EdRoss
Real Name: Ed Ross
Portsmouth, Hampshire (United Kingdom)
Service Desk - Level 2 - Provisioning
Biography
I was born in 1982, so computers have "grown up" with me.
I studied Computing at the University of Portsmouth, and went to full time youth work with Solent Youth for Christ for three years. After that I worked for a financial institution, and from there moved on the the Youth With a Mission "Discipleship Training School" course.
Now I work for a company with provides Hosted Exchange accounts (and other technical things, such as web hosting and Hosted CRM accounts). I am in the "Provisioning" team, actually setting up the accounts.
I got married in October 2009.
I am a Geek. I love God.
Latest Contributions
Critique of edross.co.uk
I'm interested in your views of my personal site: Ed Ross. There isn't much there. What do you think it needs? What do you think I should change? Any other views?
Community Guidelines
Is it time for a set of Community Guidelines for this site to be published - in a similar style to Flickr's Community Guidelines perhaps?
Building community
Episode 65 of the FLOSS Weekly podcast featured an interview with Jono Bacon, community manager for the Ubuntu Linux distribution.
He talks about what it takes to manage a community in terms of his experience in the world of Linux, but he makes the point that the methods could easily applied to other communities too.
He is writing a book: The Art Of Community which is about building and managing communities.
He uses stories as a teaching method to describe how to bring together a community.
Web Slices: increase usefulness of your web site
Web Slices are a new feature in Internet Explorer 8 that allow users to quickly see updates to sections of a web site (for example, seeing the latest bid of an item on ebay). There is a guide to creating web slices available and also a Firefox extension for web slices to make them work in that browser too.
Increasing Online Giving to Non-Profits and Charities
Today I found this article: Donation Usability: Increasing Online Giving to Non-Profits and Charities, by Jakob Nielsen, which is summarized with:
User research finds significant deficiencies in non-profit organizations' website content, which often fails to provide the info people need to make donation decisions.
You might find it interesting reading. What have you found to work when it comes to online donations?
