Organise online groups

This offers the option to start up a new group and invite people to join.

Members of the group can decide how they want to see their information from this group: through the web only will work for many, others might want a notification by email, and some might want a digest of information to look at in a single chunk per day.

Once again it is important to consider who the members are and how they will react to this sort of flexible online forum; some will jump at the chance for an online debate, others will be a little less enthusiastic.

Technically this service is in beta, although Google’s gmail service was in beta for several years without any major problems.

Google is by no means the only provider of this sort of service, although its setup and use are among the simplest. Yahoo Groups offers similar facilities as well as member polls, and shared links. Meetup is another, with the slight variation in that it aims to unite people who share interests and let them meet up.

If a society wants to recruit new people, it would need to specify a geographical and interest area and then post the date and time of any forthcoming meetings.

These services can also export calendars. The menu can be accessed from the same place and members can transfer the information they need to their own computer.

Data protection
Members might want to use older-style communications, in which case a PC can be used to maintain a mailing list. It is a simple matter of entering address details into a spreadsheet and importing the results into a mailmerged Word document. Word has templates for the most common address label sizes.

The essential thing to remember when keeping information in this way is that the Data Protection Act will almost certainly apply, so registration is essential. This isn’t intimidating and the self-assessment form at http://tinyurl.com/dr8d9 will tell you whether you need to bother.

The regulations are not as stringent as you might think, and as long as a society or club is not selling member information without consent, there is unlikely to be a problem. Remember to keep a mailing list updated; ex-members still receiving group information are unlikely to be impressed.

As members become more familiar with the systems in question, it’s possible that some people will want to use more sophisticated services. Scheduling a meeting and having a natter online are useful functions, and the ability to point to exactly what was said during an online conversation can be invaluable if there is a disagreement.

If you want to create documents online then Google’s Docs project, has some useful features. On the Google calendar homepage there is a link to ‘Docs and Spreadsheets’. Click on this to create a document that will be compatible with Microsoft Word or a spreadsheet that can be imported by Microsoft Excel. This means a document can be accessed from any web browser. Also, multiple members can log on and amend a document, bringing it up to date in real time.

As long as nobody has a copy of the document on a forgotten computer, there should be no problem with people having different versions; it should always be up to date. People can also upload their Word-compatible and Excel-compatible documents, although it is worth noting that Office 2007 users will have to save as .doc and .xls instead of the newer format.

A similar service at www.writeboard.com is worth considering for those wanting to create written documents only and not spreadsheets. Enter a name and password for the Writeboard and invite people to join – the scope for collaborating over a geographical spread is considerable and people can sign up to an RSS feed that will tell them when a document has been updated. People can revert to a previous version of the document, so all of the changes are fully trackable.