I think it is pretty much impossible to understand how useful or not new online tools are for your personal or organisational use without trying them. It's another world, another language and just translating the technobabble isn't enough. Packages may seem attractive - but you can land up with costly disappointments. You need to make the trip and explore for yourself.
Of course that takes time and quite a bit of effort, and it helps if someone else can offer insights, focus and encouragement. In short, a guide: but then, they need to have done some serious exploration first.
That's a preamble to applauding The Great Web Office Experiment that Miles Maier is starting next week. Miles is the London Region ICT champion, responsible for helping voluntary and community organisations use new technology. He writes:
Inspired by IT Redux’s Office 2.0 and the Dot Organize ‘Organizer’s Toolcrib’ of online tools, the aim is to find out just how easy or hard it is to apply online tools to my everyday tasks. This means no more Outlook for email and calendar, Word or Excel as I’ll be using only online tools to do the same jobs.
My own perception is that online tools have the potential to allow voluntary sector organisations to more easily exploit ICT (which many aren’t doing) and better achieve their organisational goals. However, most of the UK voluntary sector (apart from the big boys like Greenpeace, NSPCC and Oxfam) are not grasping the opportunities of online tools to connect with their stakeholders.
Miles kindly refers to a workshop that Beth Kanter and I ran recently to give people some insights into the use of social media ... while emphasising that his experiment will focus on the day-to-day office tasks rather than wider communications:
For me, the key is going to be showing how online tools can be applied to everyday tasks. David Wilcox and Beth Kanter have develped an excellent social media game that aims to show organisations how they might apply online tools or new media to their business. The question is are web 2.0 tools suitable for business tasks like email, calendar, documents and spreadsheets?
Paul Henderson at Ruralnet did some good work on exploring how small organisations might be trained to use and exploit online tools or new media on the I-See-T project.
My basic criteria for the Web Office that the tools must all be online, free or low cost and sustainable. I’ll be putting up a more detailed page on my web 2.0 experiment next week - this will detail why I’ve chosen the tools below and list a few alternative choices.
Miles give us his starter list (there's more at the Office 2.0 site and Organizer's Toolcrib)
Web Office tools:
- Address Book: Plaxo
- Bookmarks: del.icio.us
- Calculator: Google
- Email: Gmail
- Calendar: Google Calendar
- Documents and Spreadsheets: Zoho
- File Manager: Box.net
- Images: Flickr
- Personalised homepage: Google
- RSS Reader: Google Reader
The intruiging School of Everything, being developed by Paul Miller and friends, also gives the list of tech tools they are using. Some overlap, some difference, so scope for comparing notes. If you are doing something similar, please drop a comment here - or even better on Miles' site.
And that's the other thing I like about the way that Miles and Paul are tackling this: it is a great example of open source thinking. They are prepared to share their exploration and learning in a real context, offering a conversation with other people.
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