How many times has your private data been lost?

The Open Rights Group has put a survey online that leads you through a quick 28 questions and then reports how many times your private records have been lost by bungling government and private organisations recently.  Those are my results above. 2 possible losses, one certain.

Do this.  Get a sense of what data loss means and why it matters to you.    Oh, and the Open Rights Group really needs your support.

Link

People + Blog + Education = Fish

So far so good on our new project with SCIP Mark Walker (South East Regional ICT Champion and the man behind the ever-popular SCIP-list, amongst many other things) and the Coldean Resident’s Association. They approached SCIP wanting to be given a fish and, yep, we offered to teach them how to fish.

The fish they wanted would probably have gotten rigamortis pretty quickly. That is, when people hand over the power to publish, when the ask other people to build them a website, time and cost restraints often mean their websites die. Especially if they haven’t budgeted for a content management system at the back end and training for those that directly need it. And even then, it doesn’t necessarily make life easy for the novice.

If content can’t be added or changed easily, if we don’t learn how to do it ourselves, then our websites can get really stale and we all lose interest.

The cool folk at Coldean have taken our suggestion and run with it beautifully. After only two sessions, they have:

- imagined their very own community webspace into being, as a living, breathing, online gathering…

…where various sectors of their community from young to elderly can be informed, connected, maybe even inspired to get involved online and at meetings, etc. Online via comments, contributions (including logins to upload their own articles), feedback via private email.

- created a test website using Wordpress, and started adding pages, posts, words and images

- started identifying key roles and tasks for building and sustaining (eg. webmaster, editor, contributors)

- thought about how to launch the site and encourage people to engage with it

- begun an understanding of the wider online world and how it is changing and growing

The test site is already No. 1 in Wordpress community for “Coldean”, and no doubt when they launch it will be at the top of the Google ranking, making it easy for people to access (hopefully) up-to-date, interesting, relevant information about what’s happening and what matters in their own area. (Actually it’s already No. 2 for Coldean + Christmas and probably a range of other expressions.)

It’s been a delight to work with everyone and I’m looking forward to seeing where things go next – with Coldean and with SCIP Mark. One thought I am having now is, it would good to get Coldean contributing to their wikipedia entry, which is always a way to build debate and involvement!

Fresh fish for everyone, and a pond to grow them in (with apologies to the Vegans out there).

Now off to meet Mark and see where things are going next… personally I would like to see this service made more widely available to others in this community and beyond! All very affordable in the short and longer term too.