UKriders

You will remember that I’ve been keeping you up to date about the Colalife campaign to get CocaCola to distribute rehydration salts to the Third World in their cases. The campiagn, led by Simon Berry, has been made possible through web 2.0 technologies such as Facebook. I have put his RSS feed on the sidebar. If you [...]

The Tender Fund is a new Futurebuilders programme offering interest-free three year loans of between £3,000 and £50,000 to community and voluntary sector organisations who need relatively small sums of money to help them tender successfully for specific public service delivery contracts. Total Fund Value: £ 1,000,000 Grant Value - minimum: £ 3,000 Grant Value - maximum: £ 50,000 The Total Fund [...]

It’s a bit later than we’d like to put the notes out from September’s meeting……A big thank you to all of our guest speakers and riders for making this a great event to network and learn from each other.    CiviCRM - Michael Mc Andrew (Westminster CVS) Salesforce - Nicole Aebi-Moyo (BOND) How (and how not!) to run open [...]

Well, after a bizarre day of floods, snowdrifts and storms right over Ottery St Mary now is a good time for staff at COSMIC to be reviewing our emergency procedures and flexible working. Our offices were unaffected by the flooding, but we escaped the water literally by feet - the pub next door was flooded and has a massive clean-up job on its hands. 

I had already made a commitment to others to write a feature on disaster recovery, back-up procedures and how flexible working arrangements can help with business continuity … well today I have more to offer in developing that feature and its certainly risen up the ‘to do’ list!

For more news on the weather and conditions in East Devon yesterday take a look here

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/7701372.stm

      

SCIP has been down the DreamWeaver route for many years, but right now I think wordpress is the best short and medium term solution. I'm now looking at the progression route for an organisation starting without a website and would welcome views on what I'm thinking of:

1. Brand new org or never built a website before:

• wordpress hosted site to learn basics of posting stories, creating static pages, working with images, sharing tasks within a group, editorial issues, etc
• build test site to learn basics then rebuild launch site
• budget = 20 hours training + zero for website + 20 hours for group to launch site

2. Second generation site

• hosting wordpress on your own server [ie paying for hosting]
  
• want specific look and feel not available in word-press hosted themes, or functionality only available in specific widgets
• this requires some degree of expertise in managing and updating the site software, plus a decent host familiar with wordpress
  
• budget = 10 hours training + £100 pa hosting + 20 hours for group to re-launch site

3. Third generation site

• take control of the code on a self-hosted site
• buy in or learn CSS skills and other wordpress-related magic, eg to integrate site fully with a database, calendar, map, whatever
• budget = ? hours training [eg CSS] + £100 pa hosting + 40 hours for group to re-launch site

4. Moving on

• depending on the size of the organisation and its needs it may be necessary to move onto drupal, or some similar CMS, which will probably mean buying in much more expertise and support
• by this time the org should be muchy better at specifying and administering an appropriate solution, and therefore pay less and get more for their money.
• budget = ? £3k for group to pay agency

Any thoughts based on your experience?

I also wonder whether this model holds for small businesses?

At the North East voluntary and community sector awards tonight.
What makes me so proud to work in this sector is to see these people giving selflessly of themselves simply to help others.
Well done.
Details will be on the VONNE website soon.       

Thanks to Amanda Vickers at the Regional Forum for this alert: The Train to Gain Enhancement Fund is of interest to voluntary sector employers and training providers because it supports many more types of training, indeed everything that can’t be funded through the main Train to Gain programme. The estimated total Fund allocation for Yorkshire and the [...]

GRASSROOTS GRANTS - Voluntary and Community Groups can apply for a Grant of £250 to £5000 CNet has been appointed the “Local Funder” for Bradford Metropolitan District to deliver the Grassroots Grants in the area and raise Endowment Match Challenge Fund in the District for three years. These Grants are intended for small, developing and less well-resourced [...]

Source via J4BCommunity Funding Newsletter : The UK’s only telecommunications co-operative has been named the country’s best social enterprise. The Phone Co-op saw off tough competition to be judged the overall winner of the Enterprising Solutions Awards and claim a £10,000 cash prize. Now in their tenth year, the Awards are provided by the Social Enterprise Coalition in [...]

The video below, ‘Think about it’ has been created by the Digital Inclusion Team. It sets out how we can take the opportunity to use technology as a tool for improving lives and life chances or face the risk of increasing economic and social costs. This presentation is available for anyone to place on their website [...]

The Government has just released an action plan for consultation about how to bridge the digital divide.

You can access the document online at - http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/communities/deliveringdigitalinclusion

The consultation period runs from now until 19th January 2009 and so its important to make sure you get your responses back to CLG in time for them to consider them fully. 

The main issues covered in the paper are: 

• 17 million people in the UK are not using the Internet 
• there are strong links between social and digital exclusion – 75 per cent of socially excluded people are also digitally excluded 
• there are opportunities to provide more effective and better targeted services to excluded groups and communities using technology 
• considerable work is being done by government, public, private and third sectors to promote digital inclusion, but there are still gaps and opportunities 

One of the opportunities is for government leadership which provides a clear set of principles and a framework for action to ensure that all sectors are clear about their roles and how they can contribute to strategic goals. 

But what should any such principles and framework for action focus on and how should they be carried forward? 

There are proposals to 

•  introduce a Charter for Digital Inclusion creating a framework that will facilitate conversation and understanding between the various players and encourage positive cross-sector engagement on this agenda; 
• appoint a Digital Inclusion Champion who will develop, embed and promote the Charter, support the digital inclusion needs of the most disadvantaged citizens and communities, maintain a strategic oversight of the issues from the point of view of the excluded citizen and work with all sectors to identify the evidence of emerging issues and options for actions to address those issues; 
• establish an expert taskforce with representation from all sectors to support the role of the Champion; and, maintain a cross-government coordination team, to complement the work of the Champion and support the valuable and ongoing role of the Cabinet Committee 

      

There’s some great work coming out of Knowle West Media Centre in Bristol who are working on their Carbon Makeover programme. Here are a couple of the projects already underway and creating lots of interest - 

www.green-footprints.org.uk 

Working with local resident Mil Lusk, KWMC have co-conceived and created 
this website which allows local residents to order vegetable seed 
plugs (germinated seeds) online, view latest stock, learn more about 
seasonality and get active themselves by joining a ‘my back garden’ 
scheme. 

They have also created an administrative GUI (graphical user interface) 
where Mil can grow vegetable seeds on demand, dynamically monitor and 
maintain her business online; including order summaries, payment 
tracking, seasonality info and compost quantities. 

—————–

www.green-medicine.org.uk

Working with another local resident Akilah Nuru, they have created a 
website where local residents and the wider community can understand 
the medicinal qualities of plants in direct correlation to common 
ailments, share advice and narrative with each other via an 
interactive (web 2.0) forum and buy plants from Green Medicine 
(allowing Akilah to build up a small business from sale of products). 

Both of these projects have scalable elements – which can be used in 
other neighbourhoods and regions should anyone be interested? 

—————

Green Homes 

KWMC are creating a website called Green Homes where local 
residents can sign up for a free* Energy Performance Certificate 
(subject to funding), understand the connection between being more 
energy efficient and saving money lowering environmental impacts. gather information on 
potential savings, grants and other home improvements. They hope to report 
something on this project soon.

For further information from KWMC and for contact details please visit -www.kwmc.org.uk

      

Grassroots Grants is a grants scheme aimed at supporting voluntary and community sector organisations. So if your group is looking for a small pot of funding (up to £5,000) then Grassroots Grants could be ideal for your group. The grants are intended to benefit your local community so you can apply for a whole range of [...]

A new high-profile Digital Champion will help promote the Government’s Digital Inclusion agenda, the Minister for Digital Inclusion Paul Murphy announced yesterday , Friday, 24 October 2008. The creation of an independent Digital Champion is one of the key proposals to achieve greater digital inclusion included within the new cross-Government report ‘Delivering Digital Inclusion: An Action [...]

I'm planning a training course to help a community association learn how to build and run its own website. And I'm using a hosted Wordpress.com site as the platform for this training, as opposed to other possible solutions, suich as self-hosted Wordpress, Typepad, blogger, drupal, joomla, build your own in dreamweaver, etc. But why Wordpress?

After years if patiently explaining ftp to people who didn't want to know about ftp I'm hoping that choosing a theme and agreeing what pages to have on their site will be more useful, engaging and fruitful to most people than having to work through the back end techie bits or get to grips with html. It seems an ideal way of helping people understand the process from the front end side of things, like what it looks like and what it has on it, with more time to explain some of how it works and play with the CMS-style administration interface.

I run a wordpress-hosted site as ICT Champion, having previously used blogger for some time. I should say that I've also set up a self-hosted WP site and I did it in about an hour but that included 45 minutes finding and configuring an ftp client. Then I spent a lot of time downloading themes and widgets and wotsits and fixes and then uploading them and installing them and remembering passwords and whatever else. Then the latest version was released and I had to carefully back everything up, save everything in then right place and reinstall blah blah

Simple enough stuff to be sure, and offering a great deal of flexibility and control which I may well need at some time in the future, but I can't I can't tell you how much happier I am since I started using a wordpress-hosted site and working within its limitations.

The trickiest techie bits were working out how to have the blog entries appear on a page with a menu tab [by no means intuitive to me but actually just a couple of menu items in different parts of the system] and fruitlessly seeking ways of embedding javascripted stuff like google maps.

Aside from posting I now spend most of my time thinking about categories, which I realise need to drive my navigation much more than the page structure, and re-categorising old stories as I fiddle with my categories. [On which point Blogger has a much easier way of retro-categorising batches of stories than wordpress, which requires you to do one at a time.]

I can also look at promotion and content and editorial issues with a much clearer eye than when I used dreamweaver, when I seemed to spend a lot of time tidying up folders and playing with plugins etc.

By the way I have used Typepad, and I liked it, but it costs, which Wordpress doesn't, so it feels like a safer option for first timers. And I also tried blogger and it doesn't support static pages, so I think it's less interesting to people who want a website, not a blog.

And so I favour Wordpress, both as a nursery slope for people new to building a website, but also because it's probably good enough for most organisation's relatively modest needs.

And in case anyone needs evidence of people's modest needs I leave you with a link to a site which has been used to create a web site/presence by more community organisations than any other in our area - perhaps five times more than we have worked with ten years:
http://www.communigate.co.uk/sussex/viewgroup.phtml?group=3

This is a layer in the internet's geology which is technically outdated but remains a useful reminder of just what people in community organisations want to do on the internet and where they have to start if they're ever going to do it.

More soon on this as I start preparing the notes...

I'm planning some workshops for a local community group that wants a website. Rather than selling them a website they've asked for some training in how to build and run their own. Now we have to work out what to teach them. Here's an update on progress.

I'm working with Libby Davy for the first time - a local social media person who crossed my path in various ways and seemed like a good choice when the person I've worked with before on web design sessions said she was a bit too busy. Turns out she's a great choice: we're both full of ideas, and have complimentary skills and experience, so it's been a very creative and enjoyable early process.

We'll be working with a neighbourhood group in Brighton - a resident's association with no staff, supported by a community development worker who has been the link to SCIP until now. They have a Council grant to fund this - £1000 - and we'll be working in a swanky new library building on an estate on the edge of town [which shall remain nameless as I'm not working with them yet].

Now Libby and I are planning the sessions in detail, as we have the beginnings of a timetable, with two sessions planned in November to be followed by four or five sessions in Jan/Feb/March. Yesterday we had a great time mapping out topics we want to cover, so here's my version of what we've got in our long list [in no particular order]:

• how to use wordpress.com [our chosen software solution]
• passwords, permissions, getting a webmail account
  
• storytelling skills
  
• teamwork/working with others/collaborative skills
• getting to know the internet - trends, demystifying, searching, etc
• why do it? how can a website help a community association
• roles and responsibilities of a community web site team
• planning: aims, milestones, processes, resources
• planning your site: what it has on it - page structure
• planning your site: what it looks like - pictures, colours, fonts, logos
  
• promoting your site
• working with pictures
• working with sound
• a guided tour of someone else's community website and how they run it
  
• working with video
• building links with others/community networking
• how to get other people involved
  

I've got some really good stuff via the UK Circuit Riders email discussion forum and another regional ICT Champ who has run wordpress training, but none of it encompasses such as broad set of training outcomes. So Libby and I need to work out how to teach that lot in six two hour sessions and we're now working on lesson plans, course outline and handouts.

More soon.

Yesterday I went along to the meeting of the Funders Forum hosted by the Funding South West group meeting and presented to those present a paper outlining how funders can improve their investment in ICT for organisations including ideas about how they could adopt good practice in supporting organisations prior to bids being submitted. 

As a result of the meeting I am now working on a factsheet which can be circulated around by funders (and infrastructure organisations) about the good practices for developing ICT budgets and what to include in your bids. I will post a copy here once its ready too. 

Also at this meeting was a demonstration of the new resources being promoted by CIB South West (Charities Information Bureau) - its funding database and an associated bulletin (George) which organisations in the South West can subscribe to for regular and updated information about sources of funding. I will be regularly providing them with information about ICT funding.

      

Your Regional Champion is working with a number of lead organisations in the area to develop and run a number of workshops which aim to provide extra training and support for development workers and their understanding of ICT. The workshop will include information and activities about using the internet effectively with groups, fundraising online, web 2.0, training needs, and ICT Health Checks. 

If you are a development worker or you employ someone in this role for your organisation then please get in touch to find out more about these workshops and when they are running. 

Call on 01404 813226

or email julie@cosmic.org.uk

      

Well, here’s the view from the BBC on how things are developing at the moment - interested in views from elsewhere….

www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2008/10/is_blogging_dead.html

      

A new draft version of the Regional ICT Strategy has now been developed and is currently in circulation with the lead organisations at sub-regional level so that they can review the document and its strategic objectives, ahead of full consideration by the regional partnership later this year and early in 2009. Anyone with a key interest in the strategy and its development please do get in touch!