Celebrating IT flair in the community

With the announcement of this year’s UK IT Industry Awards winners just weeks away, we focus on the 10 contenders for the title Community Project of the Year

UK Safer Internet Centre

The UK Safer Internet Centre provides a helpline for professionals and volunteers working with children and young people in the UK, specifically tackling the area of e-safety. The helpline provides support and advice around issues such as social networking, cyber-bullying, online gaming and child protection.

Cancer Research UK’s Cambridge Research Institute

Cancer Research UK’s Cambridge Research Institute (CRI), specialises in practical high-quality research addressing issues surrounding cancer diagnosis, treatment and prevention. A new next-generation sequencing platform was producing too much data for CRI’s IT systems to handle so CRI deployed Platform Computing’s HPC software.

WORLDwrite

WORLDbytes, run by the charity WORLDwrite, is the first and currently only online citizen TV channel facilitating excellence in citizen reporting with excluded young people. In just two years its School of Citizen TV has equipped more than 500 young disadvantaged volunteers to produce 200 web-based news programmes watched, so far, by more than 450,000 genuine viewers.

The Prince’s Trust and MSM Software

The Prince’s Trust has identified significant new funding opportunities through a new software solution designed and implemented by MSM Software. The Prince’s Trust revolutionised the process of bidding for funds through a cloud-based centralised data solution that has transformed the charity. The solution also helped The Prince’s Trust identify that it was not bidding for all the funding available to it.

South West Grid for Learning (SWGfL)

SWGfL’s 360 Degree Safe is an innovative and user friendly online tool that allows schools to review their e-safety provision, identify strengths and weaknesses and develop an improvement action plan. It can be used free of charge by any school and provides a unique database of current and relevant data on the state of e-safety in schools.

Go ON Adopt

With six million older people currently offline and around 450,000 care home and 700,000 housing scheme residents in the UK, Go ON Adopt aims to encourage every school, college or association in the UK to adopt a local care home or housing scheme, to help engage residents in the benefits of the web.

Beam SRC - HealthMate

HealthMate uses risk monitoring, analysis and management practices to help ordinary people monitor lifestyle parameters, identify and counteract risky aspects of lifestyle and lead healthy and happy lives, with fewer long-term health issues and associated burden on the healthcare system.

World Vision UK - Microloans

World Vision UK’s Microloans project is an innovative pilot scheme offering online users a new way to empower hardworking people with ideas for small businesses in developing countries. The project uses digital channels to enable users to make small monthly donations, which fund business loans. This allows entrepreneurs in the developing world to create better lives for themselves and their children.

Zoological Society of London - iBats

Wild nature is declining rapidly as humans use more of earth’s resources, better tools are needed to monitor wildlife populations. Zoological Society of London and Bat Conservation Trust have created iBats – a global citizen science project where changes in bat populations are tracked by recording bat echolocation calls. A data portal manages and analyses uploaded data, and the smartphone “iBats app” records geo-referenced bat echolocation calls and uploads them from people’s mobile phones.

Community Gateway Association

The Community Gateway Association and Preston City Council have harnessed the latest wireless networking technology to improve the connectivity of 11 offices and community centres in and around Preston, and provide a high-speed link between the two organisations to enable disaster recovery. In future, the network will be used to offer internet services to council tenants and mobile CCTV solutions where needed.

The awards, run by Computing and the BCS, showcase innovation, excellence and best practice. The winners will be announced at a lavish prize-giving dinner at London’s Battersea Park Arena on 10 November.

To view the full list of finalists for each award, and to book your table, visit our web site.