Community First has also been in the market for a regional ICT Champion - they should be announcing the new West Midlands Regional Champion towards the end of August.
Databases
Uniservity is bailing out from the voluntary sector, leaving many CVS clients who spent their ChangeUp money on its databases in the lurch. The company has told its voluntary sector clients that it will continue to support its Uni-COMMA and “Phoenix” platforms for the duration of existing customer contracts only. There will also be no major new upgrades or significant new functionality. Uniservity says it will instead focus on meeting increased demand from the educational sector.
Drupal is a powerful free and open source content management system with a growing user-base in the UK non-profit sector. If you are a Drupal developer or user check out illuminate iCT’s upcoming Drupal conference on 20 August.
CiviCRM - another free and open source content management system aimed at non-profits - has a lively UK community of developers and users. Read their blog for more on CiviCRM network events around the UK.
Another blow for e-democracy: ICELE, the government sponsored owner and operator of the VOICE community web platform is scheduled for closure by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG). As well as VOICE, ICELE has a number of useful tools for consultation, blogging, webcasting and online surgeries. DCLG is currently reviewing its options before making a decision about VOICE. Connecting Bristol has a great discussion thread on the subject and you can read Parmjit Dhanda, DCLG Minister’s Parliamentary statement at They Work for You and Hansard.
Since 2002 IT4Communities’ fantastic volunteers have delivered over £3 million worth of help to charities, community groups and other voluntary organisations. Read about it in their latest newsletter .
Telecoms company Talktalk is offering £60,000-worth of technology grants to UK charities and community groups. Not-for-profit organisations are invited to enter its second annual Innovation in the Community awards, held in collaboration with digital technology charity Citizens Online.
Government:
The long awaited Empowerment White Paper - Communities in Control (£33.45 or 1.8MB download) was recently published. You can read about it via the departmental Twitter and Secretary of State Hazel Blears’ blog or get the full skinny from Paul Webster.
Social Enterprise
It’s an urban legend that George W. Bush allegedly said, “The problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.” However, we can verify these stories are true…
Research carried out by Delta Economics says that almost 1.3 million people, or 3.4 per cent of the working population, are employed in social entrepreneurship in the UK. Read more in Third Sector.
Simon Hebditch, former chief executive of Capacitybuilders, has joined the board of social enterprise Social Firms UK. Social Firms UK provides employment opportunities for disabled and disadvantaged people by supporting local social enterprises. See Third Sector.
Databases
We hear from several sources that Uniservity, purveyors of bespoke databases to VCOs flush with ChangeUp cash, is allegedly withdrawing from the not for profit sector.
Open source rival, CiviCRM is gaining some traction in the UK non-profit sector. The CiviCRM UK usergroup recently met in Bristol. You can find out more about CiviCRM events from their blog.
Web 2.0
Our favourite web 2.0 gurus, Read/Write/Web, have a great analysis of a new report from Forrester which says 63% of IT managers are now expecting social technologies to impact their business.
More from the folks at RRW - Google has opened upKnol, its advert fueled Wikipedia competitor, to the public after announcing a private beta of the service last December.
Mobile 2.0:
Mobile Crunch reports that Wordpress has gone mobile with a free app for the iPhone
heck out the Google Mobile blog for the latest news on their mobile products and services.
What should have been an important chance for the non-profit sector to influence the local agenda and how Capacity Builders prioritises its meagre resources instead became an exercise in apathy.
Earlier this week we were at a major Capacity Builders’ consultation event in a south London borough - to facilitate the ICT strand - and were met with the sight of rows of empty chairs a grand meeting room echoing to the sound of apathy. Over 50 organisations had committed to attend, but around 20 actually turned up, their ranks swelled by event organisers, liggers and facilitators.
The few hardy souls who turned out made a reasonable attempt to look consulted before engaging with a buffet intended for three times as many people. We witnessed one old boy make 6 visits to the buffet before he retired with a glazed look of satisfaction. Who said there’s no such thing as a free lunch, these days?
So what is it with the non-profit sector:
Does the ChangeUp/Capacity Builders agenda leave non-profits disaffected and why?
Are non-profits tired of consultation, however meaningful it might be?
Or was it just a nice day and people fancied doing something else?
Either way, the irony of an apathetic non-profit sector in a hall dedicated to the memeory of Ernest Benn (uncle of Tony) - a tireless worker for the “good of others” according to the plaque on the wall - was not lost.
Ernest Benn is famously quoted for defining politics as “the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.”
And in an almost empty hall, what better metaphor could there be for the Capacity Builders project?
How time flies, time for the edited ICT highlights from the last week or so.
Web 2.0
Lingro is a new collaborative dictionary and translation service that combines open dictionaries on the web with user contributions under a CreativeCommons license.
Need to dynamically generate charts in web pages? The Google Charts API will let you do it.
Mobile 2.0
With mobile phone global sales past the 3 billion mark, Infoworld reports on the hidden environmental costs of mobile phones.
You can make it up. Last year, 5 out of 10 of Japan’s best selling novels were originally composed on mobile phones, and now craze is breaking here with Quillpill.
Mippin is a service delivering web content “perfectly formatted” to your mobile phone
British democracy is alive and well and The Right Honourable the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Parliament have launched their own Youtube channel to prove it.
IT over-spend shocker: According to Kablenet, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s telecommunications network and its Future Firecrest infrastructure work have produced a £61m net overrun on the department’s IT projects.
Lost data shocker: Another one from Kablenet. Six laptops containing personal data on 20,000 patients have been stolen from St George’s Hospital in south-west London, the hospital’s parent trust has revealed
The LIDP:08 describes the ChangeUp vision for London over the next 3 years along with action plans for thematic areas such as ICT, Advice, Olympics, Premises, etc.
The plan for ICT envisages:
2008-11
London Region ICT Champion project to take forward ICT actions identified in the LIDP:08 and the London ICT strategy;
To develop the ‘Circuit Rider’ mobile ICT support project locally;
To increase the professional development of Circuit Riders and help meet demand;
To support the network of London circuit riders and others providing the sector with technical support;
To lobby funders to recognise the total cost of ICT, as a legitimate expense that brings real benefits to VCOs and their stakeholders.
This is an ambitious list that comes without any funding attached from the LRC - the body which manages ChangeUp in London. However, we do have NAVCA’s regional ICT Champion project - funded at a national not regional level by Capacity Builders - which proposes more generic support, such as sign-posting sources of information.
We’re yet to see how the LIDP:08 plays with NAVCA’s regional champion project, so watch this space.
Disclosure: The author is the London Regional ICT Champion - a national support service project funded by Capacity Builders and managed by NAVCA.
Another round-up of ICT news that you couldn’t possibly live without…
Organise that meeting:
Organising meetings can be a real pain. Fortunately, there are several web-based services out there that let you create an event, manage invitations and even take payment. Mobaganda - based on Google App Engine - is the latest. It creates a custom web page for your event, sends out emails and lets you keep track of RSVPs in Google Reader.
Folks are also starting to use the very elegant and simple Doodle to organise meetings. We’ve used Eventbrite to organise meetings, which is also capable of taking ticket payments.
Mobile 2.0:
With spiralling travel costs, it’s no wonder that video conferencing was ranked the third hottest business technology in a 2007 survey. Check out WM Net’s guide here. Video-conferencing need not be expensive - check out Skype’s guide to free video-conference calls.
A great story over at MobileActive about the Community Voice Mail (CVM) program which has provided a lifeline to 40,000 people a year across the U.S.
Web developers take note - mobile web is the new platform you should be designing for. Mobile guru Dan Appelquist blogs about W3C’s new mobile web training courses.
More from MobileActive - read how children in India are learning about sex education through “edutainment” mobile phone games that are designed to provide entertainment and be educational at the same time.
Web 2.0 and Social Networking:
Read how our old friend Jason King has been busy building a Google Custom Search Engine for Dublin’s Ana Liffey Drug Project. The custom designed search engine helps people find reliable information on the web about addiction-related issues.
Head over to Techcrunch to catch an interview with Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg at the D6 conference.
Google Earth hits the web browser. Website developers are now able to embed 3D maps, powered by a special Google Earth Browser Plugin that end users must install. Unfortunately, it’s only available for Internet Explorer and Firefox users on Windows.
And finally:
You can catch podcasts of the Regional Champs. Julie Harris does that wonderful husky-voiced thing, Paul Ruskin gives his top tips for using ICT, and yours truly coughs up quote on telephony.
Blame it on the early May Bank Holiday, but we’re back after a break with another round-up of ICT news for you to check out.
Web 2.0 and social networking:
Last week it was Facebook and MySpace, this week it’s Google with Friend Connect. Google reckons 99% of web sites are not socially networked and Friend Connect enables any website owner to add a snippet of code to their site and get social features up and running right away without any complicated programming. More on Friend Connect here.
Interested in creating your own social networking applications? Check out Google’s Open Social
Legal:
Don’t leave your laptop in the pub - the Government has made “reckless data loss” a civil offence, it says here.
Mobile working:
Check your tariff - according to Channel 4’s Dispatches, the cost of texting for UK punters is at least four times more expensive than transmitting data from Nasa’s Hubble telescope. See here.
Vodaphone is extending its high speed mobile broadband network to Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Reading by the Autumn, it says here.
Time to start using IT in a more environmentally friendly way - check out IBM’s Green Hub.
Hardware:
Good news - Microsoft is cutting the cost of putting Windows XP on low cost laptops, here.
Software:
Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Office 2008 for Mac, designed to add stability, security, and performance enhancements to the suite of office applications. More at Macworld.
More good news - Mars may be poised to resurrect the Marathon chocolate bar 18 years after it was Americanised to Snickers.
Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect has admitted that the PC’s reign at the centre of the digital home and office is over. According to PC Pro, here.
Security:
A new version of AVG’s free antivirus package- AVG Antivirus Free Edition 8.0 - is available for download. Check out a review here.
Telephony:
Many of us have at least 3 personal phone numbers - mobile, home and office. Now launched as a limited beta service, Google GrandCentral promises to give you - free, for life - one phone number that will bind all your existing numbers together. The potential for home-workers and remote workers could be great - but then again Google and its laissez-faire attitude to privacy strikes again.
Silicon reports on the iPhone effect and how it compares against Google’s upcoming effort
We all use many collaboration tools for work and home - blogs, wikis, calendars, photo sharing, tagging, etc - and now Groups has created a service that lets you run all of your group’s collaboration tools from one Grou.ps domain using a single login. More here.
BT and NetSuite have joined forces to bring web-based on-demand software to BT’s 1.6 million business customers. Sugar CRM - a web based customer relationship management tool - will follow soon. More here.
One question is whether you trust BT to manage your data, which leads us nicely to…
Security:
According to ZD Net, the UK is nearing 100 reported data losses since last November’s blow out by HMRC, with the public sector accounting for over 60 losses. The ICO says this rate of data loss is “no worse than usual”.
Sites such as Facebook and YouTube are amongst the least trusted websites in the UK, with each brand only trusted by 12% of the population, it says here.
Privacy disaster at Twitter - one user gets her private tweets aired in public, it reports here.
Over half of UK workers have sent emails to the wrong people according to a new poll by Sendmail, with one in five office workers sending up to three emails to the wrong people everyday.
Worried about IT security? You should be - research conducted by the US Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert) estimates that almost 40 percent of IT security breaches are perpetrated by people inside the company.
According to an article in the Financial Times, Google has reneged on a commitment to improve the way it manages consumer data in light of its DoubleClick acquisition.
O2 is the latest UK operator to launch a mobile broadband package. The fees are astronomical. Close your eyes or look here if you can stand it.
BT Business Total broadband punters can now set up their own wireless hotspots. Should you wish, this means subscribers to BT Openzone, BT Fon and other roaming packages will be able to join your hotspot.
Skype has launched a series of new “unlimited” call plans, allowing customers to call UK landlines for only £2.25 a month. See here.
Legal:
The folks at Pinsent-Masons report on a French court that has punished web publishers because of snippets of text that appeared on their sites via an RSS reader.
Events:
27-28 May, San Jose, USA: We’d love to be there as this year’s Net Squared conference will feature a Mash-up challenge
You can read about the UK’s very own mash-ups at the recent Social Innovation Camp here, and the innovation winners, Rate Your Prison here.
The ICT Champion’s mission is to support not-for-profit organisations to understand and use technology to better achieve their goal of delivering high quality services for all.
