New IT blogger Andrew Samuel attempts to get to grips with the Big Society concept and reveals one volunteering event which greatly helped several charities improve their web presence.

"Are these my feet?" This glorious quote comes from Father Jack who was in a typical state of confusion in the wonderful Father Ted TV series. Working to digitally support people in the sector leaves me sharing that degree of confusion at the moment.

Naturally, I have made it my business to try and comprehend the Big Society and civil society concepts. This is because I believe that's what they are: concepts, not strategies nor policies. I think my first clue was the arrival, to little fanfare, of a Spending Challenge website seemingly aimed at public sector people and soliciting ideas on how things could be done cheaply. How very prophetic that was. The website was closed as a forum for open debate after only two weeks of usage due to "malicious attacks". You can now fill in a form instead.

Around the same time was a brand-spanking-new Your Freedom website which asks we commoners to chip in and speak our brains. With a promise on the website that "all ideas and comments will also be aggregated by discussion theme, and the most relevant government department will respond", I'm wondering how efficient the sifting of many thousands of 'ideas' will be?

I think the whole business of uncertainty that government is projecting has been inadvertently summed up by a few new pages on the National Council for Voluntary Organisations' website. The whole purpose of these pages is to gather evidence on what the Big Society is supposed to be. My point being that it speaks volumes that one of the country's largest, most successful national support organisations has to so publicly gather evidence to try and figure out our government’s intentions towards our sector.

Being mindful that there comes a time when one should stop talking about doing something and get on with doing something, I was having a few ideas about good stuff so thought I'd have a quick word with Martha Lane Fox, having learned of her being retained as UK Digital Champion. I found it slightly ironic to find the good lady, as I'm sure she is, somewhat unobtainable digitally and I'm really good at this browsing stuff. So, battling the new feeling of being digitally excluded, I did manage to locate Ms Lane Fox's executive assistant a few weeks ago who assured me that they would get back to me when things were "less hectic". Ahem. Do you need to ask?

Endurance

Meanwhile, the world carries on as ever and typically for the North East, there is always something new and dynamic and heartwarming to behold. I have just attended Webdurance, a 24-hour charity website-building endurance event which saw dozens of talented designers, web developers, copywriters and digital technicians volunteer their time freely to help others.

I've seen the finished results which are fantastic and the six recipient charities that had their websites transformed were truly delighted. Julie Embleton of Azure Charitable Enterprises said: "We found the opportunity of working alongside our team of volunteers exciting and rewarding. It is gratifying to know that there are individuals willing to go the extra mile to help a charity such as Azure. The whole event was fun, stimulating and a credit to the organisers and everyone who took part."

The Webdurance event was organised by brothers Paul and David King of internet software company 1DayLater.com, who simply wanted to help charities reach out to the digital generation. The new websites would have been live by now but typically going the extra mile and at the time of writing this article, Paul and David have wrangled some free hosting for the charities so domain transfers are in progress. Have a peek at the event website to see the results which should be posted very soon.

And I'd like to personally thank every last one of the volunteers who didn't talk about doing something. They did something. Something selfless, worthy and very fine indeed.

Andrew Samuel is the north east regional ICT champion and is based at VONNE (Voluntary Organisations' Network North East)