London Region ICT Champion

Christmas wouldn’t be complete without a riff about the latest Internet addictions and quirks.

PARIS (AFP) - The Internet has given birth to a quirky range of modern addictions and maladies, the British weekly New Scientist says in its Christmas issue published this Saturday.They include these:

- EGO-SURFING: When you frequently check your name and reputation on the Internet.

- BLOG STREAKING: “Revealing secrets or personal information online which for everybody’s sake would be best kept private.”

- CRACKBERRY: “The curse of the modern executive: not being able to stop checking your BlackBerry, even at your grandmother’s funeral.” (A BlackBerry is a popular handheld device that can be used for phoning, emailing and web-browsing).

- GOOGLE-STALKING: Defined as “snooping online on old friends, colleagues or first dates.”

- CYBERCHONDRIA: “A headache and a particular rash at the same time? Extensive online research tells you it must be cancer.”

- PHOTOLURKING: Flicking through a photo album of someone you’ve never met.

- WIKIPEDIHOLISM: Excess devotion to contributing to the online collaborative encyclopaedia, Wikipedia. (Wikipedia even has a page where you can test whether you’re an addict: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Are-You-a-Wikipediholic-Test)).

- CHEESEPODDING: Downloading of a song “so cheesy that you could cover it in plastic wrap and sell it at the deli counter.” Cheesepodders are especially vulnerable to soft-rock favourites from the 1970s.

Are you guilty of any of the above? If we had a fifth ammendment in the UK, I’d be taking it now.

I just love the power of blogs to take you on a journey of discovery.

To illustrate this story and the growing power of blogs to make new and interesting links - rather like six degrees of separation, I’m going to take you through a recent lunchtime surf of the web that started with a recommendation from my wife to check out Will Wheaton’s blog - and then on through NASA, Futurama, an online t-shirt shop, Guitar Hero II and lastly to a revitalised Netscape.

For those of you with long memories, Will played Gordie, in the 1986 movie Stand By Me, amongst his many other acting roles. Gordie was the movie’s story-teller, a role we’ve talked about before on this blog.

On his own blog, Will tells a mean story and his blog is a veritable lesson in how to stay interesting, write in a witty and involving style about diverse interests, and engage with the audience and take them to them new places - everyday.

Will’s first post took me to NASA’s Visible Earth site - an awe inspiring catalogue of images on planet Earth.

To quote NASA, “On May 19th, 2005, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this stunning view of the Sun sinking below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars. This Panoramic Camera (Pancam) mosaic was taken around 6:07 in the evening of the rover’s 489th Martian day, or sol. Spirit was commanded to stay awake briefly after sending that sol’s data to the Mars Odyssey orbiter just before sunset.”

Beautiful. And a great example of a blogger taking you to a useful and inspiring site folks without an interest in astronomy are not likely to visit unprompted. As one wag on Reddit said, “Hear that? That’s the sound of thousands of desktop backgrounds changing.”

After life on Mars, Will’s next few posts quote Futurama’s Zoidberg, point reader’s towards his passion for cool t-shirts and the Guitar Hero II computer game. And if I didn’t before, I now know what burnination means thanks to the folks at Urban Dictionary.

The point of all this is that as London Region ICT Champion, I get to look at how new technology - particularly blogs - can help voluntary sector organisations (or non-profits) communicate with their audience, funders and supporters. Although Will’s blog has nothing to do with the non-profit world, I’ve picked it out because it brilliantly shows how a writer can talk about his passions (news, poker, geekery, animals, t-shirts) and still connect with a diverse audience of loyal readers who keep coming back for more. Surely this is the skill and the point of good blogging?

Done right, blogging is a great example of the social web - making new connections that take the reader to new concepts, people and places. For example, David Wilcox does a great job of video-blogging community events and bringing to life the messages of keynote speakers that might otherwise go unreported. Likewise, images from Camera Rwanda on Flickr and NSPCC awareness campaigns on Youtube do a great job of spreading their message to an audience far beyond their normal range.

There’s also something in here about the blogger as a navigator/facilitor/educator - someone who ploughs through the morass of the web on your behalf and comes up with the content worth reading. Services like Digg, Reddit, Ma.gnolia, etc do a pretty good job of filtering web content - they work on a recommendation system - so that stories rated highly by readers naturally gravitate to the top of the pile. Ofcourse, this is purely subjective and relies on people having similar tastes.

Interestingly, this is the diametric opposite of Google’s search engine which uses a mathmatical algorithm called Page Rank to analyse key words and rank web pages according to your search terms. It usually works pretty well, but doesn’t always give the results you expect and can be easily manipulated by black hatters - mainly because computers and humans look at web pages differently. If you want to read more about how computers and humans search differently for the same information, start with Tim Berners-Lee’s blog, creator of the web, and his work on the semantic web.

Back to the main point: with some notable exceptions - stand up YouthNet, Podnosh, Demos, Greenpeace - blogging is not something commonly done in the UK voluntary sector. The reasons for this and what it would take to get the UK voluntary sector to a tipping point where uses of new technology like google docs and spreadsheets, RSS, blogs, Youtube, etc become common is (i) why the ICT Champion exists, and (ii) another conversation.

I want to bring you the best ICT projects from around the non-profit world and how we can learn from them. Doing that is going to be a challenge. But for today, I put my own hand up. I’m a new blogger and whilst most of the material I quote deserves to be noted, much of it really belongs in the file marked ‘For Reference Only’. In future, rather than clog up the blog with references to worthy reports, I’ll be dropping them into a new Resources section for you to check out as and when the urge strikes.

ESRC: ICT, social capital and voluntary action

The Economic & Social Research Council’s ‘ICT, Social Capital and Voluntary Action’ (download PDF - 1.6Mb) report contends that ignoring the Internet is no longer an option for voluntary and community organisations.

It warns that those failing to embrace information and communications technology (ICT) risk having their work overshadowed by those who do draw on this new source of ’social capital’ - the reserve of goodwill generated when people interact. And though local ICT initiatives are taking place, the booklet says that the smaller online communities they create need ongoing technical and funding support if they are to survive.

The report concluded:

“Our research suggests that top-down, centrally managed projects are prone to a range of problems that make their long-term sustainability doubtful in contrast to grassroots initiatives owned and managed by the communities themselves.

In other words, grassroots ICT initiatives may be more sustainable than those driven by outside policy interventions.”

You can download the full report from ESRC.

Yes, I know I’ve been blogging about IT reports rather a lot recently, but hey, it’s all good and funders are always saying how much they like to see fresh research into voluntary sector ICT issues.

Anyway, in the spirit of bringing you the latest research into voluntary sector and non-profit ICT….

Evaluation of LB Newham’s Where ITs @ project

Here, we have Paul Ticher’s evaluation of the LB Newham Where IT’s @ project.

To recap:

• The Where IT’s @ project of Newham Council’s Social Regeneration Unit (SRU) began in January 2002, funded throughout from the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund.
• Stated aim of the project was to capacity build the ICT of Newham advice agencies to take advantage of new technology (broadband) and case mangement software - to better deliver their goals.

• 20 advice agencies with ‘under-developed ICT’ were selected for the project - all received health-checks, broadband and 4 software packages for case management.
• All participating agencies received training and support to help them take advantage of the new technology.

Findings:

As Paul explains:

“The evaluation exercise found a number of interesting things. For example:

• For some of the organisations the effects were spectacular - mainly where the project chimed with a manager who was keen for the organisation to do new things and to be managed better.
• Where the project worked well, it was the whole package that counted: provision of software, management training, technical support and provision of broadband internet access.
• Many of the small organisations that dropped out did so because they didn’t have the capacity to take on the work needed to make use of the ICT capacity-building measures. This parallels a recent finding from research commissioned for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and reported in Third Sector.”

The full report can be downloaded from: http://www.paulticher.com/articles/Newham.pdf (2.91Mb)

I stumbled across an interesting post on screen sharing on Robin Good’s site. The Robin Good site really functions like an aggregator of new technologies for those interested in the business of marketing and promotion. Don’t be put off by it - as we’ve said before on this site, it’s those organisations which understand and embrace new technologies who will better engage their stakeholders and prosper.

Screen-sharing allows users to share the contents of their screen with anyone else in real-time, and has interesting implications for us in the voluntary/non-profit sector in that it has the potential to make the holy grail of ‘online collaboration’ and ‘e-learning‘ that we all talk about much easier. For example, screen-sharing could make it easier for circuit riders to deliver online tech support to smal groups, guiding the end user through various steps to a solution.

If you want to read up some more on screen-sharing, check out Infoworld lead analyst and Test Center blogger in chief, Jon Udell , who recently complained about screen sharing tools being too complicated and feature-rich. His request was for new tools to do one thing only while doing it very well.

My usual coda applies:
Does anyone out there use screen-sharing? And if so, which product do you use and how useful has screen-sharing been in your work?

A quick plug for my colleagues at Lasa…

I thought it would be worth bringing the Supporting Advice in London: Review of Infrastructure Needs report to people’s attention as it contains a few lines on ICT and suggests circuit riding as possible model of ICT support.

The report was commissioned to review the support needs of organisations providing advice and guidance services - and summarises the survey responses of 103 organisations.
Just to give you a flavour of the edited highlights:

• Rated as high priority - increasing organisational infrastructure eg ICT and being able to use ICT effectively in advice giving;
• 41% said they had accessed ICT support services in the past 12 months
• 80% said they anticipated accessing ICT support services in the next 12 months
• 64% reported support needs for databases and case management software
• 53% require support with accessing computers to carry out advice work. Smaller organisations tend not to have web access to advice resources.

Once again, this is a situation we find this findings mirrored in other parts of the voluntary sector. So what are the potential solutions for (a) increasing access to ICT support services and (b) promoting new technologies that are low cost, sustainable and aid colloboration between advice agencies and the people they campaign for?

So far, the work of circuit riders has been mainly strategic - encouraging organisations to think about their ICT strategy, budget, training needs, etc - and working intensively with them to build organisational ICT capacity.

Can we see a need for a ’second generation’ circuit rider - one who works for a network of affiliated organisations and provides a combination of hands on tech support and championing/implementing new technology? And if we can champion ICT at a London-level then shouldn’t we be able to champion ICT at organisational or network level? How could this work - could network members band together and budget for their own support worker? Or are funders amenable to supporting community networks with a circuit rider? Is this the next step for community networks?
Unfortunately, I’ve got more questions than answers at this moment….Over to you.

You can download the full report: Supporting Advice in London Full Version. or the summary version: Supporting Advice in London Summary Report