Computing Assistance Support & Education Inc – CASE Notes

CASE is a membership based cooperative of over thirty Australian non-profit organisations who identified a significant gap in the ICT services provided to our sector and created a shared services solution to address that gap.

As such CASE is a technical support service owned and operated by community development and non-profit organisations.

The resulting services have proven over a  ten year period to be appropriately targeted to the needs of the sector and capable of delivering superior technical services at reasonable costs.

Indeed, if this were not the case and other appropriate services were available, there simply would be no need for the sector to operate it’s own service. However, the needs of the sector are not typically compatible with the business solutions provided by commercial vendors who often times simply apply standard business solutions and have a very limited understanding of the unique and challenging environment that we operate in.

CASE does not compete with commercial services and indeed where such services are appropriate for use by members, we establish working relationships such as we have with Dell Computers on behalf of members.

Organisations involved in CASE can be proud that they are showing by example how the sector can work together to establish effective services to meet their mutual goals of improving services to those in our community living with disadvantage. Membership organisations also have the significant advantage of ownership which gives them the benefit of being stakeholders in the service. Funding contracts now require that best practice is followed in areas such as adhering to privacy regulations and disaster recovery. As such the need for such services is even more critical than before.

The ultimate strategy of CASE is that by providing superior transparent ICT services to member organisations, we are effecting significant community development by reallocating administrative overheads to the much more important area of service delivery. This ensures that less people will be sleeping on the streets, more people receive proper mental health care and that even the smallest of services will have access to proper business systems…

The Melbourne Joomla Users group has, once again, put on a great weekend worth of informative workshops, talks and lectures. This is the third year running and the attendance looked healthier than it’s ever been which is a great sign for this open-source project.

Amongst the attendees was varying levels of experience and skill with Joomla and the MJUG team presented material that was appropriate for everyone. Andrew Eddie gave us further details about the upcoming Joomla 1.6 release; while there’s no launch date yet it’s worth noting some of the features that were discussed. One of Joomla’s drawbacks (features?) is that there’s no clean way to define new usergroups with specific and access controls -  Joomla comes with 9 pre-defined user groups that provide a simple user structure right out of the box. But for administrators that need to fine-tune user access, they must work outside the Joomla core, likely utilising a third-party extension. When 1.6 is released, the option to define new groups with unique permissions will be available. Permissions will be able to be set to menus, modules and other content items. This will mean a huge amount of new flexibility in terms of who can see and modify what, opening the door to the possibility of administrators running on a non-Joomla powered website with unique user groups to migrate to Joomla in the future.

You can read more about the upcoming release of Joomla here.

Another good talk was on optimising your website for speed. We were presented with a number of tools that help webmasters assess the overall performance of their website. Yahoo’s “Yslow” plugin for Firefox being a popular way to record a comprehensive range of speed related stats for your website. “ChacheClear” is a handy little cache-clearing tool for Firefox that ensures that your speed results aren’t messed up by local browser cache! The use of Gzip, a popular compression method was also encouraged (This can be swtiched on in Joomla’s global configuration, and some professional templates come with options to optimise for Gzip).

Sam Moffat gave another security talk, most of his tips and tricks should be adopted immediately by anyone concerned with the integrity of their website. Full details from his presentation can be found here.

Overall I would call Melbourne Joomla Day a very valuable event for people working, or interested in working with, Joomla. It’s a great chance to go face-to-face with the people behind the software and they’re always more than willing to answer questions. Given the size of this year’s event, I can only assume there’ll be another run next year, bigger and better than ever before!

You can view all the speaker presentatons here. The official Twitter feed can be reviewed here!

CASE would like to wish it’s members (of which there are now over thirty!) a happy new year and all the best for 2010. This will be our tenth year providing shared IT services to the community sector in Canberra (and indeed, nation wide!) and we feel that this is quite a milestone. If we have it our way, we’ll be here for another decade at least!

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.

CASE’s Annual General Meeting wrapped up this evening after a small but pleasant gathering. Patron Sen. Kate Lundy arrived just in time to stop the Web 2.0 version of herself stealing the show and what followed was a relaxed, informal talk about human engagement through technology. After Kate’s presentation we briefly looked at the  year behind us, Darrell detailed VISE’s Online Volunteer Management System (developed by CASE over a number of years), our trip to the Dharriwaa Elder’s Group in Walgett, and welcomed new members Hepatitis C Council of NSW, among others.

Business as usual followed, then the nomination of committee members for the coming year. Darrell Burkey maintains his position as President, Amanda Plowright maintains her position as Vice President and I have been returned as a committee member.

Looking forward to the year ahead!

CASE is holding it’s Annual General Meeting Tuesday 22 September. We’re please to announce that Senator Kate Lundy will be presenting a talk on Government 2.0 & Citizen Engagement from 5:30pm, preceding the AGM proper. Senator Lundy has been a patron of CASE and involved in web technologies for quite some time now. We’re hoping for an illuminating talk that looks at the recent developments of her #publicsphere initiative and the federal government’s Government 2.0 initiative. The AGM will run from 6.00pm – 7.00pm at the Offices of Volunteering ACT, Canberra Labor Club Community Chambers, 55 Chandler Street Belconnen ACT.

Feel free to join us! For further information make sure to check out the official CASE website.

Recently CASE headed out back to meet our friends in Walgett, The Dharriwaa Elders Group. Almost a year prior we’d worked together remotely to install a server in their office, CASE techos building the computer in Canberra and then shipping it to Walgett. Guiding installation and setup over the phone and with our remote administration tools, DEG ended up with a high quality intranet that has been stable for twelve months. For more details on this project you can listen to our podcast with Wendy from the DEG.

DEG undertake a lot of cartography and multimedia work and the related files are huge. After a year they were running out of space on their server which could only be addressed by us attending in person and installing new physical hard drives. So on a Sunday morning we packed our bags-and-things into the car and headed north….

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There’s a large number of Twitter related services out there. Some cater towards the “power user”, others are just a great way to keep track of statistics relating to your Twitter account. At CASE we’ve been using Twitter  in order to be involved in various conferences and events as well as communicating interesting bits and pieces to our members. The links below are some Twitter related web service we find interesting and or useful:

Twitalyzer: This website examines your Twitter account and then gives you scores in the following categories: Influence, Signal, Generosity, Velocity and Clout. These are measured by how many people follow you, how many times you re tweet, how frequently people are choosing to follow you and so on. The site makes recommendations on how you should improve your scores and gives you a whole stack of nice graphs to visualise the whole thing. This site is a must if you think your Twitter campaign is important. Great for stats!

Qwitter: This site offers a service whereby you’re notified when someone stops following you on Twitter, and shows you what your last tweet was before they canceled. This would be a very valuable tool for someone dealing with controversial material – you can effectively see visualise people turning their back on you on the Twitterscape! Simple, yet effective.

Whatthetrend: This site shows you the emerging trends on Twitter and allows users to post detailed descriptions on what those trends are, and why they’re trending. Great for seeing what’s popular and what people think of it. This is also a good place to keep an eye out for upcoming spam and scams.

ChirpCity: This is a handy website that searches for and then collates tweets by city. This means you can keep an eye on what’s emerging in your area even before it trends.

There’s been an abundance of good references mentioned during the event and we want to take note of a few of them here.

Yesterday Susan Devine and Gail Tuft gave a talk on how they have used a wiki to maintain business knowledge. The session was packed and a lot of people were very interested in trying out a wiki themselves. Gail reccommended DocuWIKI for a simple, easy to use wiki platform.

Peter Deitz from Social Actions gave a thought provoking presentation on “Social Actions”. For his site you can see www.socialactions.com, for a list of social networking sites you can see this wikipedia entry.

Headshift, a social networking consultancy based in the UK (but looking to expand into Australia) has done some good work and their offical site can be found here: http://www.headshift.com.

More to follow…