By Tom Purves

Whether you are start up voluntary, coummunity group or charity, or maybe a well established organisation; one of the fundamentals to best practice is to have all your policies, guidelines, constitution, etc all in tact. 

The practicality for start ups is that some of these essential documentation need to be addressed right from the outset.   Any CVS will advise that a constitution needs to exist from the beginning if not for any other reason then to give the group form and function, definition for the management team.  

However the task of creating and construction these neccessary documents can be time consuming and resource intense {human resource that is}, not to forget that most groups that are forming at the beginning are very good at what they do.  They have a passion for the cause and frankly would like to get on with it! 

One pf the reasons that a CVS {Council For the Voluntary Sector} exists is to support and guide groups in this area to make sure that everything is adequate and in its place.  The support and development team for T3SC are committed to making sure that the groups they support  are confident and competent and well equipped for developing and growth.  

Nevertheless the groups themselves need to collate all these documentation.  

Here is where collaboration online comes into play and can make this process essentially a breeze and empowering.

Collaboration online simply means to be able to share.  Tools are now available that allow you to share videos, music, presentations and of course documents.  I want to look at tools that allows collaborating on documents in real time.  This is an area that has really improved dramatically and intends to go much further.  

Real time allows more then one person to be online viewing and editing the document at the same time.   Why would you want to do that? Well, for one it will be just as if you were in the same room as the other person or people;  this frees up the time needed to travel and meet with others and allows those from distances to be able to give an input into the documents.  

Imagine there was an expert who could give valuable input into your document but live 100 miles away you, or even on the other side of the world; physical they can not be there but in the virtual world this is possible.  With real time involvment you can ’sign and seal the deal’ i.e. get the documents viewed and approved by all parties and filed away!

Here is a blog post at  mashable that discusses 5 online collabaration tools.

I did a search using the following shortcodes in Google, children safety policy filetype:pdf and came up with 5,140,000 webpages that are PDFs on ‘Children Safety Policies’.  You could do a search for any type of policy and should come up with results.   The shortcode in Google filetype: means that whichever filetype you put on the end of it, it will find i.e. ppt {powerpoint}, wma {windows media}, etc.  

I choose PDF since it is the most likely to be a policy that has been converted from a .doc to a pdf that is official and can not be altered.  After checking over a few I came across some solid ones that can be used as guidelines to write up my own.  

Also do a search on the Internet for groups or organisations that have similar aims and objective as yours.  If they have a website they have email.  Either send them an email or give them a call, have a chat and ask if you can get a copy of their constitution, policies, etc over to you.  The one thing about this sector is that people are very much into giving.   At the same time you maybe making friends in another county or country that shares your passion and beliefs.

Currently I use Google Docs for my online document collaboration, but will be having discussions with etherpad and the development of its tool.   Its got a long way to go, but could be a surefire winner if they can improve in a few areas.

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