Call for husITa Board member nominations

husITa are now accepting nominations for five open husITa Board positions. The Board has several exciting projects that will be undertaken this coming year, including the implementation of projects and plans to broaden and involve our membership.  To make a nomination (and to vote on Board membership) you must be a member of the husITa mailing list – please feel free to join).…

On visiting infoxchange and making connections.

[avatar user=”Gareth Morgan” align=”left”]Gareth Morgan husITa Board Member[/avatar] Some of the things that the technological developments of the last decades are meant to have achieved are to remove the limitations of distance, make it easy to find out what’s been done elsewhere and share knowledge and experience. Why therefore did people from all over the world make their way to…

Ethical use of social media: The responsibility of human services providers

[avatar user=”Melanie Sage” size=”thumbnail” align=”left”]Melanie Sage husITa Board Member[/avatar] Social media opens up new worlds to connect and communicate. We use blogs (like this one!) or micro-blogging sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to connect with peers, find social support, create new friendships, and gather quick information. For some, these are such natural extensions of our lives that they are…

Hong Kong Democracy Demonstration

The battle for democracy: on the streets and in cyberspace

Hong Kong might seem an unlikely setting for popular democratic struggle. Yet on the 1st of July 2014, in the greatest public demonstration since the 2003 rally to mark the anniversary of Hong Kong’s return its motherland, over half a million people took to the streets. Among the many slogans and appeals, two stood out. Firstly, down with the Chief Executive. The…

Caravan Studios wins husITa best human services app.

The husITa award for the best human services app goes to Caravan Studios (a division of TechSoup Global) for their app Range developed by Marnie Webb. Range is a free app for US youth under 18. Range uses geolocation to identify times and places for free meals when school is out during Summer. It seems shocking that any developed country would need such a service but they do. Congratulations to Marnie and to Caravan Studios for their innovative work in fighting child hunger.

Congratulations also to our runners up ucForward by Ferret Information Systems,  and SafeNight also by Caravan Studios. Thanks to everyone who submitted an entry for your interest, and for your fantastic work in continuing to develop innovative and exciting human service applications.

Thank you for Range Award from Caravan Studios on Vimeo.

W3C group launches forum for human service data standards

There’s a growing recognition that for the human services to be effective, autonomous programs must learn to operate in concert, as though they were parts within a single whole. Making that happen will mean rewiring the sector to share more information across organizational borders. That, in turn, depends on developing strong data standards. There are already important efforts to build standards for…

Designing learning in the attention economy

When petabytes of data are accessible to anyone with a digital device, information is no longer a scarce commodity.  In the information age it is human attention that is in short supply.  This is a well known problem for anyone with a message to communicate on the internet. It’s an even bigger issue for those of us designing learning materials, especially online…

husITa14 program and abstracts

The program for the #husITa14 subtheme of the Joint World Conference on Social Work and Social Development is now available. Each #husITa14 paper has a web page where a powerpoint and audio recording will be accessible after the conference. These pages can also be used to comment and discuss the relevant paper. Please use the hashtag #husITa14 to discuss the program on…