CTT in the News - 2004

Peter Sweatman looks at online charity resources and CITRA

Charity Times - Online Insight Colunm - September 2004
What do you think of “community websites” or online discussion forums ?  For me, they seemed to emerge from silicon valley with the dotcoms (even though many IT firms had been using Lotus Notes and similar things long before).  The world ascribed value to a virtual online community, often as a vehicle to increased sales at a lower cost, and pointed at eBay and Amazon as shining examples.  Yet 9 out of 10 of the online communities that were created failed to deliver on their dream, and in the UK a 56k modem pretty much decimated our forum take-up.

However, the world has changed in two major ways :

• Broadband Arrived:  The growing penetration of high speed internet connections into the office and home environment began to change people’s attitude to and use of the internet in the UK; and
  
  
• Google revolutionized how we find things:  Rapid and powerful search engine technology allowed vast amounts of data to be made relevant to specific enquiries - so we changed the way we thought about getting to information.

I am amazed at how confident I am at being able to quickly find useful information today via the internet.  I google a person’s name before I meet them for the first time, I use google instead of calling directory enquiries and I frequently find it easier to google my way to an organisation’s website because I can’t spell it or recall if it has a dash or an underscore in the title.

So is it time to revisit online resources for charities or should we just let google be our guide ?  My view is that it may just be time to give those forums a brush-off and try again, for two reasons :

• Relevancy and Quality is what is needed by charities when they are addressing specific issues or researching the answer to something that has been done before.  Google gets you 17,564 hits but which of the sites can you trust and who qualifies what is there ?  In the world of online resources, human beings attach comments to useful documents and upload their own when they wish to share it.  The search is contained within the “known world of useful solutions” which has been supplied by people who have a reasonable chance of having been in a similar situation once and approved editors sift out the junk for you;
  
  
• Linked to a Human Being:  While information and technology are “commodities” their value is realized by humans, and more often than not a “word from the wise” is worth a man-week of independent research.  Community sites hold information which was submitted by a person from the community, reviewed by others from the same community and then commented on by yet more of the same group.  The power of being able to rank a search by “usefulness” as defined by a peer group is beginning to be REALLY powerful.

This is why the eight major sector bodies (my own included) representing over 10,000 individuals, charities and not for profit organizations are launching CITRA – the Charity IT Resource Alliance – whose online resources can be found at www.citra.org.uk

Closely adhering to the principles of transparency, free access, balance, relevance and peer-review, CITRA has built a really “beautiful” technology asset.  Based upon open source code, CITRA provides the charity sector’s first robust framework for shared online resources and information relating to technology for charities.  This includes White Papers, Resource Directory, IT News, Events, Newsletters, Alerts, Private Messaging facilities, Blogging, Filtered content based upon ability or interest and fun, immediate polls and surveys.

The combined power of the contributing organizations and founder editors (full list on the site) should provide relevancy and usefulness of the information as it will be tailored to the technology needs of the user simply because, for example, CFDG contributes charity technology information that is relevant to Finance Directors, Institute of Fundraising for the technology needs of fundraisers, CCITDG for Charity IT managers and so on…  The fact that technology understanding and needs flow through every level of a charity’s human capital, a relevant solution needs to address a tailored enquiry and potentially be provided through a naturally existing channel and not a specific new agency.  CITRA is a virtual collaboration with no offices, staff, nor politics.  It is open to all and for all and everyone who registers notionally becomes a part owner in the intellectual capital and the valuable asset that is created.

We’ll see.  9 out of 10 community sites fail to deliver on their dream and our sector has high expectations and is full of beautiful dreams.  CITRA will as good as its community decides and its success will be defined by the value that it adds to your lives and the IT headaches that it hopes to remove.  You be the judge…

Peter Sweatman, Founder