The time has come to announce the 100-strong shortlist of UK groups competing to earn a share of the million-pound Big Green Challenge prize fund.

The big green ideas shortlisted range from a ‘Carbon Watchers’ club to monitor CO2 emissions in Yorkshire and a Sussex prison’s bio-fuels production scheme, to the creation of a volunteer workforce in the West Midlands to help local people take energy-efficient measures in their homes and a virtual farmer’s market in Bristol.

You can find out more about the selected groups on the Big Green Challenge website. Hopefully you’ll find an idea among the shortlist that you could build on, or a nearby group to cheer on!

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.

The Big Green Challenge from NESTA is a £1 million prize fund that challenges people to work together to develop and implement new approaches that will lead towards a 60% reduction of carbon emissions in their communities.

The Big Green Challenge is only open to not-for-profit groups. Examples of eligible groups include community co-operatives or clubs, charities, voluntary groups, parish councils and larger not-for-profit organisations. The ten finalists, once selected, will have a year to show that they can turn their ideas into action, and the winner will be announced in late 2009.

Find out all you need to know at www.biggreenchallenge.org.uk

Entries for the first stage of applications must be in by 29 February 2008. Are you up to the challenge?

VOLUNTEERS URGENTLY REQUIRED
FOR A COLLECTION in AID of the MS RESEARCH CHARITY
at THE MALL CRIBBS CAUSEWAY near Bristol
on FRIDAY 18^TH and SATURDAY 19^TH JANUARY 2008

The collections will take place all day on both of these days, and if you are able to help for a couple of hours, please contact:

BRIAN PAGINGTON
on Tel: Home 01454 320141
Tel: Mobile 07776 341 601
Please forward this request to anyone you know who might be able to help with these collections.
Thank You

Last week I have published a new design for the MS Research charity website. It is using a free template from D. Carter who gives away some of his designs on his own site or with others on the Open Source Design. I provide the work free and I have been a volunteer for many years. At the same time, things are changing at the MS Research and Resources Unit and a new volunteer is writing a newsletter which will give no doubt some details about the Project on Fatigue started last month…Then there will be another round of updates.

Two thousand spam comments caught by the Akismet spam filter since we started using it on CharityBlog 3 months ago. That’s an average of around 20 a day. If any real comments got trapped by mistake, apologies, but we do review the whole *** lot.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has launched his own book, ‘Britain’s Everyday Heroes: The Making of the Good Society’, which tells the stories of 33 individuals whose commitment to a cause or campaign has inspired him. East London charity Community Links helped with the book and will receive the royalties. And apparently VolResource is recommended in the resources section.

We’ll add a link to the book on Amazon - it’s discounted by a few quid.

The social networking site Facebook appears to be flavour of the month (see today’s Networker article in The Observer for instance). However, it also has some possibilities.

I was prompted to join by David Wilcox (Designing for Civil Society) and have located a number of relevant groups with a presence. They’re not all bursting with activity, yet, but with Facebook’s origin in higher education there’s a range of student volunteering groups for instance which could make future developments interesting.

Not exactly the first way to get campaigning groups together online (e.g. see BBC’s Action Network) but perhaps once which could attract more than the usual suspects. We’ll be updating the VolResource campaigning resources page soon!

OK, now to check if the ‘Share with Facebook’ button works (only active on CharityBlog’s author pages at present).

Some changes on CharityBlog.

While upgrading to the most recent version of WordPress, we took advantage of its new easy export/import feature to amalgamate OpenCharityBlog with this one. We’ve copied over the log-ins for those registered there, as well as the posts and comments. (The import mis-matched authors to posts, but we hope that’s now sorted.)

Looks like the OCB links didn’t make it across - next thing to do then.

Note: We may not have updated all references to OCB yet!

I am trying to get feedback on A-boards and other street furniture - what do people think about these? My organisation is keen to start a campaign to highlight the problems disabled people face when dealing with street furniture. It’s been very difficult to get our clients to comment so I thought people on this site might have some comments instead.

The campaign would focus on disabled people mainly but obviously other people would benefit too: people who use walking sticks and frames, people with prams/ buggies, people with dogs - the list is endless.

We are based in Richmond upon Thames in London, so feedback from this area would be really useful but all comments are welcome.