Field Reports

Hola hola mundo! We have had weird weather in June so far here in Southern California.

Just finished mailing out hundreds of Wired for Wireless Reports. Thanks Stephen for shooting that email, by the way! I am continuing to send out reports. This brings me to the database. Bounced mailed reports are actually in our favor because it helps to clean the database. And so now, updating the database is of primary focus as well as using GIS tools (most likely Google Maps/Earth) to map out our network.

Also, I helped organize California Emerging Technology Fund’s (CETF) very first webcast of a new campaign they launched for Southern California titled Get Connected: Your Life Made Easier. Thanks to the Bresee Foundation who actually brought out the equipment for the press conference.

Finally, I recently got a CTC VISTA extension for about three months. I am blessed to get the extension. I enjoy working here, and there are still a few things I need to get done.

This may be the last month a few of you will be posting. I thank you for your help and your service…I am sounding like the president, jeje. Please stay in (Twitter) touch: @OsoHormiguero.

Our year's coming to a close, and not all of us are staying on with the CTC VISTA Project, but wouldn't it be nice if we could pass on our wisdom to the incoming class? I propose we create a hashtag on Twitter and tweet advice up till July 27 (I think that's the official start date). The field reports are a rich resource but take a significant amount of time to sift through. Probably several of us will be kicked off the listserv come July 11.

For anybody who's up to it, let's go with #ctcvista. Invite any former CTC VISTAs you know to tweet, and let's keep it constructive!

UPDATE: Twitter's great for bite-sized advice, but for those who don't use it, the Facebook discussion thread would be an accessible place to leave advice.

Recently I’ve been gathering requirements and consulting on information architecture for another Mercy Corps group, Mercy Corps Northwest. MCNW is doing a major site redesign; and it has been exciting to help them understand their audience (defining user roles and creating surveys) and define/prioritize organizational and user goals for their new site.

I have started wrapping up my work for MicroMentor by ramping up social media outreach. A paradox? Yes and no. With only a couple of weeks left and so much to accomplish I have been concentrating on capacity building at a strategic and tactical level, in order to provide MicroMentor with tools and research that will ease them into a social media presence.

Strategic:
Wrote SEO, Twitter, and Facebook guidelines and research docs, including tips and best practices. In the process of writing an additional report on Google Analytics.
Created a Marketing Dashboard via igoogle for managing social outreach.
 Requirement: ability to log in to one application and address social media maintenance needs quickly and easily.
 Solution: an igoogle marketing tab that includes: a bit.ly shortener, a twitter widget, a google calendar (dedicated to marketing), a Facebook connection widget, marketing to do list, direct access to delicious account for tagging, and feeds from marketing, media and related blogs. Also set up tabs for tracking news feeds about entrepreneurs, nonprofits and mentoring, to facilitate finding interesting (audience specific) content.

Tactical:
Set up a branded twitter account and am tweeting a couple of times a day – to gain followers and establish a “tweet voice”. http://twitter.com/MicroMentorOrg
Launched a MicroMentor Facebook Page and a Facebook Profile (with Causes); these pages and profiles can be further built up over time. (MicroMentor on Facebook)
Set up specific goals in Google Analytics and auto-generated weekly analytics report which is emailed to MicroMentor.

On a personal note, I am wishing the very best to my fellow CTC Vistas, now and in the future. Mary

In May/June, I offered several training workshops, likely the last round of dedicated sessions as my year of VISTA service comes to a close. The remainder of my year will be devoted to compiling the training materials I've written, and writing the manuals I haven't had time to compose yet.

Of the three video production workshops I led, one was an interactive session with students from the READY School in Champaign, IL. After an initial tour of our facilities and those of Urbana Public Television, the students checked out free camcorders and videotaped a day at their school, with interviews and shots of classrooms, art, bulletin boards, and the building itself. Our training session covered the fundamentals of cutting, arranging, and editing scenes, using Adobe Premiere Pro. The students, whose school year is finished, now have two local resources for continued learning where they can finish this and other films if they would like.

Many of the training sessions were about A/V data backup, transfer, and duplication, as members of the IMC get ready to work more independently after I have finished my service. Beyond these and other basic recording and editing tips, two of the audio workshops addressed key issues for citizen journalists - 1) posting to the web and 2) understanding the principles of digital audio and their application. Finally, I have been working with our community radio station WRFU, to ensure that members are knowledgeable about making PSAs, news stories, and updating their Drupal site. In the last month, I will compile and share these resources; for now, I have been revising the manuals as I go, and sharing with smaller working groups.

Though we often use commercial software like Premiere at the IMC, the only real expenses that any artists or journalists should ever have to face are time and hardware (cameras, mics, computers, a/v equipment, etc.). I encourage everyone I train to use and tell others about free and open source software (FOSS), and this month I continued my research into these tools. Specifically, FOSS operating systems can be installed (easily and for free) and used to keep older and slower computers running quickly and efficiently - especially important for organizations with small budgets. Operating systems I recommend are Ubuntu (which has many variants, including one with media production applications called Ubuntu Studio), Puppy Linux, Dyne:bolic, and Pure:dyne. There are others, but these systems have familiar desktop and window environments, can be expanded to include office productivity and media software, and some even run off of live CDs, so no installation is necessary. We received a donated laptop that was quite slow, running Windows 98 - now with the most recent version of Xubuntu, it is much faster and is available for IMC members to use for on-location recording, broadcast, and web publishing.

A critical component of documentation is not just manuals or progress reports, but recommendations. The final aspect of capacity building requires communicating to your organization what they can do to grow after the absence of VISTA staff. At the IMC I am in the process of troubleshooting and listing improvements that could be made to the production facilities - via hardware that will need to be purchased, and software that is free. Luckily for us, we just hired some summer youth employees through the Champaign Consortium, and each individual has his/her own project to use as a learning experience and as a service to the IMC - adding to the continuity and capacity built so far with VISTAs.

Work at Aspiration has been going really well. A few things are more or less falling into place for us and we've been excited to get going with a couple of projects that we've been working on. I've continued to work on developing the ANSWR site in Joomla and I'm pretty comfortable with the CMS in case anyone needs any help (I've probably run into the same problem as you have). I've decided that I don't really like CMSes but that they're a necessary evil. Regardless though, I've really taken to this whole "building a website" thing which has pretty much cemented me into Geekdom. This, proven when the last time someone showed me a website I automatically asked "what's it built in?" *sigh*

Aspiration is putting together an event that happens next week in Amsterdam (!!!) centered around Open Translation Tools. Basically throwing a bunch of people around the world concerned with translation (spoken languages) in software for social change. It sounds kind of nitchy but it's actually a pretty vibrant community with a lot of grassroots love. Other than falling into a canal, Amsterdam will have us running an Aspiration-style event for about 75 people for whom English is not their native language which should be interesting. Afterward we're going to run a book-sprint which is basicallly where you lock a bunch of experts on a specific topic (in this case translation) into a room for a few days and they churn out a book. Sounds insane. and yes. yes it is. So for the next two weeks I'll be out there doin my thang.

Other than those little nuggets of goodness, I've been working a lot more with specific nonprofits training them to use tech. Before my role was a lot more removed from the people side and now I've had a lot more hands-on experience and I'm really diggin it. Especially because many times you're saving these organization sooo much time by teaching them how to do stuff more efficiently. And half the time you're explaining how to do something really basic in Excel works. Yeah CTC VISTA capacity building! holla!

I feel as though technology training should be mandatory for any high school degree. It would be amazing if tech skills were the foundation for people's work. Think of the time saved! gah!

So that's what's up with me. What's up with you?

Nine months since I took the digital storytelling class at PCM, I have finally finished my digital story!
One of the on-call media ed instructors, Peta Mni came up with the last component of my piece: the title. Yes, it was that hard to come up with one.

I'm still working on locating and updating resources in our online, resource database. I'm also working on 3 grants with Ronda, my supervisor:

* Compassion Grant
* Kennewick CDBG (Community development block grant)
* Richland CDBG (Community development block grant)

For the Compassion Grant, we're proposing to work with 50 organizations (non-profit or faith-based) to help them reach out to their communities with asset building and online, self-help resources to help at risk people get out of poverty.

For the Kennewick CDBG Grant, we're proposing to supply 20 young mothers who recently, or will have, their first baby with computers and internet access and provide them with tools for baby development and care, online education about Microsoft products (Excel, Word, and PowerPoint), resume writing, and office etiquette -- all to help them become more self-sufficient.

For the Richland CDBG Grant, we're proposing a project similar to that for the Kennewick CDBG Grant we're proposing to supply a number of at risk families with computers and internet access, online education about Microsoft products, online education about resume writing, online education about office etiquette, and online access to information about social services to help them help themselves out of poverty.

In the coming month, I'll be ending my term of service as an Americorps CTC Vista. I plan to continue volunteering for RECA Foundation and 4People.org, maintaining the online, resource database and assisting with grant writing.

As I wrap up my VISTA service we have some new staff coming in who will be continuing my work. I will be spending my final week training them, main regarding use of and administering our Drupal based website, as well as how to use Drupal's tools for basic site building.

I also need to organize my documents in a way that is somewhat logical. I'm starting a digital library of curriculum materials on our server that our staff can access and add to.

One of my last projects is designing a plan for creating a network of volunteers and schools looking for volunteers to teach media projects. The idea is that when people come to us wanting to volunteer we can match them up with a class. Network will be managed on our of our Drupal sites.

Appalshop is suddenly brimming with new energy! Lots of summer interns have arrived, and all this good weather certainly is keeping everyone in a good mood!

I'm feeling good about my decision to stay on longer. I feel like a lot of the projects I've been working on all year are just now coming to fruition, which is no time to leave! And I just get busier by the day, so I might as well stick around and get some of these new ideas and concepts going!

I finished creating our work plan, which was very helpful in getting us to think about what skills and assets each of us have and how to best move forward. I'm excited to be doing more work coordinating our volunteers and helping grassroots groups develop campaigns around their own goals. I'm working with a woman in the Virgin Islands to help them develop a campaign to bring VI prisoners who are currently housed in Virginia back home to the VI and to stop interstate contracts that allow for prisoners to be shipped across the country. You can check out the blog that they've created to get some idea of the work they're doing. And the post at the top about being on the radio is how they've been teaming with us so far. We have this radio program that allows them a way to connect with their loved ones up here in Appalachia.

The migration to the CRM SalesForce database is moving slowly. Our old FileMakerPro database computer has crashed (major virus), so we're struggling to migrate all our contacts. and also trying to figure out the best way to customize the new database to fit our needs. We're still on the lookout for a consultant to aid us in this, so if you know anyone, please let me know!

The online social networking stuff continues to aid our work. I've been twittering and we've developed a pretty good following, though it would be great to have even more followers! Check us out at twitter.com/thousandkites. And I finally made us a facebook page (moving from just having a group), which is exciting because it means that people can more easily read about what we're doing. Become a fan!

Let's see. I'm also preparing for our intern to arrive next week. And then we're bringing on a new VISTA member, Andy, to start working with us in July. So a lot of my work in the next month is going to be around preparing work flow charts and organizing our lives here so that we can seemlessly move into having a third staff member.

On another note, if anyone is interested in going to a a great festival next weekend, come down to Appalshop! It's Appalshop's annual Seedtime on the Cumberland. Music, crafts, food, literary readings, dancing, watermelon seed spitting, jamming. It's gonna be a great time!

Hello everyone sorry I am late posting, as you may know from earlier post I am involved with getting the Community for Creative Non-Violence’s Arts and Education building restored. Since the last post I have gotten a designer to help with the restoration. Through her contacts I have gotten a structural engineer to look at the building, surprisingly he said that the building is structurally sound; the roof beams are in excellent condition for the age of the building. This was good information seeing that we wish to install a green roof. I have gotten free estimates from building contractors and some have offered to do work at no cost to us, great! As stated in earlier post through lengthy weekly meetings the individual partners in this venture are forming a partnership. This kind of partnerships will help us secure fund through the President of the United States stimulus funding soon to be revealed.

On Earth Day the individuals from the DC project organization and I went through the building and removed hundreds of old monitors, printers, and system units. These units were carried to the Environment Protect Agencies collect drive for Earth Day, upon getting there it seemed that no one else was going to show up, so a few of their volunteers offer to come back to our site and load more unit on the truck. In closing, just the other day a music writer stopped by to offer his services to help teach music writing to the residents of the shelter. Well, these days I do not have much free time, so until next post good luck to all other Vista’s keep up the good work.