CharityBlog

I included an item in this week’s VolResource email newsletter on the government’s ‘Power of Information Task Force’ before I had a chance to read the speech from minister Tom Watson. This amuses me for a number of reasons.

Firstly the effort that has gone in to giving web links to as many items in the speech as possible - so much that it is a little distracting when reading if you start following them!

Secondly this excerpt: “Take a motor industry analogy, in some ways the policy process is a bit like building a Morgan [External website] in Malvern [External website]: a handful of people taking years to create beautiful, hand-crafted model.” Apart from the fact that he then implies he wants boring mass-produced and short-lived policies to replace tailored quality, given a strong south westerly the Morgan factory is in spitting distance of VolResource towers. Pity the web link for Malvern doesn’t go my hobby site.

Despite that, the speech is worth a read. Also see the interim reports on progress on recommendations of the Power of Information review.

UPDATE: for some reason they moved the speech - link now corrected.

As pointed out in an email from Dan Macquillan of Internet Artizans, Amnesty International’s website is now running on the open source platforms of Drupal and CiviCRM.

I’ll add it to the CharityBlog link page of open source use by voluntary groups, but it’s getting such a common occurrence now that a) it would be difficult to keep track of them all and b) it’s no longer hard to find and learn from such examples.

An American volunteering website made Time Magazine’s Top 10 list (of websites, that is) for 2007. Link to Volunteer Match.

I saw some turn of year mentions of UK volunteer opportunities, but don’t think any sites got quite that level of recognition over here. Can anyone prove me wrong?

(Time top 10 courtesy of ephilanthropy.org)

It’s not just government agencies which manage to lose important data.

Kablenet reports that a laptop containing client information has been stolen from the car of an employee of Citizens Advice in Northern Ireland, with up to 60,000 client records. However, the data is protected by three levels of security, including a high level of encryption.

Please note that the kablenet site was too busy when we went to double check the link (which can disappear after a few weeks).

Charities and other voluntary organisations are to get the chance to use Ordnance Survey maps in web applications for non-commercial purposes. Technology Guardian reports:

Ordnance Survey’s OpenSpace product is a “slippy map” interface, a piece of software that allows users to place any kind of information with a geographic reference over a map displayed on the web. Maps available through the service range from the 1:1m outline of Great Britain, up to street level (1:10,000). “It provides you with all the necessary functionality to interact with a map such as panning, zooming and adding markers and polygons,” the agency says. Users will need no special knowledge of geographic information system software.

It is currently at ‘closed alpha test’ stage but should open up early 2008. OS OpenSpace.

And while we’re on human rights, a posting on judging Best Use of the Social Web by a Nonprofit comes up with some innovative uses in the field - the use of Twitter by activists to let people know whether they’ve been arrested or disappeared and “the courageous use of YouTube by award winning blogger Wael Abbas , whose videos captured the torture of victims at the hands of police”.

From internet.artizans , via Nick Booth.

Amnesty International has a “new, completely re-architected, W3C Web Content Accessibility-compliant, data protection law and privacy legislation-compliant, multi-lingual and totally open source Drupal, CiviCRM and Alfresco-based website”. That’s according to Important Projects consultancy, who had something to do with it.

Not everyone will like the bright yellow backing to headlines, but then that’s part of the brand image.

It can be fun trying to keep a track of thinking around online communities and effective ways of using the web, and then trying to work out how that relates to the voluntary sector. For instance:

On Gerry McGovern’s blog, which emphasises focusing on the customer not the organisation, Thinking Web, not website “If your product or service is being discussed in the blogosphere, you must be there, listening and contributing. Is it more important to publish your content on your website or on the websites most of your customers frequent? If your organization has particular words for describing a service, and those are not the words your customers search with, you must change your words.

“On the Web, we need to think beyond the organization. What is success? Is it that having a website? Or is it getting people to act in a certain way? It is the results of what you organize that matters, not the organization you created or where you created it.”

So does that mean that trying to create your own online communities, and then measuring activity etc, isn’t important? My short answer, as often, would be “it depends” (long answer on application and a small fee). For another aspect, try Ed Mitchell’s blog entry, Community ROI Report, where he says “Many of us are wrestling with emergent community metrics and their meaning in this time of increasingly distributed community activity.”

How do you get statistics simple enough to collect and report reliably across sites which aren’t yours? But then Facebook’s new Pages facility has a built-in ‘Insight’ section, giving some feedback on views and visitors.

A couple of international (English speaking) voluntary sector developments:

From The Malta Independent: Enactment of legislation to strengthen the voluntary sector - “The National Council of Women welcomed the Voluntary Organisations Act, passed by the House of Representatives on 24 September.” This item is rather truncated and doesn’t explain much but it appears that a Commissioner will be established and voluntary work supported.

From Scoop, New Zealand: The New Zealand Federation of Voluntary Welfare Organisations and New Zealand Council of Social Services are delighted to see that the Community & Voluntary Sector portfolio has been promoted to Cabinet level (in the government).

Does Britain need an equivalent to ProPublica, a non-profit newsroom launching early 2008? I think the States has a greater need, and we have the likes of OpenDemocracy already, but any comments?

Here’s an excerpt from Nonprofit Online News aboutProPublica:

“I’m not surprised to learn that the project is backed by some of the very same grantmakers whose vision has opened up opportunities for nonprofits and the Internet. Investigative journalism is clearly at risk and while I am intrigued by the choice of a former Wall Street Journal editor as its leader, I have a lot of hope for ProPublica. They understand exactly what role they could play in the renewal of democracy in the United States.”

ProPublica - Journalism in the Public Interest:

ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that will produce investigative journalism in the public interest. Our work will focus exclusively on truly important stories, stories with “moral force.” We will do this by producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.