Why this exists
Two things are true about the Queenstown Lakes district at the same time.
Queenstown Lakes is a district of about fifty thousand residents carrying several million visitors a year, and the community sector holds a lot of that weight. Hundreds of organisations operate here, most of them small, most of them run by a handful of people who are already stretched. Where an organisation elsewhere might have an operations person, here the same work sits on top of someone’s actual job.
Software is what gets skipped. Not because nobody has thought about it, but because the money goes to the mahi and a quote for custom development is out of the question. Meanwhile the district has a real technical population, working remotely for companies elsewhere, largely invisible to the organisations down the road. Two problems that happen to be each other’s answer.
This programme is the attempt to solve both at once. Community organisations get something they could not otherwise afford. Local developers get paid work at a community rate, mentoring, and a reason to be in a room together.
Who is behind it
Dr Pradeesh Parameswaran
Pradeesh runs the programme day to day. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Otago, specialising in natural language processing, and teaches AI and generative AI courses at Queenstown Resort College.
He is responsible for delivery: recruitment, the build schedule, technical standards across the three teams, and getting everything handed over properly.
His research background is in how people actually write and speak, rather than how software wishes they would, which is a useful instinct in a programme where most of the work is understanding a problem before building anything. He also sits closest to the developers coming through Queenstown Resort College, so he sees which of them are ready for real client work.
Giovanni Stephens
Giovanni founded Queenstown Coders Connect, the district's regular meet-up for local developers, and chairs FLINT Queenstown, the local branch of TUANZ. He works as a software engineer building AI systems.
From 2024 to 2026 he was community investment adviser at Queenstown Lakes District Council, managing the community fund and designing The Funding Series, a capability programme helping community groups become more financially sustainable. That work meant sitting across the table from a lot of local organisations and hearing the same thing repeatedly: the problem was not always money, it was that the tools they needed did not exist at a price they could pay.
He also advised Queenstown Resort College on its data and machine learning programmes, which is part of why QRC students have a guaranteed place in this cohort.
Six organisations deliver Community Tech Lab together
- Startup Queenstown Lakes (opens in a new tab) leads the programme, holds the funding and contracts the developers.
- Queenstown Coders Connect provides technical leadership, mentoring and developer recruitment.
- FLINT Queenstown (opens in a new tab) brings mentorship and hosts the closing Showcase Hui as its Q4 event.
- Queenstown Resort College (opens in a new tab) supports recruitment and learning pathways, and reserves a place in the cohort for a current student or recent graduate.
- huddl (opens in a new tab) connects the programme to the not-for-profit sector.
- Technology Queenstown (opens in a new tab) advises on the wider ecosystem and employer connections.
