Surepoint blog » information management

Counselling Directory

Rowan Purdy — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:45:12 +0000

Counselling Directory (www.counselling-directory.org.uk) is an online web directory listing counsellors and psychotherapists all over the UK. Each counsellor has a profile stating what areas they specialise in, a bit about their background, and their qualifications. All the counsellors registered have a relevant qualification and insurance cover or proof of registration with a professional body. The site also has a wealth of information about various types of mental health illness, as well as a blog about the latest health news.

The search facility on the site means you simply type in your postcode or town and the site produces a list of all the counsellors in that area, allowing the individual to browse through them and select and contact one that would be exactly suited to their needs. The site is free to use.

The site has been running for four years now. Feedback shows that the Counselling Directory offers a valuable and much needed service for site users and counsellors alike.

Tools to support us to collaboratively build ideas together

Rowan Purdy — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 21:32:42 +0000

Wikis have for a longtime been my favourite for collaborative ideas building. The main weakness seems to be the linear word-process driven approach to ideas capture. Compare this to real world face to face brainstorming sessions where people get out the flip charts, white boards or if you’re really luck the back of the restaurant menu to illustrate their ideas.

Mindjet, one of the leaders in the mind mapping field, have now produced a web-based version of their standalone mind mapping software mind manager. Mindjet Connect allows you to co-edit and share maps simultaneously online in realtime. You can trial it free for 30 days. The pricing information says that it is sold through subscription only on a per annum basis e.g. Mindjet Connect standard would cost roughly £300-£900 / year for 3-9 users.

Relatively new to me is mindmeister, a social networking tool that allows you to create, edit and share mind maps. It offers capability to start an online brainstorming session where people can simultaneously work on the same mind map. There are some interesting features that seek to exploit other useful tools e.g. you can initiate Skype calls directly from your brainstorming session.

Following a quick trawl around to see what’s out there I have put together a mindmap of some of the tools that you might want to try.

Alternatively you can download the mindmap in a variety of formats:

Portable document format (448 KB)
PNG format (76 KB)

Introducing Ubiquity

Rowan Purdy — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:52:46 +0000

A Mozilla labs experiment into connecting the web with language.

Improving information and choice about psychiatric medication

Rowan Purdy — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 21:25:23 +0000

We are supporting a multi-sector partnership project to develop a website www.choiceandmedication.com that offers people information about medications used in the mental health setting to help people make informed decisions about medication.

Background to the work

A previous research project led by the National Institute for Mental Health in England identified the most common questions that professionals and people who use services have about precribed psychiatric medication.

The idea behind the website was to provide an engaging way for people to interact with these questions. These are intended as a starting point to inform discussions and choices about medication.

The site makes a genuine attempt to inform, educate and support. The information it provides is based on published data from well recognised information sources such as national professional bodies.

The website is the result of a multi-sector partnership project involving Norfolk and Waveney Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust, the United Kingdom Psychiatric Pharmacy Group (UKPPG), the National Institute for Mental Health in England (NIMHE) and the Pharmaceutical Schizophrenia Initiative, an Association of British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) affiliated group. We have also consulted with many bodies … read more.

User informed design

We worked with web developers Ichameleon to develop the site. We have encouraged the adoption of a prototyping approach within the project to support better user informed design. The website has been made available for people to engage with it and test early on it’s development cycle.

To support this approach we have developed a range of mechanisms to foster and gather user feedback to inform future development. This includes using open source wiki (Tiki-wiki) and survey (Limesurvey) platforms as well as taking advantage of Google applications and analytics tools.

By working in this way we are:

making best use of freely available technologies to reduce costs
supporting community engagement with the product early on in its lifecycle
generating enthusiasm and excitement about the products future protential
actively listening to what users say they want
gathering detailed intelligence on visitor usage, and
promoting increased confidence amongst project partners and sponsors.

What to do with wikipedia?

Rowan Purdy — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:40:04 +0000

A recent article by William Badke, published in Information Today (March 2008), entitled “What to do with wikipedia?“ challenges the oft quoted antipathy in academic circles towards the online encyclopedia wikipedia.

Badke says

Often banned by professors, panned by traditional reference book publishers, and embraced by just about everyone else, Wikipedia marches on like a great beast, growing larger and more commanding every day. With no paid editors and written by almost anyone, it shouldn’t have succeeded, but it has. In fact, it’s now emerged as the No. 1 go-to information source in the world. It’s used not only by the great unwashed but also by many educated people as well.

Badke recognises that there are denouncers and enthusiasts camped on opposite sites of this social information divide. He urges us to move beyond the impasse by:

encouraging the denouncers from the academic community to embrace wikipedia, improve it and connect it into other digital resources
promoting greater information literacy so that people are better able to evaluate information they find on wikipedia and the wikipedia enthusiasts consult other sources to verify the information they are finding

The e-archiving debate

Rowan Purdy — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 19:14:25 +0000

Arguably, the majority of scientists and scholars seek to have their work published in order to make an impact in their field of work or community of practice. Here we explore the e-archiving debate which pits alternative methods of publishing against the more traditional ones.

Traditionally these authors send reports to publishers in exchange for for effective dissemination services and the unique recognition provided by the publishers who organise new knowledge with authority.

Nevertheless, many authors struggle to be accepted by the publishers of their choice. In addition the charges made for access to ‘peer-reviewed’ journals are clearly a barrier to an author reaching a wide audience.

There is a commonly held view that e-archiving and in particular self-archiving will solve the communication problems faced by many authors. By storing their own works in interconnected and interoperable institutional Archives they can be harvested into global “virtual” archives, citation-linked and freely navigable by all. It is argued that self-archiving should enhance research productivity and impact as well as providing powerful new ways of monitoring and measuring it.

There is a wealth of detailed argument which explores these issues. The best articulation of the e-self-archiving argument I have found is by Harnad, S., Carr, L. & Brody, T. (2001) How and Why To Free All Refereed Research From Access- and Impact-Barriers Online, Now. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/science.htm

I am keen to see the Knowledge Community used by authors who wish to archive their own works and communicate with lively communities of practice. For those authors who are not part of institutions and without access to an archive the KC provides a free to use and ‘ready-made’ archive with a growing audience of active participants to reach out to and explore dialogue with. I would also like to explore with institutions how the KC can be used to feed in content from their archives to support active interaction with the communities of practice.

To help people and their introduction to the debate in a few definitions and some background information may be helpful

What is an archive?

An archive is here understood in it’s broader sense as a repository for stored information

What is an e-archive?

An e-archive is here understood as an electronic repository for stored information

What is self-archiving?

Allows authors to store their own work on-line in their own institution’s (University) electronic repositories

Key drivers behind e-archiving and self-archiving

These include:

increasing access to scholarly research
fostering innovation
enhancing scientific communication

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI)

The OAI http://www.openarchives.org develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The OAI has its roots in an effort to enhance access to e-print archives as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication. However the OAI mission is now more broadly about opening up access to a range of digital materials.

Open in this context means from the architectural perspective – defining and promoting machine interfaces that facilitate the availability of content from a variety of providers. Openness does not mean “free” or “unlimited” access to the information. Some data repositories have adopted protocols which permit more or less unrestricted access to their metadata, while others use various methods to restrict access (e.g., by IP address of origin).

Examples of Open Archives Initiatives include:

The UK FAIR initiative has funded a number of projects to implement OAI
- CURL SHERPA Project http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/
- Project ROMEO http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/
- TARDIS Project http://tardis.eprints.org/ – University of Southampton e-Prints
- DAEDALUS Project http://www.gla.ac.uk/daedalus/
Caltech’s CODA [Collection of Open Digital Archives] has been set-up using the publicly available ePrints.org and the Virginia Tech e-theses software. From July 2002, e-submission of theses at Caltech is now compulsory. Caltech have Use Licences in place for their repositories which identify the rights and conditions which must be accepted if a paper is to be deposited.
CERN Document Server http://cdsware.cern.ch/
Budapest OAI
Lund University, Sweden, have implemented an e-Prints service offering departmental branding which can sit within a departmental websiteLund
FIGARO, a European e-publishing initiative for the academic community. FIGARO will build an e-publishing infrastructure to foster innovation & enhance scientific communication
MIT are using DSpace which has a core digital preservation element and an information model includes a much wider community and aspects of revenue earning on premium services.
Google is using OAI-PMH to harvest information from the National Library of Australia (NLA) Digital Object Repository. For more information see http://www.nla.gov.au/digicoll/oai/

Technical challenges to OAI?

There is freely available software to enable institutions or disciplines to build OAI compliant data providers. For example:

GNU Eprints 2 software http://software.eprints.org – creates Archives compliant with the OAI metadata-tagging Protocol OAI 1.0.
DSpace http://www.dspace.org

Gateway to information about the Freedom of Information Act

Rowan Purdy — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 21:05:34 +0000

JISC has awarded £200,000 to Freedom of Information (FOI) experts from Liverpool John Moores University and MIMAS at the University of Manchester to develop the Information Governance Gateway.

The intention is to provide one centralised resource which pulls together all the relevant information about information governance in one place including signposting people to the best information sources in this field.

Steve Wood, Lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, is the project leader for this work. He maintains the Freedom of Information blog which provides news, views and updates on the UK Freedom of Information Act and worldwide FOI and open government. www.foia.org.uk was winner of “best blog” at the 2005 International Information Industry Awards.

What can Zimbra do for us?

Rowan Purdy — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 21:09:07 +0000

The Zimbra collaboration suite provides an open source web-based communications solution tailored for the small business. This article explores what this new kid on the block has to offer.

Many organisations that I work with today have flexible and mixed working environments. Some staff are office based whilst others are remote workers, working from home or out ‘in the field’ with only occassional visits to the office. The Zimbra collaboration suite provides an open source web-based communications solution tailored for the small business.

The communications challenges facing many small businesses

Effective and efficient communication is crucial to the success of most organisations. However many organisations face infrastructural constraints which prevent communication in a mixed working environment. In practical terms this means that we are unable to store files, share contacts, schedule appointments or administer our email using a single system across the entire organisation. It is often the remote workers who face the biggest barriers as many of the communications tools they use are part of closed systems. This is where web-based communications tools come into their own.

Tools we use to communicate

Most people that I work with use a range of tools to communicate, for example:

Face to face communications, from one to one’s to small group meetings, events, conferences
Phone
Simple Messaging Systems (Text)
Email
Letters
Newsletters, bulletins and briefings
Television and video
CD ROMs
Instant messaging (via laptop)
Video conference (e.g. iChat)
Voice over internet (e.g. Skype, iChat)
Websites
Shared calendars
Social networking sites
Newsreaders
WIKI

What is Zimbra?

The Zimbra Collaboration Suite http://www.zimbra.com/ is an open source technology for messaging and collaboration. It provides support for email, contacts and group calendaring, and consists of a server and client.

What is different about Zimbra?

Zimbra will enable small organisations to make the best use of what they have already got without having to invest huge amounts of money in a typical large scale enterprise solution. This flexibility will provide them with a great number of benefits. In addition Zimbra makes use of the latest web-based innovations which most large scale enterprise solutions are incapable of. For administrators this means easier management, better security and improved performance. For end-users this means its easier to find and share what you want. People will be able to store files, share contacts, schedule appointments or manage our email using a single system across an entire

organisation.

What benefits would Zimbra give small organisations?

Most geographically dispersed organisations with a mixed working environment use a range of email clients, mobile wireless devices, web browsers and operating systems. Zimbra works with all of them.
Zimbra makes it easy to organise, find and share content using powerful search, tagging and collaborative features.
The Zimbra browser client provides seamless integration of email, contacts and calendaring
Zimbra also makes use other popular web services and applications such as Google/Yahoo Maps and Skype.

More information:

If you are interested in finding out more about Zimbra:

read the overview of the technical details and support resources below or more detail in the Zimbra Data Sheet (PDF)
visit http://www.zimbra.com/
try the Flash demo or Hosted demo
ask your email administrator to check out Zimbra
look for third parties that are providing Zimbra as a hosted web service

Overview of the technical details

The Zimbra Server supports existing desktop and wireless personal information management (PIM) clients via standard protocols like POP, IMAP, and iCalendar
Zimbra will work with a range of email clients (Outlook, Mac Mail, Eudora etc), mobile wireless devices (Blackberry, Palm, Nokia, Motorola, PocketPC etc), browsers (InternetExplorer, Firefox, Safari etc) and operating systems (Windows, Mac etc): for example, Outlook, Thunderbird/Sunbird, Apple Mail/iCal, Evolution, Eudora, and Wireless IMAP.
The Zimbra Client is AJAX-based—Asynchronous Javascript on the client with XML/SOAP-based communications to the Zimbra Server, and runs on Windows, Linux, and Apple desktops in Firefox and IE browsers.

Support resources

Developer Zone- share and read ideas and tools to get you started
Forums – ask questions and participate in the Zimbra community
Blog – read and coment on the latest thoughts from the Zimbra team
Contribute- to the improvement of Zimbra
Third-party open source projects- learn more about the open source technologies which Zimbra uses such as Linux, MySQL, Postfix, and Apache
White papers- expert views on a wide range of related subjects
Open source licensing- find out about the terms of the licensing for Zimbra.

NHS good corporate citizenship assessment model launched

Rowan Purdy — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 20:54:24 +0000

As the largest employer in Europe spending £65 billion a year, the NHS is a powerful economic presence. This model is designed to help NHS organisations to look at how they procure and manage services to contribute to healthy outcomes for people who use those services.

Patient opinion

Rowan Purdy — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 19:35:26 +0000

Patient Opinion is all about enabling patients to share their experiences of health care, and by doing so help other patients — and perhaps even change the NHS.

As well as allowing everyone to see what patients are saying about their services, it also offers a way to feed the experience of patients back to the NHS so that their insights and ideas can be put to good use.

Visit the site at www.patientopinion.org