London Regional ICT champion

The Google Grants UK beta programme supports organisations sharing Google’s philosophy of community service to help the world in areas such as science and technology, education, global public health, the environment, youth advocacy, and the arts.
Designed for UK registered charities, Google Grants provides free advertising on Google AdWords, to charities seeking to inform and [...]

It was almost a month ago that I launched the ‘Great Web Office Experiment. The aim was to discover if it was practical to stop using desktop software such as Outlook, Word and Excel and instead use only online tools to do the same jobs.
My orginal hypothesis was:
Online tools have the potential to enable [...]

Tags: Google, googleapps, thinkfree, zoho

For those of you who missed it, BBC Radio 4’s ClickOn technology show talked briefly about the benefits of free and open source software for the voluntary sector (open source software, unlike proprietary or licensed software, is free of charge and users can access the ‘source code’ to alter the software to meet their specific [...]

I recently had the pleasure of meeting social media blogger Beth Kanter at the Circuit Rider conference in Birmingham, where we discovered a mutual interst in how to apply web 2.0 tools to the everyday tasks of non-profit organisations.
The upshot of our dialogue was an interview on Beth’s blog, which you can read about here.

It’s day 4 of my “Great Web Office Experiment” – the quest to discover how practical online tools really are for carrying out the everyday business tasks of a UK non-profit organisation.
Image: Camden Town, 8 Feb 2007 (Miles Maier)
Given global warming and the novelty value that snow now holds for us in the UK, [...]

One of the themes of this blog has been to talk about the potential to use ICT for collaboration between voluntary sector organisations and their stakeholders.
Two new reports from NCVO’s Collorative working Unit (NCVO is a partner of the ICT Hub) expand on this and aim to inspire organisations to see collaboration as a potential [...]

Two days in to the Great Web Office Experiment , and it’s been just as hard as I thought it would be to kick the Outlook habit (which I had to resort to for one email to a large distribution list). Otherwise, it’s been web 2.0 all the way for email, contacts [...]

From Monday 5 February I’ll be launching the ‘Web Office” experiment a 2 week trial of web 2.0 tools.
Inspired by IT Redux’s Office 2.0 and the Dot Organize ‘Organizer’s Toolcrib’ of online tools, the aim is to find out just how easy or hard it is to apply online tools to my everyday tasks. [...]

I’ve just spent the last 2 weeks wading knee deep through the mangrove swamp that is policy and strategy writing, and it’s only now that I’ve emerged, blinking with relief into the winter sunshine of a February afternoon.

Image with kind permission from Maritess Ynclino. All rights reserved.
Before disappearing into the mangrove swamp of strategy, [...]