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.

October 15th is ‘Blog Action Day‘, aiming “to get everyone talking towards a better future”, posting on the environment. Well, one day of talking isn’t going to crack the range of environmental issues we face but our blogpool, bringing together feeds from a variety of charity blogs , does feature a fair few with a slant in that direction and is around for more than a day.

In passing, increasingly Facebook has a range of issue groups with a presence on the social network. Whether it is any easier to keep up with development in areas you are interested in is dubious, but I guess having them in one spot could help.

It may not be news to some of you but I am pleased to tell you you that the CSE from Google works well and is easy to set up with no ads on Google for a charity. This existed previously and was changed without letting the user know. So I had the search for non-profit organizations still running with the old settings and wrong links to the site. I also had no way of changing anything! It had taken so long to Google to notice that they were offering this to US non-profit only. I was worried to change the search (what is not broken…) but the improvement is that you can design your own result page!

I am pleased to show this to you:

1. search for “rehabilitation” on MS Research search page
2. see the results page.

I said it was simple to use but it took a while for the penny to drop as you need to write the url of the results page in the search page code.

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.