The Official CASE Blog

As is common at conferences like this, URLs for interesting sites get get suggested thick and fast. Here’s a summary of a few interesting ones we were pointed to during the conference. We had a great time and want to thank everyone for their talks, and to everyone who attended ours. We’ll have online versions of them available shortly, in the meantime make sure to check out the following sites:

Techsoup.org – A vast ICT resource for not-for-profits including valuable templates for essential IT documentation.

www.aiia.com.au/GreenIT – A comprehensive book looking at “green computing” strategies for business and not-for-profits.

act.ly – A site that enables you to start petitions and polls on Twitter, great for online activism!

doingitbetter.net.au – A comprehensive program run by Monash University and partners investigating how to expand the capacity of ICT in the community service sector.

www.ici.qut.edu.au/projects/sustainablefoodculture.jsp – An example of where Federal government’s ARC funding is enabling social action through technology.

prezi.com – A place that allows you to make impressive looking power-point-esq presentations, and can be viewed on a web browser.

Xero.com – “Cloud accouting”. Affordable bookkeeping and financial services for small to medium sized groups, with a Web 2.0 twist.

SalesForce.com – an impressive CRM. They give free licenses to charities and not-for-profits.

OpenOffice.org – A free, professional word processor that rivals, and is compatible with, Microsoft Office.

Overall, a great two days. You can review the Twitter feed of the event here, for further info, links and insights from the day. To review our very own Twitter posts from the day, click here.

We’re down in Melbourne for the annual Making Links conference. The focus is the convergence of social action and technology and we’re coming up on morning tea of the first day. So far we’ve had a great talk by Matthew Allen on “de-tooling” technology, whereby change how we think about our role within systems and how we treat them reflects our attitudes towards offline community. Lisa Harvey (@lisaharvey) has provided a summary on the ongoing efforts of the Australian Federal Government’s Gov 2.0 taskforce. Included in her presentation were ideas about open information, a look at the developments triggered by the Gov 2.0 roadshow from earlier in the year and how interaction with the public service has the chance to run in both directions.