Shelley Grell — Aotearoa New Zealand

Thirty years of strategy.
Now built with AI.

I'm a communications strategist working across infrastructure resilience, community advocacy, event management, and games that make you think. Different subjects, one discipline: understand the problem properly, then build the thing that actually solves it. This site is the work.


About

It all sits together,
once you see the discipline.

I founded Communicate IT in 1999 and have spent the decades since helping organisations communicate clearly under pressure — biotech, agritech, high-tech, investor relations, and crisis communications, with APR accreditation along the way.

A telecommunications resilience submission, a triathlon's race operations, and a word game that teaches you the word you missed look like unrelated things. They aren't. Each one starts the same way: work out what the problem actually is, find out what's really true, and build something a real person can use. The subject changes; the method doesn't.

AI is what makes the range possible. I came to it through study at AcademyEX — most recently on disruptive technology — and then through two years of using it every working day: not as a novelty, but as the thing that lets one person carry a project from research to a finished, tested tool. That's why the work here is usable rather than described.

Golden Bay is a long way from Silicon Valley, and that distance is an advantage: the problems are genuine, the feedback is direct, and the stakes are human-scale.


The work

In progress

Infrastructure & resilience

The fibre route serving Golden Bay has been severed three times since 2022. I gathered structured community evidence from the July 2026 outage, mapped it, and took it into a submission to the Commerce Commission. Case study coming.

Writing it up
Live

Mind games

Scriptorium is a tile word game with a coach built in — after every turn it shows you the best word you actually had, and what it means. Free, ad-free, works offline.

Play it →
Live

Learning games

Built for learners who need a different approach, starting from a real request by a real teacher aide. Kim’s Game and Word Switch are both playable now.

Explore →
In progress

Operations & events

Thirty years of running events, now with the systems to match: a local-first race operations tool for the Tinbum Triathlon, and a volunteer roster built for a local school.

Writing it up