Nick and Paul attended this meeting, of various users, developers and potential users of CiviCRM. We were treated to a useful demo of the software working with Drupal on the VOSCUR site  and being used to generate its browsable directories of organisations.

It was useful to see how the software is increasingly able to handle a range of requirements around membership management and communications alongside the core contact management.

More on themeeting can be found on the  CiviCRm wiki

I attended the meeting of the Inclusive Digital Economy Network in Newcastle over the last couple of days.

The focus of this work is the identification of research priorities to ensure that older people and other commonly excluded groups are included in the future growth of the digital economy

Discussion focused on three main areas:-

• Interaction
• Responsive environments
• Social networking, including social health care

The keynote came from Gregg Vanderheiden from the Trace centre, who spoke about the difficulty of accessibilty keeping up with the pace of change in web and other technologies. He introduced the “Raising the Floor” initiative to develop an open source accessibility core for software development, into which a range of accessible interfaces could be plugged.

I joined the social networking group, which identified a range of issues and priorities for research in enabling excluded groups from using and benefiting from social networking technologies. Some key areas of interest included:

• Community analysis of the existing networks that older people belong to: including voluntary and involuntary, geographically local and dispersed.
• Ways to simplify and filter existing networking platforms
• Alternatives to text-based networking
• Participatory methods for the design of social networking
• Evaluation techniques and methods for assessing the success of existing initiatives