Sharing information

I'm working on how we share information inside our organisation. Some information is available on our intranet, but it tends to be information about the IT department that people need to know. Using an intranet is a very "IT" thing to do. It occurred to me that in any given organisation, not necessarily ours, that various departments could use various methods:

• IT create an intranet
• Maintenance/Facilities Management put a noticeboard on the wall
• Personnel hold an information sharing meeting
• Catering hold a meeting in the dining room with free cake
• Finance put a message on the bottom of a financial statement
• Marketing/PR create a glossy leaflet and circulate it
• Fundraising send an up-beat email
• Legal send a sternly worded email with lots of bold bits
• Cleaning leave a note on your desk

Of course, the method of sharing should be appropriate to the audience, not the author of the information. What other methods could other departments use?

A sight to make an IT Director's heart glad

These are some discarded filing trays in a store room. This means that people need paper less, which means less printing, which means less use of printers that keep going wrong. Not that I'm against paper altogether (and there are more pieces of paper on my desk since I wrote that). However there is a good case for using it less where it makes sense. In fact several good cases.

Letter sweep

I liked the idea of Tim Bray's letter sweep http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2011/03/03/ABC so I've done the same thing.

[a]mazon.co.uk - birthday presents, the odd CD for me.
[b]logger.com - editing this blog.
[c]olly.com - web designers blog. If I click through his feed from Google Reader it never works, so I go straight to his site. Perhaps I ought to tell him.
[d]ownforeveryoneorjustme.com - Useful if a site goes down.
[e]urotp.org - the website of our training organisation. At the moment I'm in between reworks.
[f]acebook.com - like [insert latest stat here]% of the population.
[g]uardian.co.uk - I heart The Guardian.
[h]something - our local intranet.
[i]something - our organisation wide intranet.
[j]obs.wycliffe.org - runs a couple of apps listing vacancies and asking lots of questions of potential recruits.
[k]ingsgateuk.com - I was finding out this churches postcode.
[l]not disclosed for security reasons
[m]anypies.paulmorriss.com - this blog.
[n]ews.bbc.co.uk/weather/ - always good to know.
[o]utlook-trust.org - they use some of our spare office space. We have more available!
[p]aulmorriss.com - my site.
[q] - no default, but the most useful on in the suggested list was this interesting article quora.com/Microsoft/Why-doesnt-Microsoft-understand-tablets.
[r]eplay.waybackmachine.org - previous versions of websites.
[s]tackoverflow.com - top quality programming answers.
[t]echmeme.com - tech news aggregator.
[u]nionbaptist.org - my church.
[v]alidator.w3.org - essential web developers tool.
[w]ycliffe.org.uk - our website, I'm always working on minor changes.
[x] - no default, the most useful was this site about wikis built on the engine that stackoverflow.com uses (don't know why it came up under x).
[y] - no default, though I do visit youtube.com .
[z] - no default, though my recent search for "zero inbox" was at the top.

Is an email address personal data?

I was at a Data Protection seminar last week and this question came up. The answer was "yes, if the email address contains a name". However I wondered if that's always so clear cut:

Alternatives to Dabbledb - my conclusion

This is a follow up to this article - Alternatives to Dabbledb.
In the end I picked Teamdesk (but see update at the end). Here are my conclusions.

Zoho Creator
The deal breaker with this one was that you couldn't display parent records and child records on the same page. Also, according to one person their support isn't so good. From what I can tell they only have one person assigned to support.

So in the end it came down to Infodome or Teamdesk. Looking at their respective pages with wishlists of features it looked like Teamdesk had more people using it. Also, the fact that Teamdesk has other products was encouraging, as it meant that their income wasn't vulnerable to the popularity of one product.

As I started implementing I struggled with the complexity of our data, with four levels of relations to nest. However that's the limitation of these web interfaces and programming-free approach. There were also some niggly things with the way that relations worked, but I could have lived with those.

Due to external reasons we're thinking of using another system to manage the data.

(Update 18 March 2011 - That other system is Highrise, and we've decided to go with that instead. That's not because of a shortcoming of Teamdesk - it is a good equivalent to Dabbledb. However the nature of the data is about people - contacts and cases, not so suited to a rigid database format like Teamdesk or Dabbledb.)

How long have you got? 1 second to a lifetime?

I hope readers of this "work" blog will appreciate the fact that I don't promote the organisation I work for ad nauseum. However I came up with this list a while back. I'm not aware of any concious effort on behalf of our marketing team to cater for every timescale, it just seems to have worked out like that.

If you have...
1 second - like Wycliffe Bible Translators UK on Facebook.
1 minute - pray
1 hour - From Eden to Eternity (actually it's a bit over an hour, but I'm sure you won't notice the time going).
1 day - Wycliffe and Me
1 week - Window on Wycliffe
1 month - Engage
1 year - One-to-One
1 lifetime - long term work

Finding out about IT in Wycliffe

We're holding an event so that you can find out about IT in Wycliffe, not just in the UK office, but in all the places where Wycliffe works in the world. It's called Check IT Out.