Things tagged ‘sustainability’

Ian and I were at a community IT event a couple of weeks ago. The aim was to connect design agencies with community groups who needed assistance with their online presence. It reminded me of how differently people see technology – annoyance, tool, magic or secret club.

Community groups are used to doing things themselves, and more than one of them had tumbled down the rabbit hole with a Dreamweaver book in hand. I wanted to make the point that it’s more important that they can articulate their needs and find willing helpers than it is to understand the technology details.

Ian took the opposite view – that people have inflated expectations of new media, and that if they expect to be running a publishing system they have to learn the language and workflow of the tools they’ll be using.

In a way it comes down to roles – you need someone who can draw the organisational big picture, and someone who understands how to format posts in Wordpress. In community organisations these roles often fall on the same person, and thinking about their online presence from such different vantage points can be difficult.

Footsie, our idea to help businesses reduce their carbon footprint, has been shortlisted for the Social Innovation Camp in December.

Please vote for it! Your votes will send it to the camp, where we’ll be able to spend a weekend knocking the idea into shape and working out where to take it next.

And where would that be? Maybe Unltd? Our plan is to get seed funding to work up the idea into a business plan and pitch. Then we’d start approaching businesses who might be interested in sponsoring the project. With four businesses involved, we’d have a set of beta testers and enough money to build the site.

But first we need your votes…

We’ve been talking to a couple of climate change organisations recently, and it’s inspired us to start thinking about how online environments can help individuals and organisations adapt.

What’s the goal here — to raise awareness? No — everyone knows we’re in an eighteen-wheeler heading for the cliff. We know this. We’re just too paralysed to steer. (For anyone who wants to understand how we got to this point, and how much worse the situation is than they realise, watch this gripping video). (more…)

Update: we were shortlisted for Social Innovation Camp.

Footsie will help larger businesses develop a carbon-reduction strategy through a game experience of pledges and prediction markets.

It’s a collaborative tool which will engage all staff in planning, implementing, monitoring and evaluating change strategies – all with a few minutes of engagement a week. (more…)

If you are thinking about commissioning work on your existing or new website, you’re going to want to write a brief to give to your developer/designer at some point so they know what you want. Here are some topics to get you thinking in the right direction and help you do just that.

What do you need a website for?

It may sound like a daft question, but it is at the top of the list for good reason. Even if you have an existing website, ask yourself the same question again. What do you need it to do for you? What are your short and long-term business goals? Do you need to raise awareness of your product? Increase sales by widening your audience? Get your brand message across to a new audience? Once you’ve really know what it needs to do, we can start to think about how we can achieve it… This question will help us define what the key design and functionality needs to be.

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