The Official CASE Blog

Computers in Homes New Zealand have come across the sea to visit Making Links this year to share with us the trials and tribulations of deploying low cost computer solutions to remote and disadvantaged communities. There was a great deal of emphasis placed on working side by side rather from the top down in these communities. NZ (or this group at any rate) seems to have a grasp on how imposition of new ideas or interventions made in the social structure is so very condescending for an Indigenous culture with thousands of years of history. It took them over ten years to get where they are today and now with a line in the budget they certainly aren’t going away any time soon. While the politics and the geography are very different to Australia’s, the inspiration behind the ideas were valuable. For more information on the project you can head over to http://www.computersinhomes.org.nz

The WA Community Resource Network was another inspiring story that has obviously done a great amount of good for rural and regional communities in Western Australia. Generally focusing on communities between 200-3000 in population, they have ensured services like banking, Centrelink, vehicle registration and other government services are available to these areas. The polar opposite of waiting in line at Centrelink would be attending one of these community centres to enjoy a live cast of an orchestra performance in Perth. Which they also organise! From essential services to cultural enrichment, WACRN is providing these and more to a lot of grateful people. Find out more about the organisation at http://www.crc.net.au

More to follow….

Web accessibility is constantly overlooked. But there are a lot of really simple and easy things that you can do to ensure that people with disadvantage have a great user experience at your website. Actually, it’s the law that you attempt to provide this. Vicki Stanton gave us the the basics on how we could think about making websites more accessible. One very important point (one I’ll have to shame myself with) is that transcribing podcasts is important (which I’ll do as soon as I get back to Canberra..), captioning YouTube videos is important and understanding that screen readers for the vision impaired will not work well with your site if you don’t take care. Vicki provided a great range of links to resources to help you and your organisation bring your site up to standard. Check out  Check My Colors, WAVE  (Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool) and ATRC Web Accessibility Checker. Vicki’s personal story was inspiring and encouraging. Well done!

Jessica Kerr really, really, REALLY likes forms. By cheerful coincidence we have been thinking about web forms here at CASE, too. Her insights proved very valuable. Her approach to building a great form revolves around “The 4 Cs”. Clear, Concise, Clever and Cooperative and the way she detailed the thought process that should go into building a form makes us feel confident that the next one we do will be the best one we’ve done… apart from giving a great presentation, Jessica also provides a stack of great articles at formulate.com.au..

The conference proper kicked off this morning with a wonderful Welcome To Country from the entertaining Nanna Beryl Harp. Tanya Notely then made us feel hopeful and afraid at the same time by giving a presentation about freedom and technology. She used examples from worldwide to show how communications technology can make dramatic changes to social fabrics in a very short time. She also talked about how fast repressive governments and regimes can (and do) disable these technologies when they feel they need to. The group she works for provides resources and assistance for those who are being repressed. Head over to http://www.tacticaltech.org to learn more.

We were then very lucky to hear from Susan Moylan-Coombs, an Indigenous character that worked for a long time at the ABC but recently has been working for National Indigenous Television. This is a channel I’d never heard of before but It’s accessible through Foxtel, Austar and Optus. Susan gave us some interesting numbers, including an impressive amount of original content created and aired for very little money. Alarmingly, we were told that NIT may very well be shut down at the end of the financial year. This is appalling news; if NIT disappeared not only would our Indigenous community miss out on much needed local content but Australia as a whole would be culturally lessened. For more information on National Indigenous Television click here…

More to follow…

Today’s workshop “Building Websites From The Ground Up” has proven very valuable for us and I assume everyone else. We’ve had a range of diverse speakers from a wide range of backgrounds who have really covered building a website from the ground up from concept to delivery. Viveka kicked off the day with a hugely detailed presentation on the Victorian AIDS Council’s efforts to develop their new website. She let us into the finer details of the planning process including objectives, constraints, assumptions and a lot, lot more. The key thing to take away from their experience, I think, is that documentation and planning has to be paramount in the process of developing a site, if you’re to end up with what you want! Also critical to the process was ensuring Government accessibility standards were met and that the staff were adequately trained in using the new software backend (Drupal). Have a look at their site which was launched late last year – great effort! http://www.vicaids.asn.au

Following on from Viveka’s presentation we had Andrew Johnson from FII who detailed a developer’s perspective on processes and jobs very similar to Viveka’s. He really emphasised the personal aspect to developing a website, encouraging looking at the task as developing a relationship between the developer and the organisation you (they’re) developing for. Returned to frequently was the idea that it was a good idea to actually like the client you’re working for. If you don’t…consider not taking the job! FII are big on Joomla which is great to see. They’ve got a range of projects on the go and we can recommend checking out their site! http://www.footefrancis.com.au

If that wasn’t enough (and it could have been) Gary Barber from Radharc weighed in on all things Information Architecture. Detailed, to say the least! He offered suggestions on how to better survey and study a userbase so that more appropriate development decisions could be made. He also showed us multiple ways of considering content, how we might look at it differently and how we might spot patterns. Surprisingly, something as mundane as sorting cards turned out to be a great way (through discussion, not necessarily the final arrangement of the cards!) to organise information in way everyone can understand or at least is happy with. Survey, observations, interviews, analytics! Details about these and more can be found at Gary’s site http://www.radharc.com.au

A slightly re-arranged schedule and a relateively relaxed atmosphere after lunch resulted in an expert’s panel on web content management systems. Joomla, Wordpres and Drupal all represented (Silverstripe gets a mention), the importance of keeping ALL of your web software up-to-date was reiterated by myself a few times. Seriously, you’ll get hacked if you don’t stay up to date. Andrew and Vivecka got to field followup questions from an engaged audience and everyone seemed pretty satisfied.

Following afternoon tea an enthusiastic/passionate discussion about domain names in Australia and abroad ensued. Darrell’s position on the auDA policy review panel allowed everyone to get a bit of insight into the domains industry and the history that preceeded it’s current state. Do .com.aus get more traffic? Are they more appropriate than asn.au? What would happen if Australia’s domain policy ended up matching the American free-for-all? There were a range of diverse opinions and everyone came away with something to think about…

Overall a very valuable day and we’re glad we attended! This is actually an event that runs prior to Making Links 2010 proper which of course we’ll be attending. We’ll continue the coverage here and of course you can follow the Twitter stream at #ml10 http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23ml10

Thanks for everyone who turned out for our AGM which turned out to be a great event. Nick and Stuart from Woden Community Services gave a great presentation detailing how they performed a major IT overhaul for their group, with great results. What’s more, they brought copies of all their high quality documentation to share. Brilliant! Then we surprised Andrew Tridgell with Kate Lundy dropping by to do a small presentation bestowing to him life-membership and a new Sonic Screwdriver. A heartfelt speech for someone who has helped a lot. The business end of the AGM concluded quickly with Darrell Burkey re-elected as President, Amanda Plowright as Vice President, myself as Committee Member and we’d like to welcome Stuart Hogan to the committee as well. Thanks for volunteering!

We’re very proud to announce that Kate has picked up a significant award for her efforts in electronic democracy! If you’ve followed what she’s been up to (you’d be hard pressed to keep up, for starters…) you’ll see that engaging citizenry through and leveraging social energy with Internet technologies is a major facet in her politic. Here at CASE we share exactly the same sentiment which is why this award is so exciting.

From CeBit:

“Senator The Hon. Kate Lundy has been awarded the International eDemocrary Award for 2010 at a ceremony during the World eDemocracy Forum. The ceremony took place at France’s Department of Foreign Affairs in Paris overnight.

Senator Lundy was selected from a shortlist of 12 to take top honours at the event, which is considered the foremost awards for leaders and practitioners of the Gov 2.0 and eGovernment agendas.”

From all the CASE staff, well done Kate!

If you live in the ACT, anywhere near Gunghalin and like your Internet, be aware that the NBN Co will be holding a consultation session on broadband deployment very soon. From the official release:

“An open public consultation is to be held about the NBN deployment to approximately 3000 premises in the Gungahlin region, which is planned for deployment in the 2nd quarter of 2011.

The consultation will be held by the Gungahlin Community Council at our October 13th meeting at the Palmerston Community Centre on Tiptree Crescent at 7.30pm.

Glenn Holdstock, the NBN Co Community and Stakeholder Relations Manager will speak about the early NBN deployment to Gungahlin, and then will open the floor for community discussion and questions.”

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More info can be found here.

We’re pleased to announce the CASE Annual General Meeting for 2010:

Wednesday 27 October, 2010
Pearce Community Centre
Collet Place – Pearce, ACT

4.00pm – Member Presentation:
“Woden Community Services Info Tech Modernisation Project”
Stuart Hogan, Woden Community Service.

Over the past two years Woden Community Services and CASE have worked together on a project to upgrade the IT infrastructure of WCS offices. Nic Ilic, Project Manager, and Stuart Hogan, IT Manager will share with the sector their secrets on how this project was implemented, what was achieved and how to avoid the pitfalls of managing such a large project.

If you are interested in how to get the most out of your IT infrastructure and what it takes to implement best practice systems, then this presentation will be extremely valuable to you. This is one of the largest IT upgrades undertaken by a community development organisation in the ACT in recent times. WCS has implemented some very interesting systems such as the Zimbra Collaboration Suite which we are confident that members will find very interesting.

After this presentation, the AGM will commence.
CASE Members are encouraged to attend!

Here at CASE we craft affordable IT solutions for not-for-profits and community groups. One area of research has been workgroup collaboration software as it’s a frequently requested service. For a while now we’ve been using VMware’s Zimbra as an alternative for groups that are looking for an Exchange solution. Zimbra is already used by large business and universities and now some of Australia’s most important community service groups use it too.

The Zimbra team is putting on a live webinar entitled “Zimbra vs. Exchange” on the 29th of September that will no doubt be a great introduction to the benefits of their software. If you’d like to know more you can register for the event here.

Back in 2002 CASE bagan conversations with member organsation Volunteers for Isolated Students Education about the challenges involved in managing over 500 volunteer educational tutors assisting families living in remote areas.

The result of working together over next few years resulted in the creation of a project called the ‘Online Volunteer Management System’ which is now central to the the success and operation of an organisation delivering a service much in demand. The OVMS is without a doubt a project that has supported the great work of many wonderful people who are willing to donate their expertise for a great cause. CASE is very proud to partner with VISE in this work.

Every few years VISE volunteers from NT, QLD, ACT and VIC meet to network and build on their work. CASE President Darrell Burkey has the honour of joining them this year in Melbourne, Vic to ensure that the OVMS project is meeting their needs, to gain a better understanding of the challenges they meet and to plan for enhancements of the system.

Everyone at CASE would like to thank VISE for the opportunity to apply our skills in a way that benefits so many Australians and would like to express our best wishes for the continued growth and success of the organisation. It’s been a real honour to work with the many people who make VISE such a wonderful organisation and we’d like to congratulate them on 21 years of operation!