How to Enter

DesignIT is your opportunity to take £15,000 and apply some creative thinking to improve the IT infrastructure of your chosen charity. If you don’t have a particular charity in mind, don’t worry, as we have asked the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), Leonard Cheshire Disability, Global Action Plan and Fauna and Flora International (FFI) to supply us with a number of problems that require a creative solution. Following the steps outlined below, submit your system design along with a 400-word summary demonstrating a clever use of technology and, where appropriate, a brief budget breakdown.

• Review problems posed by our 4 Charities

Please note: You can submit anything from a picture-perfect Visio diagram to a sketch from a whiteboard. Don’t worry: your system design can include more than just Microsoft technology!

How to enter

1. To submit an entry for DesignIT 2008, please read and accept the Terms and Conditions and Release of Rights
2. Log on to the registration page using Passport by ticking the checkbox below
3. Complete the short registration form, including your full name and email address
4. A submission email will be sent to you, automatically requesting a copy of your system design* and a 400-word summary

Please remember:

• The winning entry will be passed on to a team of Microsoft technical specialists who will work with the winner to deploy their system. The four runners-up will receive £1,000 worth of software from Microsoft. Plus, all five finalists will win a free ticket for IT Forum 2008 in Barcelona.
• The competition will run from 17 December 2007 to 21 March 2008.
• The entries will be reviewed by our judging panel, and a shortlist of ten finalists will have their system designs turned into artwork and exhibited in a top London art gallery. The top five entries will then be put to the public vote to choose the overall winner.

Click the checkbox below to signify that you have read, understood and agreed to the Terms and Conditions of the 'DesignIT 2008 An Innovative Way to Make a Difference' competition.

• Review the Terms and Conditions

*JPEG, TIF, PDF or GIF files can be submitted but they must not exceed 2MB.

Please review problems from DesignIT 2008

1. Fauna and Flora International - Technical Challenge
2. Global Action Plan - Lean and Green IT
3. Leonard Cheshire Disability - 'Ability Blanket'
4. NSPCC - 'Sport case management recording system'
5. A solution for your chosen charity

Fauna and Flora International (FFI) Fauna & Flora International is a leading international conservation organisation which is saving species from extinction and habitats from destruction, whilst improving the livelihoods of local people. We are active in over 40 countries, working mainly where there is little existing capacity to conserve wildlife and wild places.  We are a dynamic, flexible organisation and make choices based on where the conservation need is greatest. We often work with overlooked or unfashionable species or habitats and in difficult conflict and post-conflict areas.

1. Fauna and Flora International - Technical Challenge

Background
Every day across the globe, ecosystems are being degraded or destroyed and species are being pushed to the brink of extinction. Around 80% of the forests that originally covered the Earth have been cleared, fragmented, or degraded over the past 150 years.  Half of these forests have now been lost forever.

Fauna & Flora International (FFI) is working to save species from extinction and habitats from destruction, whilst improving the livelihoods of local people. Our programmes cover Africa, Eurasia, Asia-Pacific and the Americas, supporting projects in over 40 countries. The world's remaining wild life and natural resources face unprecedented threats. If we act now we have a chance of safeguard the natural world’s future; if we don’t, we risk losing much of it forever.

In an ever urbanizing world, our challenge is to help people find a connection with nature. Only when they personally experience its spectacular beauty and its alarming insecurity will they feel motivated to support its conservation. However, most people will never have the chance to visit the jungles of the Amazon or any other biodiversity hotpots. Our job is it to bring it to them. We must make these faraway, exotic places come to life to mobilize action for species and habitat protection.

Problem
According to our recent online questionnaire, a massive 95% of our website users would like to use technology more to open up discussion on conservation issues.  How can we bring conservation closer to people with the use of technology? How can we better link grass roots projects and experts in the field to the public who want to know more and get involved?

If you have any questions about the technical challenge from Fauna and Flora International (FFI), please email us @ designit@microsoft.com

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Global Action Plan Global Action Plan delivers tangible environmental, social and financial improvements by working practically and creatively with hundreds of thousands of people from all sections of society.  In homes, the workplace, schools and the wider community we help to make the small changes that have a big impact on the things that matter.

2. Lean and Green IT

Background
Global Action Plan is an environmental charity with 15 years experience in helping schools, households and businesses reduce their impact on the environment. In December 2007 Global Action Plan released the report “An Inefficient Truth” (available online at www.globalactionplan.org.uk) highlighting the inefficiency of many organisations’ IT hardware, software and systems and the great opportunities for improvement. The manufacture and use of ICT equipment worldwide has a similar carbon footprint to the aviation industry, and whilst having a much lower public profile, the ICT industry contains much simpler and achievable methods to achieve improvement.

As a charity that has developed in terms of manpower and UK locations with the sources of funding and projects that have been secured, Global Action Plan’s ICT has been reorganised and adapted in tandem with organisational change. There are now 30 employees based at 5 disparate UK sites and 20 further home based staff, all of which are dependent on a single server based in the London head office. Staff outside of the London office find connecting to the server time consuming and in-access to e-mail and the server is frequent. Global Action Plan’s only teleconference facility is a telephone conference account.

Problem
To completely redesign the infrastructure of Global Action Plan’s ICT and optimise how Global Action Plan utilises ICT. The charity would like the new system to achieve:

• Minimal new hardware purchase (reducing manufacturing impact on the environment and cost)
• Minimal power requirement of ICT equipment (reducing carbon emissions and operating cost)
• Maximum reliability of access and speed of access to the server for head office and non-head office staff
• Optimal efficiency of data handling (increasing server efficiency and speed)
• Better options for meeting-without-travelling (reducing travel but also improving charity efficiency by allowing more frequent meetings where required and less waiting at train stations!)

If you have any questions about the technical challenge from Global Action Plan (GAP), please email us @designit@microsoft.com

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Leonard Cheshire Disability Leonard Cheshire Disability exists to change attitudes to disability and to serve disabled people around the world. Our principal activity in the UK is the provision of services in support of disabled people in the widest context. These services include care homes, supported living, domiciliary support, day services, resource centres, rehabilitation, respite care, personal support and training and assistance for those looking for work. We operate in all parts of the UK and are the largest voluntary sector provider of care and support services for disabled people. By 2015 we want to be known globally for changing society's attitudes towards disability. Visit the Leonard Cheshire Disability website

3. Leonard Cheshire Disability ‘Ability Blanket’

Background
At the heart of discrimination against disabled people is a single problem: negative attitudes. Too many people do not see ability when they see a person in a wheelchair: they see the chair not the person. At Leonard Cheshire Disability we do not believe that people should be defined by a disability. We believe we should each be defined by what we have to offer the world, by our abilities.

We have an idea that is a fun way to make people think differently about ability. But no amount of ideas amount to anything without the right IT solution to provide the answer to what we are calling the ‘Ability Blanket’.

Problem
We want to create a positive expression of ability on the Internet in which people with and without disabilities have a chance to express their talents. To do this we want to tap into the power of social media. We want to invite people to help build a blanket of virtual squares. Each square will be filled by a person who wants to say what their greatest ability or achievement is and a little bit more information about themselves.

For example, a wheelchair user called Pam may be the curling champion of her local club. A young guy called Steve who does not have a disability might be bi-lingual in English and Russian and can lay claim to having read War and Peace in both languages! What unites these two people is that they both have talents and abilities. Whether you have a disability or not gets put to one side when abilities are put under the spotlight.

Imagine how amazing it would be if thousands of people filled in an ‘ability square’ and created an online blanket of talents. That would help Leonard Cheshire Disability to change the way people see disability by getting people to see themselves and those around them in terms of abilities rather than the limitations that each of us have, regardless of disability.

If you have any further questions about the technical challenge from Leonard Cheshire Disability, please email us @ designit@microsoft.com

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The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) was set up to protect children from cruelty, support vulnerable families, campaign for changes to the law and raise awareness about abuse. They have 177 community-based projects, and run the Child Protection Helpline and ChildLine in the UK and the Channel Islands.

Most of its work is with children, young people and their families. NSPCC also works to achieve cultural, social and political change - influencing legislation, policy, practice, public attitudes and behaviours, and delivering services for the benefit of young people.

• Read about the NSPCC's work with children, young people and their families
• Read about the NSPCC's work to achieve cultural, social and political change
• Read about the NSPCC's public awareness and education efforts
  

4. Sport case management recording system

Background
The NSPCC Child Protection in Sport Unit has been working with sports bodies to ensure children and young people involved in sport are safe. As a consequence of this sport bodies are both collecting and receiving information about reported concerns and other relevant information. In order to both improve the quality of the management of this information and allow for accurate and detailed analysis of this sports bodies and the NSPCC would benefit from the development of a case management system.

Problem
This application should include:

• Record information about incidents, victims, and perpetrators.
• Be able to capture sufficient consistent case information to enable them to be progressed though to resolution.
• Provide simple enquiry facilities to support locating cases by victim, perpetrator, or incident details.
• Allow export of data for local (National Governing Body) monitoring, research and analysis.
• Upload via a secure mechanism anonymous incidence data on resolved cases to a central incident database
• Allow for the development of resources to reduce the incidence of abuse within sport

If you have any further questions about the technical challenge from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), please email us @ designit@microsoft.com

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5. A Charity of Your Choice

Design an IT system for a not-for-profit group or organisation in the UK, excluding the following:

• Religious organisations where the winning prize will be used to fund projects that are designed to promote a particular religion or that require participation in a religious service in order to benefit, or projects that do not relate to work in the community
• Local authorities, local education authorities, learning and skills councils, higher education establishments, tertiary colleges and universities
• Schools, city academies and sixth-form colleges where the winning prize will be used to fund a project that does not relate to the wider community

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