London Regional ICT Champion

Like Alice Cooper said, “school’s out for summer”, except we’re still here bringing you the not-for-profit ICT news.

Funding:

• Telecoms company Talktalk is offering £60,000-worth of technology grants to UK charities and community groups.  Not-for-profit organisations are invited to enter its second annual Innovation in the Community awards, held in collaboration with digital technology charity Citizens Online.

Government:

• The long awaited Empowerment White Paper – Communities in Control (£33.45 or 1.8MB download) was recently published.  You can read about it via the departmental Twitter and Secretary of State Hazel Blears’ blog or get the full skinny from Paul Webster.
• Over at Kablenet, a report on information recording and sharing in the criminal justice system finds that big IT projects are not necessarily the answer.

Social Enterprise
It’s an urban legend that George W. Bush allegedly said, “The problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.”  However, we can verify these stories are true…

• Research carried out by Delta Economics says that almost 1.3 million people, or 3.4 per cent of the working population, are employed in social entrepreneurship in the UK. Read more in Third Sector.
• Simon Hebditch, former chief executive of Capacitybuilders, has joined the board of social enterprise Social Firms UK.   Social Firms UK provides employment opportunities for disabled and disadvantaged people by supporting local social enterprises.  See Third Sector.

Databases

• We hear from several sources that Uniservity,  purveyors of bespoke databases to VCOs flush with ChangeUp cash, is allegedly withdrawing from the not for profit sector.
• Voluntary Action Sheffield has launched a new web based database solution specifically designed for the voluntary sector.
• Open source rival, CiviCRM is gaining some traction in the UK non-profit sector.  The CiviCRM UK usergroup recently met in Bristol.  You can find out more about CiviCRM events from their blog.

Web 2.0

• Our favourite web 2.0 gurus, Read/Write/Web, have  a great analysis of a new report from Forrester which says 63% of IT managers are now expecting social technologies to impact their business.
• More from the folks at RRW – Google has opened up Knol, its advert fueled Wikipedia competitor, to the public after announcing a private beta of the service last December.

Mobile 2.0:

• Mobile Crunch reports that WordPress has gone mobile with a free app for the iPhone
• heck out the Google Mobile blog for the latest news on their mobile products and services.
• For all you folks who can’t stand to be out of touch for more than a nano second, Windows Live Messenger is now available for Blackberry and Google Talk for the iPhone.
• A great article from Webware on why mobile analytics matter.