Bright One is a volunteer-run communications agency for the third sector, offering third sector organisations affordable yet effective communications by bringing together communications professionals and volunteers from a range of backgrounds. It’s just celebrated its first anniversary and now has appointed four new ambassadors, details in this PR Week article, one of whom will be well known to FIR fans

If you need communications support, such as campaign planning and implementation, media relations, media training, creative copywriting, press release drafting and distribution, audience mapping, blogger relations, social media, etc then why not get in touch with them and see if they can help?

If you’re a communications professional and you’d like to volunteer to help third sector organisations, then why not contact them and see what you can do?

Their website is at http://brightone.org.uk/

If you’re looking for a comprehensive monitoring solution for your organisation’s infrastructure, OSSEC is a scalable, multi-platform, open source Host-based Intrusion Detection System (HIDS). It has a powerful correlation and analysis engine, integrating log analysis, file integrity checking, Windows registry monitoring, centralized policy enforcement, rootkit detection, real-time alerting and active response.

It runs on most operating systems, including Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, MacOS, Solaris and Windows. A list with all supported platforms is available here. The download link is here

The interactive Smart Chart 3.0 is an online tool that can help you make and assess strategic decisions and it’s free to nonprofit organisations. If you’re looking to create a communications strategy for your organisation, this could be just what you need to get started

Excellent new resource from the Tactical Technology Collective and Front Line.  Security in-a-box includes a How-to Booklet, which addresses a number of important digital security issues. It also provides a collection of Hands-on Guides, each of which includes a particular freeware or open source software tool, as well as instructions on how you can use that tool to secure your computer, protect your information or maintain the privacy of your Internet communication. There are also details of Portable security software. It is well worth reading.

Useful report from Freeform Dynamics about using Linux in your business – a practical look at the use of desktop Linux in a business context – http://www.freeformdynamics.com/fullarticle.asp?aid=678

Interesting post from Jakob Neilsen, about a new report with case studies, you can see what other organisations have done and maybe guide the decision/implementation process for your organisation if this is something you’re considering. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/social-intranet-features.html

MobileActive.org has a very useful article about using SMS and software to run a messaging campaign for your organisation – http://mobileactive.org/howtos/setting-sms-campaign-your-desktop

The H is about security and open source topics and has regularly updated news and features, subscribe to their RSS feeds and keep up to date automatically.

eBox Platform is a unified network server that offers easy and efficient computer network administration for SMBs. It can act as a Gateway, an Infrastructure Manager, a Unified Threat Manager, an Office Server, a Unified Communication Server or a combination of them. These functionalities are tightly integrated, automating most tasks, avoiding mistakes and saving time for system administrators.

This looks to be well worth investigating, here is an overview of the latest version eBox 1.2 Overview

Very interesting post (3rd in a series) from Neil Hopkin’s blog on Free Web 2.0 Leadership and Information Management software with an excellent list of resources you could use to support your organisation and your work. The previous two posts in the series also contain some very useful links.