Technology News
An invitation to help local government prepare for tomorrow today
Local services to the public in the 21st century
The LGA and the Government Horizon Scanning Centre have started a wiki inviting contributions on how local services can meet the needs of the public in the 21st century. Keep an eye on this as it promises to be a rich resource, pulling together knowledge and ideas from those involved in both futures work and local and public services.
Their hopes for this website may well look familiar with those of you who use the NCVO Third Sector Foresight...
‘One small step for man….’
I recently read an interesting article about individual responses to environmental change. The main thrust of the piece centred on the fact that steps taken by one person can lead others to do the same. The author termed it ‘viral social change’ and it seems to me that this is probably the biggest influencer of people’s behaviour in all manner of things. It’s the modern version of ‘lead by example’ but this current change relies more on peer leadership than anything else. This is quite...
The relationship between technological and social change
I'm still reading Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. In describing how the internet has disrupted the world of journalism and publishing, Shirky uses the example of the invention of movable type in the 15th century, and the impact that this had on scribes. The point he is trying to get across is the relationship between technological change and social change.
When researching the ICT Foresight reports I often found myself in discussions with our expert panel about technological determinism...
Membership in the future
I wrote this think piece as the basis of a presentation on the drivers shaping the future of membership, for the NCVO membership schemes conference on the 22 April. It draws on lots of our previous work, including on public attitudes in the last Voluntary Sector Strategic Analysis, the ICT Foresight work and our Future Focus guides on social attitudes and volunteering. It will inform our proposed project on the future of membership which we are developing with colleagues at the RSA, Ruralnet ...
Here Comes Everybody, and the future of membership
I am reading the new book by Clay Shirky, Here comes everybody – the power of organizing without organizations. In the book Clay explores how social media is changing organised activity. The two chapters I've read so far have unpicked the power of networks and lower barriers to publishing, and the shifts that mean that loosely affiliated groups can often now be more effective than hierarchical institutions. It's an excellent read and I'd recommend it to all in our sector. Why? I'll let Clay...
How ICT is shaping the future design and delivery of public services
The fourth in our series of ICT Foresight reports is now available. As a taster, here is the summary of the report (with thanks to David Wilcox who wrote the summary for me!)
This report presents a challenging picture of the future for voluntary and community organisations (VCOs) aiming to deliver public services in new ways, using ICT. On the one hand users will have increasingly high expectations of how information and services should be available online, based in part on their retail...
Making new connections online
2007 was a big year for 'social networking': facebook and similar sites were rarely out of the news. I spent an enormous amount of time thinking about it, as I was also writing the second of our ICT Foresight reports - 'how online communities can make the net work for the VCS' and from anecdotal evidence it appears that the sector is beginning to get to grips with the potential of online communities, both 'bounded' groups (eg forums that people log-in to join) and the more flexible networks...
Postcards from the music industry
So what exactly does, you are already thinking, the music industry have to do with the voluntary and community sector? Well aside from the obvious that many VCOs are in the business of making or performing music, the recorded music industry is going through the sort of structural changes that seem to be relevant for our sector. Let me explain.
Record companies have traditionally generated revenue from selling content generated by a roster of artists contracted to them. This intellectual...
Where next for ICT Foresight?
Since 2005 we have been thinking about the impact of new technologies on the sector under the umbrella of a project called ICT Foresight (funded initially by the Vodafone UK Foundation and more recently by the ICT Hub). In doing so we've had lots of fantastic discussions with forward thinking people from inside and out of our sector, published 3 reports (with one more on the way) and ran a fascinating seminar.
But ICT Foresight is coming to an end, so a few weeks ago Karl and I went to...
The impact of new technologies on the VCS - free seminar report
The seminar report from the last Third Sector Foresight seminar on the impact of new technologies on the VCS is now available to download. The seminar explored the implications of new technologies for the VCS, focusing on the key areas of: fundraising; membership; accountability; campaigning; and collaboration. The report is based on presentations by five ‘experts’ in the area of new technologies, and the discussion they stimulated amongst seminar attendees:
- Steve Bridger, nfp2.0 –...
