London Region ICT Champion

The Google Grants UK beta programme supports organisations sharing Google’s philosophy of community service to help the world in areas such as science and technology, education, global public health, the environment, youth advocacy, and the arts.

Designed for UK registered charities, Google Grants provides free advertising on Google AdWords, to charities seeking to inform and engage their constituents online.

You can read about Google Grants’ programme details here and the FAQs here

Google Grants has previously given free AdWords advertising to charitable groups whose missions range from animal welfare to literacy, from supporting homeless children to promoting HIV education.

Applications to the Google Grants (UK) programme can be made at any time. Google says that it will “select Google Grants recipients every quarter….[and will notify applicants] within six months or less whether or not [they] will receive a Google Grant award.”

In the interests of sharing information, I’d really like to hear how others have fared with Google Grants.

• Has your organisation or community group used Google Grant?
• Can you tell me if the application process was easy?
• Were you successful? If so, what were the benefits of free Google advertising for your organisation (such as an increase in the recruitment of volunteers and sponsorship)?

It was almost a month ago that I launched the ‘Great Web Office Experiment. The aim was to discover if it was practical to stop using desktop software such as Outlook, Word and Excel and instead use only online tools to do the same jobs.

My orginal hypothesis was:
Online tools have the potential to enable organisations to more easily exploit ICT and better achieve their organisational goals. However, most of the UK voluntary sector has not yet grasped how they can use online tools to connect with their stakeholders. Online tools can be applied to everyday tasks like email, calendar, documents and spreadsheets and replace desktop applications.

You can read about the tools used in the experiement here.

Well, the results are now in and the edited highlights from experiment are:

• Online tools have the potential to free organisations from the traditional complexity of ICT decisions.
• Online tools can also help very small organisations (such as those working from Internet cafes) with basic business tasks such as email, calendar, contacts and documents.
• Organisations that grasp the opportunities of new online tools will prosper as they’ll be the ones getting their story heard by funders

However,

• Organisations can be reluctant to use ICT differently; and more examples are needed to show what can be done with online tools.
• It’s difficult to pick the right web tool for the right business task, especially when some but not all of these online tools can integrate with each other and/or synchronise with software such as Outlook.
• Sustainability - chose carefully as the sustainability of online tools is difficult to gauge, given that some of these tools could disappear from the Internet at any time. Make sure you have a disaster recovery plan.
• Security - issues around entrusting your organisations’s data to a third party like Google or Microsoft still remain to be resolved
  

Online tools have the potential to enable organisations to more easily exploit ICT and better achieve their organisational goals. However, most of the UK voluntary sector has not yet grasped how they can use online tools to connect with their stakeholders. Online tools can be applied to everyday tasks like email, calendar, documents and spreadsheets and replace desktop applications.

Part Two will concentrate on reviewing the tools I used in terms of the end user experience and suitability for voluntary sector use.

For those of you who missed it, BBC Radio 4’s ClickOn technology show talked briefly about the benefits of free and open source software for the voluntary sector (open source software, unlike proprietary or licensed software, is free of charge and users can access the ‘source code’ to alter the software to meet their specific needs and to continually improve it).

The show featured Paul Cooper from Open Advantage and Annete King from Digital Birmingham talking about the how the combination of recycled PCs together with open source software has made computing more accessible and affordable for community groups in the West Midlands.

Personally, I was interested to hear about how Digital Birmingham (an initiative set up by Birmingham City Council and BT) increases access to technology by offering community groups free recycled computers running open source software and 12 months free broadband internet from BT. One of the project partners includes: the National Open Centre.

If you or you community group are using open source software, drop me a line, I’d love to hear more about it.

I recently had the pleasure of meeting social media blogger Beth Kanter at the Circuit Rider conference in Birmingham, where we discovered a mutual interst in how to apply web 2.0 tools to the everyday tasks of non-profit organisations.

The upshot of our dialogue was an interview on Beth’s blog, which you can read about here.

It’s day 4 of my “Great Web Office Experiment” - the quest to discover how practical online tools really are for carrying out the everyday business tasks of a UK non-profit organisation.

Image: Camden Town, 8 Feb 2007 (Miles Maier)

Given global warming and the novelty value that snow now holds for us in the UK, the 3 inches of snow that fell overnight in the capital was enough to bring public transport in London temporarily to a halt, close schools and cue headlines of ‘commuter hell”.

So this is as a good a time as any for me to work from home and test the potential of my web office toolbox to get through my everyday tasks of email, calendar, bookmarking sites and writing up documents.

However, a cautionery note - whilst web 2.0 tools are great when they work, the downside is that there are still serious questions to be asked about the lack of contingency for service outtages. David Wilcox points me towards the problems that Steve Borsch has been having with his web office setup.

One of the themes of this blog has been to talk about the potential to use ICT for collaboration between voluntary sector organisations and their stakeholders.

Two new reports from NCVO’s Collorative working Unit (NCVO is a partner of the ICT Hub) expand on this and aim to inspire organisations to see collaboration as a potential solution to the issues they face.

To summarise:

ICT tools to support collaborative working

ICT tools to support collaborative working identifies key areas where ICT may help your collaboration. ICT has great potential for enabling collaboration, especially for projects which involve multiple partners over large geographical distances. It examines a variety of ICT tools, looks at the benefits and pitfalls of each and is illustrated with case studies of voluntary and community sector experience of ICT.

• Download the PDF (248kb)
• Case studies include:
  • DirectSupport: Extranet
    DirectSupport is a free guidance and mentoring service for UK online centres, focusing mainly on community and voluntary UK online centres. DirectSupport uses an extranet for web based collaboration.
  • Charity Web Forum: Email group
    Charity Web Forum is an email group set up by the Royal National Institute for the Blind to facilitate charities sharing information and knowledge about the web.
  • CAN-Online: Online database
    Community Action Network (CAN) is a UK organisation for social entrepreneurs. CAN uses an internet-based contacts database which is managed by all its staff and partners.
  • Leicestershire County Council: Content Management System
    has been building up an ICT community to help address rural isolation by providing information and services electronically. It uses a Content Management System to allow communities to manage their own information.
  • ruralnet|uk: Blogging
    is a rural regeneration charity that promotes a living and working countryside and finds new ways to help rural communities improve and strengthen their local economies. ruralnet|uk distributes its daily online digest of development news in the form of a blog.
  • ladder4learning: Wiki
    promotes learning for people and organisations in the community and voluntary in South East England. It uses a wiki to provide a regularly updated jargon buster for the voluntary and community sector.
  • VolResource: RSS feeds
    aims to provide practical resources for people involved in the voluntary sector, making use of communications technology. It uses an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed to disseminate news items for the voluntary sector.

  Collaborative working to make more effective use of ICT

  Collaborative working to make more effective use of ICT aims to inspire organisations to see collaboration as a potential solution to the ICT issues they face. The report explores areas where collaboration can offer a way of addressing ICT support needs, examines the pros and cons of each method, and introduces a range of case studies.

• Download the PDF (171kb)
• Case studies include:
  • ICT Hub
  • Community First: Herefordshire and Worcestershire Local Infrastructure Consortia Portals
  • 5 Counties Online
  • BME Complementary Learning Network
  • Ethical Property
  • Common Database – York & North Yorkshire

Two days in to the Great Web Office Experiment , and it’s been just as hard as I thought it would be to kick the Outlook habit (which I had to resort to for one email to a large distribution list). Otherwise, it’s been web 2.0 all the way for email, contacts and calendar. Other items in my web office toolbox - del.icio.us and Google RSS Reader - will get blogged later on in the experiment.

Getting started was easy enough. To synch contacts, Plaxo supplies a handy widget that installs into the Outlook toolbar. The widget is also smart enough to sniff out duplicate contacts between Outlook and your online adresss book in Plaxo. For those wanting to go the Plaxo-centric route to the web office, Plaxo’s widget will also synch your Outlook calendar, notes and tasks.

Moving from the Outlook calendar was also straight-forward and all it took was to export my Outlook calendar and upload it to my Google Calendar. I wrote here about how to import and share calendars in Google.

For two way synchronisation between Outlook and Google calendar there’s the handy SyncMyCal tool, which installs into the Outlook toolbar. The free edition offers limited synchronisation (of events 3 days before and after the current day), so we’ll see if it’s worth upgrading for the full benefits.

However, the real big-daddy is switching from Outlook email to Gmail. If there’s one thing Google doesn’t do very well it’s contacts, and that’s surprising given the way that Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Talk and Google Mobile all seamlessly integrate with each. It is possible to import contacts as a CSV file into Gmail, but Google’s contact management is rather basic. I have set up email forwarding from Outlook to Gmail, so people will now start getting emails from my alias, ictchamp@googlemail.com I hope this won’t confuse folks too much….

Document-wise, it’s also been something of an admin day, so I haven’t eally needed to work on any documents in Zoho.

However, I have needed to do some digital photo editing - resizing an image - and used the excellent PXN8 for this. So that’s my arguement for Photoshop out the window.

I’m also glad to see that the experiment has been generating interest from around the community blogosphere. David Wilcox wrote on his blog:

I think it is pretty much impossible to understand how useful or not new online tools are for your personal or organisational use without trying them. It’s another world, another language and just translating the technobabble isn’t enough. Packages may seem attractive - but you can land up with costly disappointments. You need to make the trip and explore for yourself.

Of course that takes time and quite a bit of effort, and it helps if someone else can offer insights, focus and encouragement. In short, a guide: but then, they need to have done some serious exploration first.

David also lists the “intriguing School of Everything, being developed by Paul Miller and friends”. Check out their list of tech tools .

Beth Kanter mailed me to say she’s also been meaning to go cold turkey on outlook, but is in the middle of her busiest workflow of the year and hasn’t yet made the jump:

I hope you will write about weening yourself from the comfort blanket that is outlook - I have the exact problem. I have this desire to switch from outlook to gmail, but I haven’t been able to shift my habit at or event think about how to start.

I wrote about that here:
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2006/08/inbox_reveries.html

And, Michael Stein wrote a reply, but six months later, I’m still stuck in outlook.

Aaron Levie from online storage company Box.net also wrote in to let me know that they have now integrated Zoho Writer. You can read about it on the Box.net blog.

I’m already using Box.net to store my working documents, and with one click I can now open my Box.net documents in the Zoho writer - another of the web 2.0 tools I’m playing with. This is a great example of mashing up services and delivering seriously good workflow to the end-user.

I’ll be writing more about Zoho Writer tomorrow, so as always, let me know if you’re thinking about it switching to the web office or you’re already there.

From Monday 5 February I’ll be launching the ‘Web Office” experiment a 2 week trial of web 2.0 tools.

Inspired by IT Redux’s Office 2.0 and the Dot Organize ‘Organizer’s Toolcrib’ of online tools, the aim is to find out just how easy or hard it is to apply online tools to my everyday tasks. This means no more Outlook for email and calendar, Word or Excel as I’ll be using only online tools to do the same jobs.

My own perception is that online tools have the potential to allow voluntary sector organisations to more easily exploit ICT (which many aren’t doing) and better achieve their organisational goals. However, most of the UK voluntary sector (apart from the big boys like Greenpeace, NSPCC and Oxfam) are not grasping the opportunities of online tools to connect with their stakeholders.

For me, the key is going to be showing how online tools can be applied to everyday tasks. David Wilcox and Beth Kanter have develped an excellent social media game that aims to show organisations how they might apply online tools or new media to their business. The question is are web 2.0 tools suitable for business tasks like email, calendar, documents and spreadsheets?

Paul Henderson at Ruralnet did some good work on exploring how small organisations might be trained to use and exploit online tools or new media on the I-See-T project.

My basic criteria for the Web Office that the tools must all be online, free or low cost and sustainable. I’ll be putting up a more detailed page on my web 2.0 experiment next week - this will detail why I’ve chosen the tools below and list a few alternative choices.

Web Office tools:

Address Book: Plaxo

Bookmarks: del.icio.us

Calculator: Google

Email: Gmail

Calendar: Google Calendar

Documents and Spreadsheets: Zoho

File Manager: Box.net

Images: Flickr

Personalised homepage: Google

RSS Reader: Google Reader

Are you using any of the above tools or different ones for everyday business use. If so, let me know about it.

I’ve just spent the last 2 weeks wading knee deep through the mangrove swamp that is policy and strategy writing, and it’s only now that I’ve emerged, blinking with relief into the winter sunshine of a February afternoon.

Image with kind permission from Maritess Ynclino. All rights reserved.

Before disappearing into the mangrove swamp of strategy, I’d been commissioned to write an ICT Strategy for London’s voluntary and community sector, an under-taking that threatened to make War & Peace look slim by comparison. As anybody’s who’s ever been commissioned to write a strategy document will know, what starts out as a short punchy document with calls to action can quickly get bogged down in a morass of detail, frustration, hand-wringing, sleepless nights and eventual mental breakdown. And that’s before the committee’s had a chance to get their hands on it.

During the writing of the strategy, I’ve also had some great mentoring support from Hilary Garner at Superhighways. Hilary is a seasoned campaigner when it comes to the battlefields of policy and strategy, and he immediately knew how to focus and cut the all the extraneous junk out of my document. I’d actually come to a point in the writing where I felt totally blocked - the answers were in my head, but I just couldn’t get them onto paper. Sometimes, even when you know the answers (or think you do), it needs someone else to ask the right questions to set you on your way again.
The strategy isn’t finished yet - it’s something of a work in progress. But for folks who who want to reserve their copy now, the London ICT Development Strategy is based on the LIDP and will be available from all good bookshops this June.