Partners
Below are some of the partners involved in delivering the Community Grid Pilot Project in Parr, St Helens:
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St Cuthbert’s Catholic Community College for Business and Enterprise has formed the hub for the pilot project in Parr, St Helens. The Help Desk is staffed by Farne Ltd. (a local Social Enterprise based at the college) |
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The service is hosted by AIMES Grid Services, a Community Interest Company. Based at Liverpool Innovation Park, the data centre boasts the latest technology including water cooling, UPS, a backup diesel generator and fire suppression and offers high resilience and reliability. |
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The financial support of the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund has been essential to this first pilot project in St Helens. The support of members of the NRF team has been valuable in many aspects. |
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Helena Housing, a not for profit registered social landlord, has provided funding toward for the project. The 250 users participating in the pilot project are families belonging to the community of St. Cuthbert’s College and half are residents of Helena Housing, who can now access their landlord via a ‘virtual office’. |
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Significant investment has already been made into installing Metropolitan Area Networks in St Helens. Co-operation with the local council has enabled the use of this infrastructure to bring user data back from the user communities to the Central Data Centre. This helps keep costs down by avoiding the necessity for leased lines. Changes have been made to allow the points of aggregation in the area to be connected to the MAN and to route the traffic back to the central data centre. These changes ensure that the data from Community Grid is kept separate from the existing users of the MAN and that both are secure. |
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Halton-based OciusB2 have provided the connectivity across the wireless network, as well as carrying out initial training sessions with the end users. |
