This year’s Connecting Up event was up and running with an interesting keynote address from Bill Strathmann, CEO, Network for Good (USA) and self proclaimed “tree hugger”. Network for Good is an online not-for-profit donation network, which allows donations to be made to any legitimate charity in the country that’s listed in the national charity organisation database. They also provide donate buttons for charities that wish to add one to their site and a custom designed button for a nominal fee of $29/month. Some interesting facts were mentioned about the growth of online donations, for example after the September 11th attacks in 2001, only 20% of all disaster relief was donated online. Only 4 years later in 2005 after hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, a staggering 50% of all donations were contributed through online transactions. After seeing this large growth in voluntary contributions made online, I wonder if it would be pertinent for an Australian alternative to Bill’s network in order for our not-for-profit organisations to open up this avenue of income.
Now that the conference was in full swing the first presentation I attended was by Jenny Kapp from Community Connections Australia, titled “Get ConnectED: Weaving a New Social Web for People with Disabilities”. Jenny spoke about the various benefits and barriers of using the Internet for people with a disability, as well as a programme called “Get ConnectED”. Get ConnectED is a 12 week course consisting of 6 modules, totalling 24 hours of structured mentoring. Topics covered will include:
- Email and netiquette
- Telling others about yourself
- Instant messages and chat
- Using Facebook & Myspace
- Skype & Second Life
- Leadership and networking
If you’re interesting in partaking in this course online, CCA are taking expressions of interest until July 15th. Community Connections Australia’s contact details are:
PO Box 6394,
North Ryde, NSW 2113
Tel: (08) 9878 2598
Next off the mark for me was Peter Grant from Microsoft QLD. The first thing I noticed about this presentation was that it wasn’t just a 45 minute Silverlight demonstration, which after the shock had subsided made me all the more interested in what he had to say. At first Peter pointed out some of the various organisational trends we’ve been seeing such as the revolution in communications, decentralized collaboration (breaking free of the standard office building and being able to contribute from all over the world), and making a conscious effort to keep our environmental footprint in check. Following this was an interesting section about strategising your IT department to achieve the best possible results using the “McFarlan Strategic Grid”, which is much more easily explained using images.
| The average IT department as it stands | The suggested distribution of resources |
 |
 |
From this we can see non-profit organisations aren’t investing enough resources in planning for what is to come, and should try to invest some more time into planning for their future projects rather than just their current ones.
The rest of the day was spent listening to some more technologically intense presentations such as “Plan well to get the Website your Non-Profit Deserves” by Jason King, BaptCare, which basically summarised the website development lifecycle from start to finish. If you’re interesting in having a website developed then this is something I’d recommend you read before you start. It is available from Jason’s blog.
To wind things up for day one I listened to Phillip Pudney, CQR Consulting (and a fellow Adelaidian), talk about “Securing your Website”, but so spare you of a lot of technical jargon I’ll summarise some of the key points in securing your web server:
- Patch your software! Patches are released for a reason, people.
- Disable any unused services.
- Try to use secure passwords or even pass phrases.
- Check if you software has any security vulnerabilities at http://www.securityfocus.com/vulnerabilities
I’ll post more on day two of the conference at a later date.
