Database developments

Yesterday’s conference (21st February, London) on Voluntary Sector Databases was an interesting event. Independently organised it sold out and has a waiting list for a repeat event (due in May).
At the start of the event I was wondering why it was so popular, given that databases have been growing in use in the sector for quite a while. Perhaps the answer is that we are now moving on to the second phase of database use – not starting from a blank sheet but having existing systems which have been forced to adapt to do more (and maybe failing), more than one database system being used in different parts of the organisation and now a perceived need to bring information (or rather data) together to improve efficiency, reporting and quite possibly understanding of the services that the charity provides.

Could this be called ‘Database 2.0′ as per ‘Web 2.0′ being the next stage of web use? Hopefully not – the latter term is used to mean different things by different people, often just to look trendy.

I was facilitating a session on Change Management – see the VolResource wiki  for some thoughts arising from that, and you can add your own contributions on the issues in selecting, developing and implementing too. But what I’d really like is something more of a cross between a blog like this, where comments are encouraged, and a wiki where usually text is updated by different users in isolation. There’s probably a way of setting up the wiki to do that, but I’m not that familiar with the technology.

In the meantime, please feel free make comments or additions whichever way.