Networking and volunteering

Topics: CVS, third sector, blogging, social networking

I attended a roundtable yesterday at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations on the Community and Voluntary Sectors and ICT supported social networking. Whew...that's a bit of a mouthful. Basically, it's about how IT can help charities get more from their existing relationships between supporters, staff and recipients or create new relationships.

It was great to meet other people - like David Wilcox, whose blog I was familiar with already. And I met other bloggers too, like Nick Booth and Steve Bridger and Molly Webb from Demos. We were all there because we're committed to using new communications tools - like blogs and wikis to support greater interaction, communication and collaboration. Very few of us are really all that technical (I'm certainly not), but we all see these tools as a big opportunity to work in a more open, social and accountable way. And there were a lot of other people there all doing some really interesting work. David Wilcox has started a community site for us to share some of our thoughts in this area at www.mediablends.net

It's part of a project called ICT Foresight and there's alreading some interesting findings - including a publication called campaign and consultation: in the age of participatory media. Although about the voluntary sector, there are some interesting statistics about how much new media tools are used already. There are some case studies which highlight how organisations can engage with users - not just for consultation but for education campaigns and maybe even decision-making. We're not there yet, but these are the signs of participative democracy and co-production online.

online volunteering
As part of the day we also attend and Economic and Social Research Council sponsored seminar on 'ICT, Social Capital and Voluntary Action'. Jayne Craven gave a really interesting presentation on online volunteering (and has some great resources online, too). It really opened my eyes to the way that we need to promote online social networking between public sector professionals. We need to treat online collaboration the same way that we treat participation in benchmarking, speaking at conferences, etc - the things we're aready doing to share information with either altruistic goals in mind or as some kind of way of improving our own professional karma.

In essence, that's what community of practices (like that for Partnerships and Performance Management - PM Partner) are supposed to do. They're a way to share learning with a wider community. But they don't yet have the cache of speaking at a conference. I'm sure that my online activities have helped to share more information about performance management than my conference speaking has - but I'm not sure how much recognition there is for that.

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BTW- here's David Wilcox's take on yesterday's events on his mediablends blog and Molly Webb's, too.


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