Information as a social asset

What role do Information Systems have in social projects? At first sight, very little. Nevertheless, a number of our past projects have enabled us to explore the role of information as a social asset, that is, more than just a means of processing necessary data. Long before the internet became commonplace we explored the potential of multimedia systems in making complex information on 'ethical' products available to customers in retail outlets, an idea we re-used in the Earth Centre at Doncaster.

At the other end of the scale, during the pilot phase of the Warm Zones project, the way that information was managed and processed was key to the success of the programme. We overcame data protection issues to enable valuable existing datasets to contribute to the identification of fuel poor households; we standardised the data capture processes to optimise the work of the doorstep assessors; and we built-in a rigorous model of evaluation from the beginning so that no key questions would remain unanswered after the end of three years.

Increasingly, community-oriented projects have the potential to make better use of ICT (Information and Communication Technology), in terms of the allocation of resources, the use of area-based statistics, and processes of monitoring and evaluation. Both in the central team and from amongst our associates we are able to provide a high degree of expertise, to ensure that the potential for using information positively is fulfilled.

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