London Circuit Rider Network

As part of Lasa's London Region ICT Infrastructure project, Lasa is organising quarterly meetings for Circuit Riders, accidental techies and all those who support the ICT of voluntary sector organisations in London.

The last meeting took place on 9 December 2008 at the St Alban Centre with presentations and doscussion on Google mapping, VOIP, Moodle and Circuit Rider training - notes from the meeting will be here shortly.

Contact Miles Maier at Lasa mmaier@lasa.org.uk if you require more information and to find out when future meetings are scheduled.

Meeting 24 September 2008 at Community Action Southwark, Elephant and Castle

Network Meeting, 24  September, Community Action Southwark, Elephant & Castle, London

It’s a bit later than we’d like to put the notes out from September’s meeting……A big thank you to all of our guest speakers and riders for making this a great event to network and learn from each other. 

We’ll be doing another London Riders event in early December – so if you’d like to take on a guest presenter slot and share some non-profit technology applications that are close to your heart – let us know.  We’ll be posting over at UKRiders shortly with a call for your proposals.

To carry on reading notes from the London Riders network event on 24 September go below the fold… 

CiviCRM - Michael McAndrew

CiviCRM (http://civicrm.org) is a customer relationship management (CRM) tool that you can install on your own webspace - and integrate with free and open source web based content management systems (CMS) such as Drupal (http://drupal.org) or Joomla www.joomla.org).

Michael currently works for Third Sector Design (www.thirdsectordesign.org).  He developed a CRM with similar functionality two years ago for a couple of organisations and is now migrating to CiviCRM.  Michael is involved in a project to deploy a CiviCRM installation for CVS organisations in partnership with Voluntary Action Westminster (www.vawcvs.org).

Other examples of CiviCRM in action include: VOSCUR (www.voscur.org), GMCVO (www.gmcvo.org.uk), Voluntary Action Rotherham (www.varotherham.org.uk), War Child (http://www.warchild.org.uk), Community Action Southwark (www.casouthwark.org.uk), Association of Volunteer Managers (www.volunteermanagers.org.uk).

Some CiviCRM developers – Circle Interactive, SCIP, Illuminate ICT, ESP Projects  

SALESFORCE - Nicole Aebi-Moyo (BOND)

Nicole gave us a demo and talk on how BOND (www.bond.org.uk) came to use Salesforce (www.salesforce.com/uk) – a web based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool for integrating their web and back office database systems.

Started development of a new database and website for BOND in April 2008 with the requirements specification and data cleaning.  BOND had previously been using an old Access database which was working to some extent, but not suitable for the website overhaul.

The web development project was well funded with £25,000 each for database and website redevelopment.  Nicole put together the specification and received 6 or 7 responses to request for bid.  Of those two providers came within budget and both were recommending Salesforce as their preferred solution.  BOND’s project has come in under budget and is not likely to be charged next year.

Staff buy-in - demo presentation of Salesforce to the staff team showed mock ups of how it could work, and this instilled confidence that it could meet BOND’s needs.

Free – applied for the free, non-profit version of Salesforce, which is available as a donation to registered charities. 

Users need to bear in mind the cost of time and resources needed to customise Salesforce to your own organisations.  However, there is a large developer community and good support resources.

BOND used a developer for a number of reasons:

Licencing – Salesforce gave 10 free licences to BOND.  They contacted Salesforce direct and had no problem obtaining additional free licences for their staff.

Database hosted is hosted on Salesforce servers - need to check where these are geo-located are for Data Protection reasons.

Upgrades to Salesforce are published every 6 months and are automatically integrated into the system.

Training - Nonprofit Admin Workshop is available for charities at the discounted rate of £300 (standard rate is £1,950)

UK user group http://usergroups.salesforce.com/nonprofits_uk/ based in London to share experience and ideas:

Future plans for BOND – database has gone live, website goes live in November, then integration of the two to follow later.

Nicole also helps run a community orchestra and showed us their implementation of Salesforce.  This site was developed for free using Salesforce employees as volunteers.

Bespoke Database development experience - John Davies (IT4C)

John gave us a short talk on IT4Communities’ (www.it4communities.org.uk) experience of managing a bespoke database system designed from the ground up.

Problems with first developer meant that to complete the development a second developer was required.  Because open code had been used IT4C was able to show sample code to new developers to ensure that it was of a good standard  - and developers were happy and able to work with it.

Conclusions

 Where next for IT4C?

Technical handbook - Mike Veitch (www.havs.org.uk)

 Mike Veitch has developed Technical Handbook – a paper-based system that allows organisations to record in one place key details – passwords, router config, contact name at tech support company, web domain renewal dates, etc).

All organisations need the tools to access their ICT resources.  The information that has to be stored (eg names and contacts of support organisation, passwords) is often scattered in fragments in different places – this makes it difficult to put together the whole picture.

For small organisations, information is often held by one person - who always needs to be sought to find out information.  The question is where to keep this information.

The IT handbook is designed to allow people to gather the small pieces of information

Currently looking to review and seek funding for print of final version.  Organisations will get in electronic form that will be restricted to support organisations and Circuit Riders.  Essentially this is an IT system documentation tool but needs a name, suggestions welcome.

Although this tool is separate from a traditional ICT health check it can be used in conjunction to document information from a Health check.

Copyright issues not settled yet, looking at Creative Commons licensing.

Would like too see electronic version available to those who do support, ie circuit riders, library of components that are useful to organisations you work with

Get Involved…

Will be put on to UKriders (www.ukriders.info) email list as a trial version.

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Thanks to Ian Goodman and Miles Maier at Lasa for taking and writing up the notes of the meeting.

 

Meeting 4 February 2008 at the Bread and Roses, Clapham

A big thank you to all those who took time out from providing technology support services to the sector to attend the first London network event on 4 February - the first of what we hope will be many network events and an opportunity for us to learn from each other.

For those who missed the event, we hope there will be another opportunity for you to contribute to the growth and knowledge of the network. We’ll be announcing the next network event for the middle of May - so stay tuned for news.

Some very powerful messages emerged from this first networking:

  • We want to do this again! There are very few opportunities for circuit riders and other providers of tech support in London’s voluntary sector to network and exchange learning. We will also look to hook up with other networks for cross-fertilisation of ideas;
  • Funding and sustainability of circuit rider projects is big concern - several circuit rider projects are coming towards the end of their funding, and whilst funding priorities may change, the need for circuit riders hasn’t.
  • Funders need to acknowledge Total Cost of Ownership and that ICT is a legitimate cost of doing business in their grant criteria. this may mean working more closely with funders to ensure they understand the importance of ICT;
  • VCOs need to acknowledge that ICT is a key organisational function (compare with e.g. financial management

We asked 2 questions of you as a community and circuit riders:-

1. What do circuit riders and other providers of tech support to the sector see as the biggest issues?

  • User training needs – core competencies, budget to train (first thing to get cut when funding’s tight)Upskilling and training of workers should be linked to NAVCA’s SKILD (programme of workshops for upskilling development workers)project.
  • There is a strong need and much demand in the sector for technical support - the question is how we can make it sustainable for smaller organisations
  • Strategic thinking (or lack of)There is also strong need and much demand in the sector for strategic support - such as help with strategy, policy, budgeting, etc.
  • Recognition of issues by organisations
  • Managing expectations (you don’t get a BBC style website for £2k…)
  • There is little planning in the sector for ICT risk assessment/disaster recovery
  • Reaching hard to reach groups (especially very small organisations)

2. How can this Forum help you and what would you like to see at future network events?

Again, we have along-shopping list of things that the tech support community in London would like to see , so we’ll be working on introducing those as when we can.

  • Links to Regional ICT Champion and to funders and policy-makers
  • Information exchange between peers
  • Provider exchange e.g. good trainers and avoiding poor ones
  • Joint training sessions – customised, appropriate to sector and audience
  • Sharing & updating good practice, policies (AUP, data protection, web use etc)
  • Websites for useful other stuff outside ICT arena e.g. health and safety
  • How do we relate to existing resources - such as UKRiders
  • Visits, mentoring and peer support
  • Develop and experience matrix for members of forum
  • Raising profile of voluntary sector ICT projects
  • Awareness of National Support Services themes and ICT implications following demise of ICT Hub
  • Drawing in other development workers (e.g. small group workers) by being proactive - see SKILD
  • Sharing/developing tools e.g. Charity Helpdesk

3. Information exchange
Follow the links to get more information on the projects:-

Kate - Superhighways: developing bespoke user training project;

Noel - Community Alliance: working on shared tech support for 6 projects in building. Also has an interactice whiteboard for hire.

Ingrid - LVSTC: Provides advice to the sector on European funding and has project with 10 hours a week circuit rider support for BMER training providers

Mike - HAVS: Needs funding to continue the West London ICT project.

Alison - LVSC: Provides internal IT support to her organisation. Recommends the CASCADE information workers forum.

David - Designing for Civic Society: blogs on social media as a solution for community engagement

Ian R - Lasa: Organising circuit rider conference in Birmingham on 27/28 February. Will also be leading a new Lasa project to develop quality standards and principles for circuit riders

Mary Sakho - VAC: circuit rider in Camden

Ian G - Lasa: Supporting Knowledgebase and Suppliers Directory. If you have an idea for an article - let him know about.

Paul - Lasa: Leading on EASI/Presto funded (ESF) project to equip asylum seekers and refugees with circuit rider skills.

Maher - Superhighways: Managing a free community wireless project for an estate in Kingston.

Emmanuel - Superhighways: Has just project managed a complex office relocation for Sutton CVS.

Marcus - Superhighways: working on a web portal for groups and help with websites www.mertonconnected.com

Ngozi - Superhighways: circuit rider and internal support for Croydon CVS. Working on matching a volunteer database developer to a database projec