Australia’s major ICT companies have got behind a Government push to upgrade the technology capacity of charities and community organisations. Funded by the Department of Communications, IT and the Arts (DCITA), the project is designed to deliver a sustainable model for a National Non-Profit ICT Coalition.

 

The NNIC will target awareness the strategic benefits of ICT for non-profit organisations, with a particular focus on operational efficiency, delivering services and support, and building networks. The British government recently provided £8m to roll out the recommendations of a similar review in the UK.

 

Responsibility for managing the consultation process has been given to a consortium led by Adelaide-based non-profit Community Information Strategies Australia (CISA). Other consortium members include Monash University’s Centre for Community Networking Research (CCNR), WorkVentures Australia, the Nonprofit Roundtable, Albany Consulting and Energetica. Reference group members for the project include IBM Australia, Cisco Australia, Microsoft Australia, Non-Profit Australia, Our Community Pty Ltd and the Australian Information Industries Association (AIIA).

 

The first round of public consultations on the proposed model will be held at CISA’s Connecting Up 06 conference in Adelaide on May 1 and 2.  http://connectingup.cisa.asn.au

 

CISA CEO, Doug Jacquier, has just returned from a series of speaking engagements and research visits in the US and the UK. He says that “non-profit organisations represent around 5% of Australia’s GDP and deliver many services on behalf of governments. We are looking to encourage government and business investment in not-for-profit ICT capacity, which is common practice in other countries. This initiative is a hopeful sign that the Commonwealth Government and the corporate ICT sector have been listening to us and are prepared to look at options for helping us to help ourselves.”

 

Not-for-profit organisations, governments and businesses around Australia will be consulted during the project and overseas models for action will be looked at closely for their applicability in the Australian context. Particular interest will be shown in the UK’s ICT Hub model but models from the US, South Africa and New Zealand will be in the mix. Speakers from relevant overseas organisations have been invited by CISA to contribute their experience at the Connecting Up 06 conference.

 

We’ve got a great line-up of international speakers coming to Connecting Up 06, as well as an amazing array of Australian stories to tell. One of the ways CISA has been able to attract these high quality international speakers is through making the investment in attending relevant international conferences. In the second half of March, I’m off to the major US nonprofit technology event, NTC, operated by NTEN (their CEO, Joe Baker, will be speaking at Connecting Up) in Seattle, Washington. I’ll be leading a session on International Case Studies in Nonprofit Technology and attending an International Affinity Group meeting. Then I’m off to London to meet with a wide range of nonprofit community technology organisations and speak at the ICT Hub national conference on 29 March. I’ll tell you all about my experiences when I return or I might even find time to post when I'm on the road.

Sorry I haven't posted for a while but we've been flat out making preparations for Connecting Up 06, Australia's only truly national ICT conference focused on the community and nonprofit sectors. We've now posted the daily programs for the two days of the Conference on Day 1 and 2 and what an exciting and stimulating program it is (even if we do say so ourselves :-). A huge help has been the recent appointment of Simon Gee as our new CommunIT Project Officer and he's now hard at work learning the ropes and getting us ready for the big event. Contact him at simong@cisa.asn.au for any Conference questions you have.

In putting together a response to Jody Mahoney's tough assignment for posting on Netsquared I had to go a mixed group of both very experienced and novice bloggers for their thoughts, including Mike Seyfang, Dave Wallace , Vince Holt and Steve Gleeson. Many thanks to them but responsibility for any rough editing of their work rests with me.

 

1. What’s *really* new on the Web, as opposed to buzzwords and sound bites?

• Free (mostly), uncomplicated, no-knowledge-required, personal publishing and cross-platform distribution.
• From a technology perspective there isn’t any one thing that is new but what we are seeing is the emergence of tools (like blogs) that make it easier for people, and organisations to express themselves, and the emergence of an allied set of tools (RSS) and sites (Technorati) that allow people to subscribe to information that they would like to share.
• It is more the culture of the web that is changing, as opposed to the tools. The opportunity presented by the web for people to not only have their say but choose to listen to what they think is worth hearing becomes a significant cultural shift.
• People can use tools like weblogs (including their friends’), flickr, del.icio.us, audacity etc to publish mundane things like a thought or an idea, a picture, a link to something cool, some audio etc without knowing how to maintain a website.
• Through the magic of RSS it is possible to subscribe to many sources of content that we care about.  Things like RSS Aggregators and PodCatchers are just a very geeky beginning.  Watch how RSS Subscription tools evolve over the next few years - and pay attention to the ones that allow clever remixing of free content.  Clever web based services like Technorati, PubSub, FeedBurner are also important.

2. Which tools best embody the new opportunities from your point of view and why?

Blogs, RSS aggregators, podcatchers, tagging tools (delicious, technorati, feedster etc) on user level. AJAX, XML/RSS, OPML, Folksonomies, podcasting on tech/behind scenes/user interface level.

The first generation tools for the stuff mentioned above were important but to put the power in the hands of non-geeks things need to be simplified.  Apple have done two special things here:

iTunes 4.9 - Made the whole 'PodCatching' thing a lot easier for mere mortals (while introducing a few nasties for geeks).

iLife06 - a significant step forward in giving the power of RSS publish/subscribe to people who don't know about the first generation tools.

 

3. Who's doing the best work with the new tools (technically or in terms of social benefit or both)?

 

Technically, the list is simply too big. Those mentioned include WordPress for blogging
Three podcasters showing how to lead cultural change through audio voice are Dave Slusher, EvilGeniusChronicles, Cameron Reilly ThePodcastNetwork who is building a profitable business and creating a platform for people who want to change the world, and  Adam Curry and Ron Bloom from PodShow who have used audio to recruit a small army to create an alternative marketplace for musicians and other audio entertainers.  In online conferences, Mike Seyfang has some interesting posts. As for platforms, obviously netsquared

Socially, it’s probably too early to call but there are many initiatives with great potential.

4. What's the bad news? What are the greatest barriers preventing web-based technology from producing social change?

• Same one that existed with Web1.0 and prior - equitable access to the technology.
• Education as to its use and benefits.
• Fear of technology and change.
• Fear of real or perceived privacy problems.
• ‘Walled garden’ thinking and attitudes. Cultivation of openness and trust is required and it will come as stronger connections build in response to the desire for focused attention.

One of my great friends from Compumentor in the US that I have mentioned in a previous post, Jody Mahoney, has finally succumbed to the blog revolution and joined in the fray. Welcome her to the world at