Mark “SCIP” Walker on Internet Fundraising

Mark Walker from SCIP has long been supporting local charities and communities with IT services. Not just through all the work SCIP does in information and computer technologies, but also via the very happening SCIP group email list, which brings people together all around the South Coast.

If that’s not enough, Mark is now researching how to help local charities raise funds via the internet, including a bunch of region specific resources. That’s all part of his role as ICT Champion  for the south east of England.

Read his post on this and the rest of his blog here.

We like lots of the same stuff (To Kill a Mockingbird and Atonement for a start), so it’s great to have found you Mark. Don’t you just love social media for short cutting all that “getting to know you” stuff. I think you can tell a lot about a person by the music/books/films that inspire them.

Resilience or “Trapped in First Life”

I’ve just finished my BarCamp2 presentation, all about resilience when the power goes off. How do we build an ad-hoc communications system from the common component we have lying around? And can we make a local internet without needing more than a few laptops, WiFi/WiMax routers and a few antennas.Here’s the presentation as a PDF:  Resilience or “Trapped in First Life”There was an interesting discussion.. Some key points:

• The difficulty of getting stuff configured. Are we really all that capable at solving networking problems and making stuff work under some pressure?
• How do we practice to test if it works?
• Can we use the One Laptop Per Child as nodes
• We needed this for Hack Day last year :-)
• Running a bunch of servers at home use a lot of power. Replace them with laptops.
• Can we demo/test some of this stuff out at another BarCamp? Could we build a solar powered, operating private Internet at BarCamp.

So, going forward, there is some interest. Next steps? Some research on the idea, I guess. I’ll publish more here under the Resilience category.

Net Neutrality is Important

The Internet as we know it, a delicious, creative free-for-all, is under threat. ISPs and Telcos want to start having a say in what traffic is carried on their networks and how much they can charge for it.

Watch Tim Berners-Lee on Net Neutrality and why it is important