFi had to cover the full showgrounds and equestrian park for both staff operations and participant welfare. Retail and food outlets needed reliable EFTPOS across the site. The medical centre needed clinical-grade connectivity. CCTV and access control had to cover a temporary township housing 10,000 people, most of them under 18. The volunteer IT crew was capable but spread across the country, so the operating model had to be documented well enough that someone arriving on day one of build could pick up a run sheet and contribute.
- Resolution
- Designed the network and operations model in the months leading up. Site-wide WiFi backbone with redundant uplinks, segmented VLANs for retail, medical, operations, and participant access. Pre-built and pre-configured the core hardware so it landed onsite ready to rack. Documented every subsystem, every credential, every escalation path before build week so the volunteer team had something to work from rather than tribal knowledge. Site went live on schedule, ran the full ten days, and shut down cleanly. The same operating documentation is now the reference model for the next Jamboree.

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