My Volunteer Experience Edward Windsor

Photo: Edward Windsor volunteering remotely, working on SAcommunity email updates

SAcommunity wanted to highlight our affection for 'the old guard', our experienced and established SAcommunity veterans. People who make up our core team, and return each week to volunteer and keep the service running. They assist us in decision-making, idea development and implementation, check and create processes, and critically, help our new volunteers and interns find their feet at our organisation and in a new office environment. We felt we were more than overdue to introduce, acknowledge and thank some of our team members. 

Edward joined our Customer Service Team as a volunteer on 20 September 2019.
He attends for 4 hours remotely across the week to answer and respond to SAcommunity emails and is an essential part of our service.

Total Hours 906 This Year 109 Joined 20 September 2019 Last Check-in 14 October 2024

Personal Biography
Edward came to Connecting Up, a service of Infoxchange on 20 September 2019 from an extensive background in IT-based Retail and Customer Service. He has a keen interest in IT and related technologies, and has studied and completed a Certificate III in Information and Technology and Media from TAFE.

Edward regularly provides SAcommunity updates each week, volunteering initially onsite, he now works remotely to assist the service. He consistently and thoroughly attends to the large number of emails and updates received each week through SAcommunity channels, checking information provided, adding to the database and making calls as needed, enabling him to maintain his previous customer service experience as a key part of our SAcommunity Customer Service Team. 

In particular, Edward displays great information seeking skills in searching for and unravelling data on some of our mystery organisations. Using search engines to find their service's digital footprints across the web through various websites, ACNC, ABN lookup, parent bodies, local news articles, to checking their locations on Google maps to identify updates, merges or service closures, 'for sale' signs are good indications the service may have moved on.




SAcommunity - Customer Service Team
Edward's works in the Customer Service Team involves responding to the many emails received by SAcommunity and checking any services updates against online sources and verifying by phone with community services themselves. He has continued volunteering with us remotely each week, aiming to complete 4 hours a week taking place over multiple sessions of half-an hour or 1 hour, since starting with us in 2019, completing more than 745 hours in total at last count by September 2023, 145 hours over 2023 this year.

It's great to catch up with Edward online and as possible, hear his news in the SAcommunity Team meetings through Microsoft Teams. It gives us an opportunity to listen to his reports on the volunteer tasks he is undertaking, examples of some of the tactics of his information seeking journeys, particularly useful for new volunteers, and his work to update community information across the sector.

It's not just our organisation that appreciates Edward's work, with feedback from some of the many services he assists:

"Good Morning Edward, I have looked at the work you have done and am very pleased with the outcome. Thanks very much" ~Plympton Glenelg RSL  

Photo (Left to Right): Volunteers Rex Porter and Edward Windsor at the Volunteer End of Year Lunch December 2021

Work experience - Internal and External Events, Connections and Networks

 

To learn more about the Microsoft 365 Apps: Sharepoint, OneDrive and Teams and how to best utilise some of their features in day-to-day work activities.

Lunch & Learn 26 June 2024 (recording 18 July 2024)
World Autism Month with Key Speaker Jim Mullan CEO, Amaze 

Lunch & Learn 9 July 2024 (recording 10 July 2024)
The Journey to Treaty with Tracey Evans a proud Gunditjmara and elected member of The First Peoples Assembly of Victoria for the Melbourne Metropolitan Region
Part of Infoxchange's NAIDOC reflections and ongoing commitment to reconciliation

IX Stakeholder Events
Data Catalyst Network (DCN): Brings together people from across sectors, to break cycles of disadvantage through the innovative use of data.

Participants of the Data Catalyst Network will advance their data maturity while sharing and improving data insights through unique cross-sector partnerships to disrupt disadvantage. As a collective, the network will harness data and knowledge from the not-for-profit community sector, academia, government and business to better use and manage data to improve the lives of people across Australia. 

DCN: Getting your data in shape: data governance and AI 
Andrew Fisher, Data Governance Manager from Lander & Rogers, a leading Australian law firm presented this Data Catalyst Network webinar on good data governanace and legal requirements governing data and AI in Australia.

He spoke about the importance of good data governance – having clean, findable, secure data – is a key foundation for better decision-making, building trust with clients and stakeholders, being ready for AI initiatives like chatbots or automating workflows, and the tools to help improve your data.

Andrew is a data governance leader with experience across NFP, government, academic & utilities. He is passionate about improving organisations' data use to deliver value, and is always looking to improve, innovate, join up systems and meet customer expectations.

DCN: Tools to get control of your data 28 June 2024

Marcello Sequiera, Data Architect spoke about The Benevolent Society’s decision to adopt MS Fabric and learn from Benny Austin, Microsoft Data Engineer as he demonstrates Fabric in action. Microsoft Fabric incorporates secure  AI through Copilot and allows users to collate data so it is complete accurate and clean to overcome fragmented data systems (spreadsheets and programs) allowing NFPs to measure and demonstrate impact for their stakeholder audiences.

DCN: Augmented Intelligence. Combining Organization Data with Large Language Learning Models  28 June 2024

Associate Professor Amir Aryani, Head of the Social Data Analytics Lab at Swinburne University and Computer Scientist discussed various aspects of data science. Including Large Language Models (LLMs) their use in business intelligence and analytics sifting through unstructured data to extract valuable insights.

He discussed how in addressing enterprise-specific problems, we can employ Retrieval-Aumented Generation (RAG) with the RAG framework incorporating a retrieval engine between the user and language model to retrieve relevant external documents from databases and warehouses, industry reports and research and government and public data for domain-specific knowledge.

Exploring how RAG and generative AI can be employed as a tool tailored for a specific enterprise, yielding more accurate responses, and how to achieve this while considering security, privacy and confidentiality of enterprise data.

Image: Eric Jenkins, Accounts Manager, Connecting Up and Volunteer Mentor

Mentor Program
Connecting Up's mentor program provides an opportunity for volunteers to connect with staff and understand more about their role, how they started, what they studied, where they applied and worked, in order to improve volunteers' own role and work-readiness.

Edward also met with mentor Eric Jenkins (above) for an informational mentor meeting to discuss his pathway into technology services in 2022. Eric a former volunteer, transitioned firstly into customer service and is now the Accounts Manager at Connecting Up, a service of Infoxchange. Eric's initial customer support role involved answering customer queries on a wide range of technology topics across multiple support channels, and demonstrating good product knowledge across vendors. 

Eric now provides in-depth licensing advice and technology consulting services to Connecting Up's not-for-profit members, working with the Business Development Team managing vendor relationships and new partner launches. Edward has found many aspects in common from their shared volunteer and customer service experiences, as well as an interest in, understanding and knowledge of IT products.

Edward has continued to develop and refine his skills at Connecting Up, building on another informational mentor meeting with volunteer mentor, James Newport, Senior Web Developer in 2023, and their discussions on the state of the IT Tech industry, where it is headed and the training and development he can look into for preparation for this field. He has worked in casual roles most recently with the Electoral Commission and hopes to find a career in IT or a related field, such as computer assembly and repair in the future and is currently applying for further studies at TAFE, Certificate 2 in Electronics

Edward first volunteered in 2019 and this Year has completed 153.28 Hours and since he began, 753.43 Hours in total. Edward volunteers remotely and consistently and thoroughly attends to the large number of emails and updates received each week. His constant work, allows the service to continue as it needs to, and allows resources to be given across the program for innovation in other areas.



Digital Skills Training and Development

SAcommunity Volunteers and Interns have access to a range of training and development opportunities, from Lunch & Learn sessions to the Connecting Up Digital Learning Platform for online training and development with a selection of relevant live and recorded webinars, workshops and webcons for life-long learning from a series of subject matter experts.

Relevant Courses, Webinars, and Recordings Edward has selected from the Digital Learning Centre include:

How we introduced ethical AI into our NFP - 7 June 2024

Learn how the innovation team at Justice Connect, a not-for-profit providing legal services for people in need, implemented AI into their organisation, and trained and developed their AI model to help connect people with the right services, faster (recorded webinar).

Which link to the following on LinkedIn Learning: Career Essentials in Generative AI

Thank you Edward for volunteering with us!