Campaigns

Face your online fears

Silver Surfers' DaySilver Surfers’ Day is coming up on the 21st May. Organised by Digital Unite and supported by UK online centres, among others, it’s a national campaign to highlight the opportunities the internet offers people in later life.

As a part of this year’s event, UK online centres are running a special campaign for people to face their online fears, after research reveals that fear is a major blocker to older people making the most of the net.

They say:

If you know someone who is not online why not support the ‘Face your online fears’ campaign and help them to overcome their worries about using the internet. There are ‘Face your online fears’ events happening at 700 UK online centres across England or why not help them to get started at home with our free ‘Face your online fears’ game which will give them an understanding of how to use a keyboard and mouse, online security, and even online shopping. It’s really easy and they could even win a laptop. To find a centre running an event or play the game visit: www.ukonlinecentres.com/faceyouronlinefears

As well as the online game, accessible from anywhere, 700 uk online centres will be supporting Silver Surfers’ Day and Face Your Online Fears.

Pass it on.

Help my village!

Thanks to everone who helped out with this vote, hopefully we will have the results soon and that it will be positive news!

My village’s community centre has the chance tonight to win a £50,000 grant from the People’s Millions. There is going to be a piece on the local news on ITV tonight during the 6pm broadcast, and telephone votes will determined which project wins the money.

Cottenham Community Centre needs the money to help convert the old Methodist Chapel in the village into a thriving community hub, including a coffee shop and other resources to help bring the people of the village together.

If you get the chance, please call 0871 6268804 before midnight tonight to register your vote. More details are below:

CottenhamCommunityCentre

Teach us a Lesson

I’ve been working with BIS and Becta quite a bit recently on the Learning Revolution project, which is all about improving access to informal adult learning – that is, learning which doesn’t generally mean a qualification. So, stuff like book groups, choirs, yoga classes, basic computer skills. That sort of thing.

One part of this project was helping to manage the delivery of a DirectGov hosted website, ably put together by the Dextrous Web team, which provided an interactive calendar and map for the Festival of Learning throughout October. It’s a lovely looking site with a load of interesting features. We also have been running an online community, on good old Ning, for providers of this type of learning to get together and share knowledge and information.

But there remains a question over how a national, permanent directory of informal learning might work, and what it would look like. To try and find out, Becta have launched a competition, called Teach us a Lesson.

It’s based on Show us a Better Way, and allows ideas to be submitted from anybody. These will be vetted for filth and stupidity, before going live on the site, and other users will be able to comment and rate them.

As the ideas flow in, we’ll be organising an unconference in November, to get everyone together to connect and collaborative on ideas that fit well together. After that, the best projects will be judged, with a pot of £25,000 being split amongst up to five projects, so that prototypes can be delivered by March 2010 at the latest.

If you have any ideas on how such a directory might work – which could be anything from “I think it ought to be blue!” to “I know the SQL syntax we need to make this work” (I know, I know, I haven’t a clue what I’m talking about…) – then do submit them into the site and be a part of this exciting initiative.

Let’s predict the lottery!

I rather enjoyed the Derren Brown stuff this week around predicting the lottery numbers. It was enjoyable and entertaining, and anyone expecting anything approaching seriousness was always going to be disappointed.

But what of averaging out the views of the many to predict randomness?

I’ve set up Let’s predict the lottery! to do just that. Enter your favourite lottery number picks, and on Saturday 19th September, I’ll buy a ticket using the average numbers of all those who contribute.

We won’t win, of course. It’s a load of nonsense. But if, if, we do, I’ll think of something fun and good to do with the lolly. Which won’t involve keeping it myself.

I promise.

Mash the State

Mash the State is a campaign to “encourage UK government and public sector organisations to make their data available to the general public.”

The first part of the campaign is dedicated to getting local authorities in the UK using RSS to disseminate information from their websites. Currently only 66 of 434 local councils currently produce RSS.

Helpfully, a PDF one pager has been published to explain why this is a good idea. There is also a blog so you can keep up with developments.

Mash the State is the brainchild of Adrian Short, who has also founded a civic hacking club in Sutton, London; and developed a rather neat local news aggregator.

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