Voscur ICT Forums

Sign of the times and the end of an era, but the always excellent NCVO ICT Newsletter is to end after the final edition published this week. Louise Brown ( a real voluntray sector ICT Champion if ever there was one ) the editor writes

We've recieved a letter from Terry Stokes CEO of LASA outlining the expected effects of the Google grant to the organisation

"The Impact of the Grant from Google: What this means for the Lasa Community

With the New Year firmly underway the team at Lasa have been busy drawing up plans on how to use Google’s holiday gift to support the good work being done throughout the third sector.

Social Media is a growing part of the communication options available to groups and individuals working in communities in the UK.

The statistics suggest that around a third of people in the uk are already registered on at least one Social Network and facebook is currently the most popular.

Facebooks age profile is increasingly balanced across the population with a growing number of people over the age of 65 getting involved.

Weekly Accessibility Tips from http://www.evengrounds.com/

"People often ask me if they have to give up all the fancy features in order to make information accessible.

By no means! I ask you not to! All you need to do is to make sure that the information you provide is available in an accessible format. In fact, you must keep all the fancy features, those are the ones which attract the largest population to your site.

At last an easy way to complain about inaccessible websites – start reporting now!

 
An ingenious new campaign called Fix the Web has been launched this week to tackle the problem of inaccessible websites on a massive scale.  Fix the Web is an initiative of Citizens Online, a national charity that campaigns for internet access for all.

Highlights in this issue

• Paula Graham on Open Source
• Review of Social Network!!

Excellent new Facebook primer for groups taking their first steps on Facebook - one I wasn't aware of is that 25 "fans" or more allows you to access a function to create a "Vanity url" for your page, so we now have http://www.facebook.com/voscur

Facebook 101 for Nonprofits: Getting Started in Five Easy Steps

Get online week is a new annual event from UKOnline Centres to inspire and help people to get online. With over 3,000 events planned across the UK, it aims to help 80,000 people get online with myguide.

I've just added to the ICT publications page the recently published LASA ICT Security Guide. It covers all aspects of software and data security in a simple straightforward manner that the non-technical office manager will be able to use for risk assessing and data protection compliance. The appendix has a handy risk assessment checklist.