Back from a blogging hiatus

First off I must apologise for disappearing over the past week or so. What with starting a new role being spread very thin across a bunch of responsibilities, and watching my cousin lose a struggle with meningitis, I've been very distracted. Keep meaning to write something but external events have got in the way.

All under control now, so I'm back and here we go again :) Only a week and a half to go before Thailand. I've still got to figure out whether I need shots. My passport needs updating and I haven't yet planned what I'm doing in the two weeks around the summit. Brilliant organisation eh?? Help!

Anyway to all of you, I hope all's well wherever you are and life is treating you gently.

To my cousin Arif, thanks for being there when I needed you. It was an honour knowing you and you won't ever be forgotten. Rest in peace.

Arif Tayabali 1946 - 2008

The Big Green Challenge

Bit of a late heads up, but in case you're interested, the Big Green Challenge is a £1 million prize fund designed to encourage and reward people working together to develop and implement new approaches that will lead towards a 60% reduction of CO2 emissions in their community – which can be local, regional or more widely dispersed.

Anyway, a quick note to let you know that the deadline for the Big Green Challenge from NESTA has been extended to 11.59pm on Monday 3 March. That gives everyone an extra three days of thinking time!

You can find out everything you need to know about the Big Green Challenge and start your application at http://www.biggreenchallenge.org.uk/

More info from Joanna Tidball at http://www.joannatidball.com/

New Category - Social Collaboration Sites!

The Urban Survival Project or iVoluntr.org as I see it won't just be a social network, but a space for social collaboration too. Cyber volunteering in sense. An ability to do something useful online with or for other people.

 In light of that I've been looking for websites that have been specifically created to allow people to set up or do socially useful things. Again the idea being to see if they really do what we want to do, and how we're going to learn from them or differentiate.

Anyway, here's my list so far. Thanks to Jamie Thomas from the Red Foundation for highlighting some of the sites below

• Good2Gether
• Horsesmouth
• Junction49
• Support A Crazy Idea
• Unltdworld
• V2V - Global Volunteer Network
• Donorschoose.org
• Celsias

It's very hard to search for sites like these because there's no easy way to categorise or create search terms for them. So, the million dollar question... Do you know of any other useful social websites to help build this list?

Factors in comparing volunteering websites

In case you're wondering why it's taking so long for me to get this volunteering research sorted, here's a quick look at the comparison factors I'm looking at. I've essentially imagined a hypothetical generic social networking site for volunteers and then used the feature set it might contain to create a comparison grid. At the end of it we should be able to see how close existing services come to what we're thinking of. If I can find even one organisation or site that is a high match I'll accept that maybe there isn't really any gap to fill.

 Apart from the generic user experience, complexity and content review I'm looking at 4 specific areas for comparison. These are social networking, cyber-volunteering (ability to do useful things online), impact and technology.

Social Networking:

• Social graph recreation
• Invite friends using email contacts or export from social networks
• Facebook application / synchronisation
• Synchronisation with Other Social Networks
  
• Synchronisation with twitter, tumblr etc

• Aggregate content from other external profiles - plaxo pulse
• Personal profiles
• Skills profiles
• Auto-Create profile from social networks
• Organisation profiles / pages
• Post messages on profile

• Status updates
• Network feeds
• Network friend updates feed / stream
• Opportunity updates feed / stream
• Customise/filter volunteering opportunities
• Track & Manage volunteering opportunities

• Interpersonal communication - email within site, IM within site, message boards
• Post photos, notes, video, presentations, papers, research
• User blogs
• Share with friends
• Wiki based information sharing

Usefulness:

• Cyber Volunteering capability
• Question & Answer capability
• Collaboration capability
• Edit documents/content directly through site
• User credit / reward system
• Create and manage multi-user project pages
• Raise funds for causes

Impact:

• Memorability
• User-centric design
• Organisational Blog
• Tone of copy

Technology

• Faceted and saved search
• Notifications by email and RSS
• Rich Media - Streaming, Videocast, Audiocast
• Customise/filter volunteering opportunities
• Open APIs
• Developer applications
• Compatibility with open standards
• Mobile compatibility

Can you think of anything else a social networking site for volunteers should offer users? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Urban Survival Project on Web TV!

Breaking news! Nope not about Valentine's day, although hope yours went well wherever you are; and yes mine was way nicer than expected :)

Anyway, Smarta have just released a short videocast on their website about the Ogunte Women's Social Leadership Awards, which I went along to last week. What I also should've mentioned in my previous post on it is that I got interviewed on camera for the first time ever while I was there, and thanks to Meriem who did all the questions prep, organising interviewees, and editing etc, I managed to squeeze in a mention about the Urban Survival Project. Ok, have to admit I probably sound embarrassing and very rushed, but well it's all a bit new! Check it out below; about 4 minutes in...

Factors in comparing volunteering websites

In case you're wondering why it's taking so long for me to get this volunteering research sorted, here's a quick look at the comparison factors I'm looking at. I've essentially imagined a hypothetical generic social networking site for volunteers and then used the feature set it might contain to create a comparison grid. At the end of it we should be able to see how close existing services come to what we're thinking of. If I can find even one organisation or site that is a high match I'll accept that maybe there isn't really any gap to fill.

Apart from the generic user experience, complexity and content review I'm looking at 4 specific areas for comparison. These are social networking, cyber-volunteering (ability to do useful things online), impact and technology.

Social Networking:

• Social graph recreation
• Invite friends using email contacts or export from social networks
• Facebook application / synchronisation
• Synchronisation with Other Social Networks
  
• Synchronisation with twitter, tumblr etc

• Aggregate content from other external profiles - plaxo pulse
• Personal profiles
• Skills profiles
• Auto-Create profile from social networks
• Organisation profiles / pages
• Post messages on profile

• Status updates
• Network feeds
• Network friend updates feed / stream
• Opportunity updates feed / stream
• Customise/filter volunteering opportunities
• Track & Manage volunteering opportunities

• Interpersonal communication - email within site, IM within site, message boards
• Post photos, notes, video, presentations, papers, research
• User blogs
• Share with friends
• Wiki based information sharing

Usefulness:

• Cyber Volunteering capability
• Question & Answer capability
• Collaboration capability
• Edit documents/content directly through site
• User credit / reward system
• Create and manage multi-user project pages
• Raise funds for causes

Impact:

• Memorability
• User-centric design
• Organisational Blog
• Tone of copy

Technology

• Faceted and saved search
• Notifications by email and RSS
• Rich Media - Streaming, Videocast, Audiocast
• Customise/filter volunteering opportunities
• Open APIs
• Developer applications
• Compatibility with open standards
• Mobile compatibility

Can you think of anything else a social networking site for volunteers should offer users? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

5 brilliant Google applications you really should be using

I don't know about you, but I'm a big Google fan. In case you hadn't noticed that Google isn't just a search engine any more, here's a heads-up on some of their other applications you really should know about for 5 simple reasons:

1. They are free
2. They are extremely useful
3. They are all very easy to use
4. They are accessible from anywhere over the internet
5. You just need one log-in to access them all

So here are my 5 top Google recommendations

1. Googlemail - Goodbye hotmail. Get a gmail account and all the other google applications are immediately available to you.
2. iGoogle - See everything you do on the web on the same page, including all your google applications, hotmail and facebook. Just click on 'add stuff' and search for the widget.
3. Google Notebook - Does what it says on the tin. Really easy to use and autosaves anything you type on the fly. Great for managing your thoughts, notes, browsing clips, blog posts etc.
4. Google Reader - This is the best RSS reader out there. Find any content you want to subscribe to and it allows you to categorise it, tag it, share it and reuse it.
5. Blogger - If you're thinking of blogging, then Blogger is definitely worth considering simply because of the variety of things you can do with it without any technical knowledge.

If you blog, other applications worth knowing about are Google Adwords, Google Adsense, Google Analytics, and Feedburner.

What's your favourite Google application? Is there another Google App you think should be in my top 5?