IT in action case studies

Race Online (a UK organisation dedicated to digital inclusion) thanked the list for its case study ideas, and shared their report, Survive & Thrive - a casebook of charity sustainability through technology with case studies on how charities are making the most of IT. And PublicZone shared their new guide to user research and testing, also available free: “chock full of great insights” according to one ECFer.

Clicktivism, slacktivism, schmacktivism

The #ecfdebate brought together 6 panellists with strong views on the subject: you can view their presentations and video of the discussion, or catch up with other online two penceworth's. My fave – the Theos poll showing increasing willingness of the British to contemplate direct action. (Though last Saturday's arrests of peaceful protesters might have put them off...)

Photomosaics

Lots of suggestions of ways to do a photomosaic on your site, including services from Shoothill and Earthware.

Two people recommended combining the free services Zoomify and Andreamosaic and OneWorld offered to share the technology developed for the tcktcktck interactive globe mosaic.

Also mentioned were Jimage- mosaic and the online Coverpop service.

Splash screens/ Hijacks

A few tips on splash screens/home page hijacks: “Key is cross-browser testing, do take your time for that, IE7 gives a lot of problems. Try to implement the use of the screen in your CMS. Also important: use BIG text and a crystal clear closing button. People tend not to look any longer than a few seconds at a splashpage”

Also one detailed case study of a particularly successful home page hijack – where the New York Public Libraries used their home page for a month to alert over a million unique site visitors to a threat to library funding.

Live streaming

All you need is a webcam, a microphone, a computer and a robust enough internet connection it seems (though the oneline attendees to the #ecfdebate can vouch for the last being the tough bit!) justin.tv and ustream.com mentioned as services to use.

Captioning video

Including captions/ subtitles in your online videos improves searchability and accessibility. The 'Caption it yourself' pages have lots of useful info and ideas about how to do just that, and this Mashable article steps you how to add captions using Google's CaptionTube web app, or upload a transcript and use Google’s speech recognition technology to automatically assign the right times to each caption.

Timelines

Some enthusiastic endorsement of the Dipity tool for generating timelines – helpful for telling the story of a campaign so far. eg and a vote for storify, though I've yet to see a great campaign example. (Anyone?) Here's the story about how not to share your holiday snaps (if you've spent your holidays shooting elephants and you own a company.)

UK law – copyright and online advertising

A few legal issues this month, including quite a bit of head scratching over what UK copyright law allows you do in the name of 'fair use' when responding to claims and material that a company has published online. The Open Rights group are organising a training, and campaigning on copyright issues.

The UK advertising code of practice has now been extended to websites, online advertising and social media channels. As well as new ways to hold companies to account, this means new responsibilities for campaigning groups – UK development charities network BOND have this online guide to the implications of the CAP code

Google for non-profits

Just for the US for now, but Google's package of services for non-profits will presumably be extended at some point, so worth watching. "a marketplace of Certified Google Partners (in Adwords, Apps, Analytics, Website Optimizer, Geo and more) that have offered to help nonprofits optimize Google tools at a special discounted rate or pro-bono”

Social media policies

Linking with the discussions at the ECF event about how organisations manage social media (See Liam's presentation and notes from the small group session ), some suggestions of social media policies to browse and even a policy generator!