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1. Latest News
2. Projects of the Month
3. Making A Difference - Feedback From Charities
4. Background to the Opportunities
5. A Word About Your Initial Meeting With The Charity
6. Final Thoughts
My New Year's Resolution (better late than never!): Shake off those February blues with the nice warm glow of giving to the community - 281 projects still available out of the 680 projects currently registered on our website. Grab them while they're hot!
Staying with the “ring in the new” theme: Paula arrived this month to take over the administration of iT4C from Alex and is ready to receive the welter of project updates we know you're just dying to send! Do keep in touch, let us know what's going on, and we're here for support or information if our website and discussion forum can't solve your problem.
Donate your leap-year day: The Giving Campaign is launching it's Big Leap initiative to persuade companies to give to charity via paying their staff wages to spend all or part of this year's extra day doing community volunteer projects. One to bring to the boss' attention . . .
Any old mobies: Your sad, frumpy ex-moby no longer has to wander the gutters to the doleful strains of a violin when you replace it with a younger, sexier model. The Computers for Charities Mobile Appeal is appealing for your old (even dead) mobile phones to use in children's educational projects in Eastern Europe. Give the poor little chap a new lease of life - and the kids will be chuffed too!
Let your fingers do the walking! Drive to develop opportunities for remote working with charities: It can often be very difficult for charities which aren't located near major cities to attract volunteers for IT projects. One of the beauties of IT is, of course, the potential for remote working - when searching for opportunities on our database, why not check out projects in other areas besides your local beat. There are some really interesting projects off the beaten track which are crying out for volunteers and which could be either entirely or mainly carried out remotely.
Adopt-A-Volunteer drive: iT4C now has over 1,500 volunteers registered - many thanks to all of you who have helped to keep iT4C growing and thriving. If you've had good experience working in the community, don't forget to keep on recommending volunteering with iT4C to friends and colleagues. Here's to an even greater contribution to developing IT in the community in 2004!
And a big thanks to all our volunteers for taking time out of busy schedules to keep plugging away through rain, snow (well, mostly rain) and short daylight to continue to deliver high-quality IT volunteer projects to the community - and see below our charities' glowing (and spontaneous) comments about the great work you've been doing.
But don't forget to keep us informed and remember - feedback is crucial to developing iT4C as a responsive resource for you and for the communities you've served so successfully throughout 2003, as well as for building capacity to meet a new year and fresh challenges.
Next newsletter will be published sometime in April.
Project of the Month: A chance to make a fundamental difference for a community outreach, skills and training charity which needs help with strategic thinking and with major management decisions relating to IT.
Northern Project of the Month: Soak up those bracing briny breezes with an all-expenses Spring weekend break volunteer project. Homelessness charity on NE coast seek database designer/developer volunteer to create new databases and install on office network. Travel and accommodation expenses covered.
The Little Bit Different Project of the Month: Charity running a large conference with registration starting in June for the conference in November needs a database specialist to build an Access database to track delegates and an audiovisual technology specialist to assist in recording the conference presentations as audio and matching these to PowerPoint presentations so that they are available for later access on the Web or CDROM. This may simply use PowerPoint audio capture or a specific product like "Boxmind".
Martini (anytime, anywhere) Project of the Month: Community partnership group needs to develop a scheme for incremental computer assisted learning. This is a job for a web content specialist who wants to branch out into more sophisticated content and into content frameworks rather than the detailed material being presented. It will present course content from basic life skills (e.g. how to buy a fridge) up to computer skills. Suitable for remote working.
Snappy (quick) project of the month: Community partnership organisation needs help in routing mail in Outlook Express and general advice on Outlook Express email distribution.
More projects and project details at: www.iT4Communities.org.uk
Please note that some of our projects might be feasible as 'remote' projects or 'virtual volunteering' so feel free to browse projects from other areas. It never hurts to ask.
3. Making a Difference - Some Feedback from Charities:
I've just collected "version 1" of the database and its looks great. . . . We're really lucky you found him we've been able to secure funding for a server to host the database on the basis of the iT4C volunteer's work
- Hitesh Patel, Halton CAB
We are now in good communication and he is being incredibly helpful with a whole range of subjects around how we use our software . . . We are most grateful to IT4 Communities for the introduction - he is an absolute star!
Phillida Purvis, Links Japan
We advertised for help with our website via iT4Communities, and have had a good response. We now have a volunteer who is working with us, and we're hopeful of making real improvements to our website
Carol Robinson, York Nightstop
We have had telephone conversations with these charities (or the brokers providing the opportunities), and have filtered out any requests that were clearly inappropriate for volunteers. In the Volunteer Opportunities section we have included information about the type of charity, the location and a summary of the request for IT advice/assistance. If you are interested in volunteering for a particular opportunity, please click on the Volunteer button adjacent to the details of each opportunity. This does not commit you to the project at this stage but will enable us to send you further information.
Opportunities are categorised by location (London, North West, North East, West Midlands, East Midlands, SouthEast, SouthWest, Scotland, Wales). We're working on better ways of representing the projects/locations but all feedback is welcome. Apologies in advance if we've offended anyone's geography. Please bear in mind that I'm not a geography guru and what you think is East Midlands might have been added to West Midlands. It's worth looking at other areas near you.
We've also classified projects by skill type, e.g. website, database, strategy. This does mean that some projects don't fit easily into categories so if you're a multi-tasking kind of volunteer or have special talents, check out the ALL category and find those hidden gems.
We will respond to offers to volunteer on a first come, first served basis and we will try to respond to all of you as soon as possible but this may take a few days depending on the number of responses and other activities. Your patience is appreciated. In some cases, we may provide multiple volunteer details for a particular project. We will also let you know if your opportunity has already been taken (assuming we've been told). We will deal with offers to volunteer as quickly as we can but we cannot guarantee to respond to all applications immediately.
Projects will remain listed until someone confirms acceptance. In some cases, volunteers have expressed interest but a project has not, for whatever reason, been confirmed. If you contact a charity about a project and they tell you it's no longer available, please let us know (sometimes they don't).
If there isn't an opportunity near to you, please bear with us. More charities and projects are registered each week. If you have any specific questions, please email Paula at info@iT4Communities.org.uk
At your first meeting with the charity you will need to check out a number of issues:
Getting this stuff right at the outset is worth the time spent and makes sure that you can then concentrate on delivering a great project
iT4Communities is a project to help the IT industry and IT professionals help communities. It depends largely on you as individuals and employees to deliver the expertise. We're here to provide the web-based resource and answer questions. We will try to provide you with introductions to charities and work with you as a group to develop best practice. You are the ones with the skills to change the lives of individuals, groups, to make a difference in your local community. If you have any suggestions about iT4Communities and / or this newsletter - do get in touch, we want to hear from you.
2003 was a great year for iT4Communities and you've helped to deliver over a quarter of a million pounds of support to your local communities. Here's hoping for an even better 2004.
Let's go to work . . .
Simon.
Simon Davey
National Director, iT4Communities
e: simon@iT4Communities.org.uk
w: www.iT4Communities.org.uk
IT 4 Communities is an initiative
to encourage companies and individuals with professional IT skills to volunteer
these skills for the benefit of the community, and is supported by a partnership
of key IT sector organisations.
We aim to achieve a significant and sustainable increase in the number of companies and IT professionals volunteering their skills in their local communities, and to maximise the effectiveness of this volunteering input in building the capacity of local charities and community groups.