Technology Burner Technology Burner

A discussion with John Wagner and Isaac Holeman from Squarepeg about their vision of a world of de-siloed information that finds its way to the people who want it the most. Followed by a discussion about why there's no good reason that a 21st century start-up shouldn't create social benefit as it creates wealth.

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To paraphrase Britt Bravo, Changebloggers are people who are using online resources to raise awareness, build community and facilitate everyone's taking action to make the world a better place. Qui Diaz originally posted the 3 questions that set off the Changeblogging meme and we've reposted them below with our responses - they look easy to answer, don't they?

Well, maybe it's that we're a brother and sister writing this blog. But it took us a long time to formulate a response. I wanted very badly to be able to write "I care about human rights, I write a blog about human rights, here are three ways you can make a difference and support - you guessed it - human rights."

Just a very quick post this time to draw your attention to the latest Digital Makeover video in which Danny from SYFAB provides an update on SYFAB's progress over the last month or so.

As reported in a previous post, as a first step in working towards a more immediate and interactive online funding service, Danny from SYFAB set up the Funding News Wordpress blog.  By providing news, comment and background information that is tagged, categorised and searchable, Danny hopes to create a much more useful resource than the old system of adding funding news to the home page.  The new blog also gives service users an opportunity to comment and feedback on the content.

There are plenty of advisory organisations like South Yorkshire Funding Advice Bureau, SYFAB, whose remit is to keep their service users abreast of the latest issues in a particular area. For SYFAB it is news about in South Yorkshire, but for other organisations it could be information about equalities in London, or service provision in rural areas. Creating regular digests on these "niche" topics can be an incredibly time-consuming job involving the regular scanning of various news sources to generate content, collate it, prioritise it, and re-purpose it in the appropriate form for the reader.

There are plenty of advisory organisations like South Yorkshire Funding Advice Bureau, SYFAB, whose remit is to keep their service users abreast of the latest issues in a particular area. For SYFAB it is news about funding in South Yorkshire, but for other organisations it could be information about equalities in London, or service provision in rural areas. Creating regular digests on these "niche" topics can be an incredibly time-consuming job involving the regular scanning of various news sources to generate content, collate it, prioritise it, and re-purpose it in the appropriate form for the reader.

A slightly different post and video this time, reporting back on a fascinating meeting last week to brainstorm some ideas improve SYFAB's funding service using web based tools. It is amazing what you can come up with in a couple of hours when you get a few heads together. In William Hoyle from Charity Technology Trust, John Mell of Web 2.0 consultancy Trovus, and Simon Berry from Ruralnet there was plenty of experience of nonprofits working with the Internet.

As mentioned in an earlier post, one of the early initiatives that SYFAB adopted as part of the Digital Makeover project was to set up their website with the Google Analytics.

In the most recent video, Danny Anthrobus describes the process of setting up Analytics on their website, and picks out some of the insights that SYFAB have gained as a result. Some key findings that SYFAB have discovered are:

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Whilst SYFAB's digital makeover is moving forward, I thought I would take the opportunity to have a look at some of the ways other nonprofit organisations have found clever ways to use new technology to refine the way that they are working.

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Whilst South Yorkshire Funding Advice Bureau continue with their Digital Makeover, I though I would draw your attention to some research from nfpSynergy about charities use of the Internet. In their annual "Virtual Promise" research for 2007, I was interested to see that:

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I am happy to say that things are really starting to progress with the project. The last entry took a look at how South Yorkshire Funding Advice Bureau (SYFAB) provide funding information to their service users and how this could be improved by taking some of this information online. SYFAB are also keen to look at how they can encourage service users to provide some of their own insights to create a more "rounded" information service.

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When: Tuesday, July 8thth, 5:30pm-7:30pm
Where: Workspace (400-21 Water Street) Vancouver BC
Price: FREE!
RSVP: Facebook, Meetup

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After a few months of silence, I am back to launch an exciting new project that I hope will be of great interest to all of those nonprofits out there that are grappling the possibilities of new technologies, and perhaps struggling to seperate the digital wheat from the digital chaff. The 'Digital Makeover' project also aims to rope in social web experts, who are up for putting their considerable enthusiasm and know-how to good use in a practical context.

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Just finished a long and detailed blog post about the conference. Take a look: http://metromapper.blogspot.com/2008/06/your-mapper-netsquared-conference.html

Hallway Chat with  Meagan Hessel.