Felix on a slide

I've got a PC now, because my powerbook logic board is broken and not worth fixing. I've got my various work needs sorted so now I'm using Picasa to take pics off a digital camera and upload them to my Flickr site.
This is a nice pic of Felix on a slide in Devizes at the weekend - with my sister lurking in the background ready for her go.
Picasa doesn't link to Flickr so I had to use the Flikr Uploadr, built into Flock browser that I'm getting very used to.
Using Picasa to add pics to a blog seems to work very easily, as demonstrated here - almost wish I had a PC [... yeah right]

net.weight

Good day today at Brighton Uni, with Prof Flis Henwood and her team working on a Department of Health project about how ICT can help people self manage weight issues.
Started with small team meeting, getting to know the others working on the project [I'm working on the project one day a month].
Then an Advisory Group meeting with several people I know and finally a partner meeting where I ran a session using a version of the card game developed by David Wilcox and Drew Mackie at Useful Games.
I developed some new cards to fit with a health information project, which I'll post up some time.
The most popular choices seemed to be training workshops in digital health.
There was a fantastic quality and diversity of expertise in the room all day, and a great range of discussion covering every possible base and then some. The project is still at the stage where everything feels possible - I hope Flis can rein that in, gently but firmly, to create a firm foundation for the research in the next two years.

Web Accessibility workshop, 15 March 2007

Lucian Borcanescu was in town today delivering a workshop about web accessibility to 20 local web designers and others with an interest in how to design accessible websites.
Lucian is the ICT Hub Accessibility Champion for the South East and delivered workshop materials prepared by the excellent AbilityNet - the leading UK experts in accessibility and adaptive technology issues.

Sunderland wins Digital Challenge

Up to London today to hear that Sunderland has won the Government's Digital Challenge - a year-long competitive process to select the most innovative digital inclusion project.
I was a regional judge for the south east so saw the twelve entries from this region - which was won by Milton Keynes. None was outstanding but the MK one was at least fairly coherent and included some degree of voluntary sector participation.
The ten national finalists were announced last July and since then have been preparing final bids and competing for a £1million prize to take their project forward.
Don't now anything about Sunderland's bud but a local voluntary sector contact suggested it had little sector participation.
Chatted to a few people over lunch, including David WIlcox, Gary Coptitch and Pauline Baker - the latter two from team that put together the highly commended runners up project from Manchester.

Shared database projects

Ran a workshop in Guildford today for people from the south east working on shared databases for the voluntary sector. Key issues raised:
- data ownership - technical, legal and political issues
- what data to collect - inc taxonomy, mapping to other sources, reporting requirements, priorities
- sustainability - initial set up costs vs ongoing management and maintenance of data
- technical requirements - web access vs data security
- budget - software + staff time
- roles and partnership development

Two examples were reviewed:
- MERLIN - built and managed by Basingstoke Voluntary Action
- Oxnet - powered by Uniservity

Each have strengths and weaknesses but Uniservity seemed more attactive for its web capabilities and the support team available - although it is more expensive

What next?
All agreed it was helpful to comapre notes and review options. Also discussed how much different people are paying the same supplier
Next workshop could focus on specific issues and answer detailed questions

Six people attended, although nine booked. This is okay but could have been better. ICT Hub met the costs of the session, and this was thought to be a good use of funds [apporx £300 inc trainer + room costs etc]

Funding for training development

SCIP is a step closer to developing an innovative new range of training courses for community and voluntary organisations. A proposal to the Lottery's BASIS fund for an innovative partnership project has moved to Stage Two, making it one of only a small number of successful bids in a highly competitive process.
The funds will enable SCIP to work more closely with Working Together Project, also based in Brighton & Hove, which provides community development training and support to smaller community and voluntary groups in Sussex. The aim is to embed ICT into the Working Together Project's current range of courses and to pilot a series of training courses to ensure that the courses meet the neds of staff and volunteers.
A complete business plan must be submitted to get through Stage Two and, if the plan is accepted, money should be available from September 2007.
I started work on the plan today with Paul and Michelle at WTP and hope to have it ready for checking by the SSICP Board by the beginning of April - all very exciting.

Re: [BH-Issues] city wifi

[as posted to BH Issues Forum]
There is a community-based wireless project in the city. As of the beginning of this month SCIP is working on a wi-fi based project with the Friends Centre and some community groups in Tarner - the bit between Hanover and Amex in central Brighton.

The residents are keen to see how wireless can provide wider access to the internet and have set up a group called the Tarner Wireless Internet Group [TWIG]. We're currently planning point to point wireless connections between five or six community centres to start building a network, linked in to a JANET [Joint Academic Network] connection which will come into the Friends Centre in Morley Street [next to Ocean Rooms].

Some centres are considering creating a 'wi-fi cloud' around their centre to create a local access point. At least one centre [Phoenix on the old Brewery site] has had a wireless hotspot like this for several years. Enabling SCIP, Friends Centre and others to deliver training there, as well as being used by local residents with wifi enabled computers.

SCIP is working with the people who run the centres - ranging from community centres such as Phoenix on the old Brewery site to shared social spaces in older people's residential blocks. We'll help them identify their needs and then work with them to provide training and other support to make use of the connectivity.

The project also includes training delivered to local residents by Friends Centre, using these wi-fi networks - both IT training and other skills. We had some really good help from Dave Phelan at Pier to Pier when we started this process and there is now a budget to bring in cutting edge wireless technology, so I hope Roger will be getting a call at Metranet and
be bidding for that.

The Council has been supportive, particularly through the education department as various people at Tarner School are involved in TWIG - I believe they're looking at loaning laptops to local parents and linking to this project to provide internet access. I believe the Council [LEA] also had to formally agree to the offer of the JANET connection before we could
get it.

I have spoken to Bill Parslow, Head of ICT at the Council and he's supportive - indeed he already uses wireless connections in various parts of the City Council's network [Metranet I believe?]

The current project runs to March 2008 and is funded by UK Online [not sure how much but it's not £1m].

Its very early days so I'm still getting my head round the link between the various parts but it seems to me that it will produce a bottom up network, based within and controlled by community centres, which distributes access to a fast connection using localised wireless network.

That's the techie bit. What I'm keen to see is:
* how the people running the centres manage the use of wifi in their own
centres
* the type of support they need to make best use of it
* how local people use the hotspots and what barriers they face
* technical issues such as capacity and certain restrictions placed on use by Janet
* how to create a sustainable network that the Centres can afford to maintain [eg putting current connectivity spend from community centres into one pot to pay revenue costs for the network]

I hope this will serve as a demo project, showing the community, the Council and other agencies exactly what support they could provide to enable these networks to grow, especially in the absence of multi-million pound showcase funding. There is a link within the project to Hangleton & Knoll Community Project to help share lessons learned across neighbourhoods and SCIP is
linked into many different community networks to help share those lessons.

We must also remember that Brighton has an extraordinary number of free wireless hotspots in the cafes, beaches and bars around town, thanks in no small part to the vision and efforts of pier to pier and Loose Connections/Metranet. And a similarly dense cloud of paid for services in Starbucks etc.

To me the flexibility and scaleability of wireless is interesting, but I'm much more interested in what people actually use it for and how it improves the quality of their lives.

Mark

On 2/13/07, Tom Coady <tom.coady@gmail.com> wrote:
> If Norwich can do it and pier2pier.net can do it between piers I can't
> see what's stopping the council from doing this:
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5297884.stm

Health and ICT project

Spent the afternoon with Flis Henwood and Liz Guy from Brighton Uni, who are leading a project about how people use ICT to address their own issues of and weight, especially focusing on obesity.
Flis presented to various people from the Interact Lab at Sussex University - several of whom I already knew.
The presentation helped enormously - showing me the academic take on this research.
My role is to help think about the connection between the research activity and the local community, in various forms. Seeing Flis the Professor in what is, to me, a highly academic mode helped set it in context and gave me fresh insight on issues I've been associated with but have no academic connetcion with. This included Peter Day's work with SCIP on the CNA project.
Flis and Liz and I then spent the rest of the afternoon looking ahead and thinking about possible paths the project could follow. This was really interesting as a way of sketching in the known boundaries for what could be an incredibly wide-ranging project.
I hope I helped both broaden the horizon and bring some focus, mainly drawing on my work with Peter Day.

web2.0 for non profits

two really useful links:

presentation by david wilcox [SCIP founder] I'm going to see on
monday [not sure presentation works but useful site anyway]
http://socialmedia.wikispaces.com/presentation

link to a useful one pager on what every non profit needs to know
about web 2.0
http://workforcefanatic.typepad.com/bamboo_us/2006/12/

org_20what_ever.html

"get with the beat baggy"

How am I doing?

Useful day yesterday in a workshop for the course I'm doing to be a Social Enterprise Business Adviser. It covered a whole range of information about reviews - from the programme itself through to your own personal development and the quality of the services you deliver.
I'm no preparing a review process for my work, across a range of clients and different types of work. I hope this will help identify key strengths and weaknesses in my own skills and approach. It will also be a useful starter to beginning to review the work of SCIP as a whole.
One useful resource I was pointed as is 360degree review and I found a very useful free resource on the BusinessBalls website. Includes templates to download.

community.brighton revamp

www.community.brighton.co.uk is a community portal, a one stop shop
for informatiion about and resources for the community sector in
Brighton & Hove. We have some funding form theplacetobe.net to
overhaul what's there and we started in earnest on this project this
week.
We've started by sketching out what we want the site to be able to do:
- Directory of local community organisations and the services they
provide to the local community
- Local community jobs
- Community news service
- Community events diary
- Community documents library
- Funding information
- Local training directory
- Community venues guide
- Information about local community sector support services
- Advice and information about how to run a community organisation
-- Media, key people in the Council and other important contacts
-- Good practise issues: fundraising, marketing, managing volunteers,
governance, planning, finance, HR, management, office management/
administration, beneficiary involvement
The next stage is to put some flesh to these descriptions, quantify
the work needed and begin planning out the work for the next 12 weeks
or so
We would hope to several of these tools available by mid-Feb and have
a launch site ready for a City Information Network meeting we're
planning for mid-March
Along the way I hope we can involve users in the design process,
bring some llocal volunteers into help and work with partners who
could help to maintain and update relevant information within the site.
Just before then we have to work out a project management methodology
for the team [me, Peter and Luke]. This should be up and running by
the end of April [ha ha]

The wisdom of wikipedia

I'm reading the Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki which is interesting enough, but I'd suggest dipping your toe into the wikipedia version before deciding whether you want to read the whole thing.

train times mash up

was using the excellent accessible train timetable at traintimes.org just re-stumbled across the live trains map produced by mathew somerville who is linked to the lovely people at mysociety - they're responsible for faxyourmp, pledgebank and lots of other fancy mashup style community stuff.
just reminded me how much clever stuff can be done with the new era of mashup web2.0 stuff
and made me think it'd be good to get something like a showcase element in the city information network meeting I'm planning for March

games. communities, networks, participation, communities

Typically inspirational stuff at David Wilcox's blog on his UsefulGames site - which seems to be an offshoot of his work on participation, technology and community networks.
Without playing games like this yourself it may be difficult to see how transformational they can be - how they break down barriers and enable everyone to share ideas and preferences.
Contrast this with more traditional techniques for brainstorming technology projects, or carrying out community consultation and you can see how it brings benefits beyond the immediate feedback. I was lucky enough to be amongst the first users of the games that David and Drew created back in 1999 [or before?] - and have used it myself in projects in the UK and in Hungary [in Hungarian].
It helps promote an informal setting that in turn helps create bonds and links which can be the foundation of networks, whether based on existing roles or helping to broker new ties. It's also a great way of overcoming technical barriers and avoiding the dominance of the technically literate - as seen in Bristol's Digital Challenge event.
Great stuff...

What is a city information network for?

I'm setting up a City Information Network meeting in Brighton in March so I've started thinking about what it will be and how to run it.
It will be a forum for people to discuss city information resources, something like an event we ran back in 2000 - see the notes on our website. This time I think we need to include information from the whole city, not just what we called community information, ie not for profit and charitable/community/voluntary and public.
This reflects the work we've done since then on theplacetobe.net which is one of very few cross-sector bodies considering local information issues in a practical way.
This is a growing area of interest often referred to as civic knowledge management.
In the internet age this means [to me] the concerted effort required to ensure the best quality information is available for and about a local community.

Healthy communities
As an example take the health of the local community and its access to information which may help maintain or improve their health.
To get the best quality information we need the Council to collaborate with the Primary Care Trust to provide information about health and social services in the area. We want the Argus to chip in with its features on health which provide accessible advice and pointers on a range of local health issues.
Then there's a health section in ESCIS - a directory of local community information published by the Council and maintained by library staff.
And don't forget information about health services in the area on the sites of the people who provide them - dentists, doctors, alternative therapists and more - just look at the 1,350,000 results when you put brighton UK + health into Google

A forum for informaton providers
So the City Information Network could provide a local forum to address a number of issues:
-- what are the key health information resources which everyone in the city should know about?
-- what do we think of their quality?
-- how can the people providing these resources improve their information service?
-- is it possible to the improve access to and the quality of the information services by working together?
-- how can the p2b.net search engine and other shared information resources help improve the situation?

How to do Social Enterprise

I'm training to be a Business Adviser to social enterprises and spent yesterday looking at finances and funding options.
This was the best bit for me so far, on a course which I started in September and takes about 15 months to complete. It's a broad ranging business advisers course with the specific skew towards issues about social enterprise. It includes on about seven days attendance and a lot of assessed work, including reflection on actual advice sessions.
I learned about the use of capital raised from investors and sources of some unsecured loans specially set aside for social enterprises.
As ever with these days I spent a large part of the day relating this to my work in SCIP, as well as other social enterprises I'm aware of.
One of the most striking things is the idea that an organisation needs to achieve a minimum size to be sustainable - anything from at least £250k turnover to keep running and be stable, to at least £1 million to win government contracts and not be too reliant on one supplier.
We talked a lot as well about how social enterprise is a favourite third way hobby horse of Government and supported equally by the Tories. Ed Milliband and the Office of the Third Sector is a big [ideological] fan and it's seen as safer ground for public sector reform than allowing in private companies.
On a local level there's a groundswell of interest, particularly being developed through the work of Brighton & Hove Business Community Partnership.
There is a lot of useful information around about social enterprises - one of the best places to start is Social Enterprise Coalition

What is our website for?

I discussed this with Peter today because I'm trying to get to grips with updating and improving it.
It's got lots of promotional stuff about services, but almost no useful information or links to resources for our clients.
So we started talking about adding it by having a 'useful stuff' section where we list top tips and link to the excellent ICT Hub KnowledgeBase.
Here's a site that seems to have got it right
ESP Projects
It's a not for profit ICT project in the north west [of England] - nice site - built in Joomla and with lots of handy hints on it.
Oh but on another note it has no rate card - which is another thing we need to sort out on our site....