Is everyone enjoying the spring weather? I know I am since I biked to work today.

It's been a good while since I wrote my last field report and so I wanted to keep you guys updated. NTEN was awesome. It was wonderful to meet all of the different people working in nonprofit tech and find out about the hot topics going on now. It was also great meeting up with the VISTA contingent and seeing how everyone's doing. Many thanks to Ben Sheldon for letting me stay on his extra bed when my hotel arrangements fell through.

Workwise, I haven't been up to anything too mind-blowing. I have still been doing client intake along with a bit of Drupal fidgeting and am looking to start a little help/advice blog to assist clients in getting the most out of the services we offer (and giving them an idea of what exactly we are offering). Aside from that, I was doing a bit of graphic design for a fundraiser that has picqued my interest in Adobe Photoshop. I'm a total newbie when it comes to Photoshop, so if guys know of any good guides to learn from then let me know. Also, if you know of any good ways to learn JavaScript, then let me know.

Fingers crossed, I'm planning on extending my VISTA term into the summer with part of my focus learning those two areas a little more in depth. I'm also excited to draw up a summer plan so that I can have more focus on a finished, capacity-building project as well as help the new VISTAs out with their projects. So yeah, things are looking good.

So... as I had to write this for a Board Report (tip: writing Field Reports is a bit like writing Board Reports;), I thought I would include it here as a Field Report. It details what I have done over the past 6 months as NAMAC's Online Community Manager.

Maybe someone might find some things in it that are helpful to them in planning, developing and implementing a website. There were many challenges along the way - much of it was simply just me NOT KNOWING HOW TO DO SOMETHING - but of course, much of it was assuaged by leveraging the knowledge of my CTC VISTA/peer network (i.e. Hey Josh King - how do i access MySQL through Terminal? Hey Ben, so how do i do a mysqldump again? - cheers dudes!)

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Overview:
While I was recruited as a VISTA to be NAMAC’s Online Community Manager, much of my work has revolved around comprehensive preparation and redevelopment of the site for the work this position entails. This work included heavy site analysis (how it works vs. how it could work) as well as the resolution of many high volume site migration and server issues. The workload has required more time and technical skill than initially expected, but marked a necessary refinement in work responsibilities to prepare the groundwork for NAMAC’s online community management.

Throughout the process I was able to get the support I needed, while developing innovative ideas to increase NAMAC’s future online capacities. Much of the support came from engaging a national network of fellow VISTAs, online community developers and the Drupal open-source community.

Our initial site launch is set for late April with a concerted effort to engage and welcome members and other stakeholders to the new site. There will still be various kinks to work out once launched, but the site will still be flexible enough to adapt and resolve these issues if need be.

Site Migration:
Throughout this process, I have:

• Acted as liaison between CAMT, the 9th Street IT department and NAMAC staff to troubleshoot web migration issues as they arose
• Engaged with national and local developer communities to resolve data migration and other web development issues
• Successfully imported all pages from the old site into a new custom-built development site

Site Development:
The major brunt of my work has been on ensuring that new feature requests from staff are indeed doable in Drupal – the chosen content-management system for the new site. In keeping with my work plan to ‘build for web 2.0 platforms’ I had to ensure utmost flexibility of the site to adapt to current and future online community and Internet trends.

With these requirements and goals in mind, I:

• Researched, implemented and tested best Drupal ‘modules’ to match with NAMAC feature requests
• Consulted with national networks of online community developers, knowledge management consultants, and Drupal developers both online and offline
• Lead weekly site development discussions with staff to resolve design issues and develop new areas for online community interactivity
• Integrated feedback from staff into various site areas

I have also documented all site work done on an internal staff wiki and am compiling a list of resources and training materials for future staff to use. I am also training and orienting staff to new administrative features while drafting an initial strategy for the site’s online growth, support and member engagement.

New Site Areas
With the collaborative efforts of Jack, Helen, Amanda and Dewey, I was able to design and implement new site areas to offer our Members.

These include:
The Idea Exchange
Keeping in mind our slogan to ‘energize independent voices in the media arts’ this new area is a hybrid of our current Hot Topics and Get Connected areas.

Key features of this area include:

• User submitted articles
• Newly enabled commentary on all articles posted to the site
• Social bookmarking functionality built in to all articles posted
• Cross linking of articles to site users and Member Organization pages

The Face of the Field
This section of the site is a multimedia, editorial-like section curated by NAMAC Staff. It is meant to feature the work and diversity of NAMAC’s national membership.

It accomplishes this by offering the following sections:

• Featured Leaders: leaders in the field highlighted each month
• Featured Organizations: a highlighted member organization and what they do
• User-submitted articles (pulled from the Idea Exchange)
• Current members events, announcements and job postings
• Links to browse and search our new and improved Member Directory

Advocacy and Policy
This area will feature policy issue briefs and analysis cultivated by NAMAC staff. There will also be handpicked articles and RSS feeds from our media policy and advocacy partners featured here.
Job Bank and Member Directory
Both of these have been rewritten and there is now an interactive Google map that visually displays clickable locations of our member organizations across the country.

Other Features
There have also been a host of new web 2.0 features we developed in the past few months.

A brief list follows:

• Ability for users to write their own categories for what they post and read on the site
• RSS subscribable Telesalon podcasts with embedded, playable and downloadable audio
• WYSIWYG formatting editor built in to content posting forms
• New and improved Member Directory area with sortable columns for Member Organization, State and Year Founded
• New and improved Job Bank with sortable columns for Organization Name, Job Location, Type and Deadline
• Ability to cross-reference Member Organizations in Articles
• Member Organization pages linking all articles and users associated with that organization on one ‘group’ page

Other Accomplishments
Other tasks I finished were:

• Coordinating the collection of online NAMAC Conference media from members
• Tracking and commenting on relevant blog posts from conference attendees (members and otherwise)
• Creating a new section on the current site to host post-conference articles, images, and video
• Coordinating and facilitating a panel discussion to represent the CTC VISTA Project at NAMAC’s conference
• Signed up and created various web 2.0 service accounts for NAMAC (Flickr, del.icio.us, blip.tv)

In maximizing my status as an AmeriCorps VISTA, I am also seeking and acquiring sponsorship for continued professional development in the field of web development and online strategy.

Future Directions
From my experiences over the course of my VISTA service, I envision NAMAC’s web and online community strategy evolving in to the future as such:

My hope is that the above plan might serve as an initial launching point for discussion between NAMAC Board, Staff and the Online Community Manager.

I was in DC over the weekend at a grantee meeting. The following is a reflection from my CCTV blog for those who are working on and thinking about citizen journalism projects:

On Saturday, April 5th, J-Lab staff invited its 2007 New Voices grantees to Washington, DC to share program successes and challenges. Some of the grantees have learned valuable lessons so far -- insight that we can definitely use as we look ahead to the future of the NeighborMedia project.

New Castle NOW in Chappaqua, NY, like NeighborMedia, is trying to fill a news and information void in the community. "People do not know what's going on out there," says project editor Ann Marie Fallon. In a community driven by its public school system, the site strives to inform people so they won't be "afraid to participate in the discussion." New Castle NOW, which runs on Expression Engine. features real voices because residents are not interested in "pretend reporting," but does not currently allow its users to comment on posts. One challenge the project has faced is a digital divide issue: People above a certain age can't always figure out how to navigate around the site.

Jeff South of Greater Fulton News says his citizen journalism initiative, a Wordpress site covering an area of Richmond, Virginia, requires registration for top-level posts, but not to post a comment -- unlike NeighborMedia, which requires registration even for commenting. South's project is making strides into multimedia by having local students produce news packages; though he has offered training to residents on using flip video phones with built-in USB ports, it appeared that as with NeighborMedia, his bloggers have for the most part stuck to text and photo submissions.

OurTahoe.org is another project that depends on student reporting to cover issues that surround Lake Tahoe, California. Students receive disposable cameras to take photos for the site. OurTahoe.org was built in Drupal and had to be redesigned in Wordpress after Donica Messing received feedback that the Drupal platform was not very easy to use.

NewsDesk on AccessSF has been "chockfull of challenges," according to project coordinator Carter Paige. The access center has been recruiting not individuals but non-profit organizations to participate in training sessions and produce media. But creating relationships with organizations who are willing to dedicate a representative from their staff to four hours of training (2 hours of instruction plus 2 hours of practicum) has proved difficult.

Things in Cambridge are great. It's hard to face the reality that it's winding down soon. We are going to be shooting 3 more episodes of YVC, and then at the end of May we will wrap up production. NeighborMedia (the pilot round) will also finish up around that time, to leave time for the programmatic reflection/re-imagining/tweaking/re-development process. My goals for the next 2 months are as follows.

- To finish doing NeighborMedia outreach. We still need to hit a lot of neighborhoods. Our grand plan was to kill all the birds with one stone by presenting at the ACN (Assoc. of Cambridge Neighborhoods) meeting, but unfortunately the leader of that group fell ill and the next meeting is postponed indefinitely.
- To get the four citizen journalists who still have not produced any web video to put together some sort of multimedia package for the site. This could be just audio or a digital story, but text and photos alone don't count.
- To document, document, document.
- To gain some insight next weekend at the New Voices Grantee Meeting in Washington, D.C.

When I return from D.C. I will be meeting with the CCTV "steering committee" (that's made up of the 3 org. staff members with "director" in their title) to figure out a grand plan for moving ahead. Another specific action item we are trying to move forward with is getting promotional postcards made.

Anyone out there have decent design skills?

Readers of these field reports may have some difficulty understanding the reports' contexts if those readers have forgotten, or never knew, the nature and purpose of the organization at which the VISTA is working. So, by way of reminder: I work at the Center for Community Technology Services (CCTS) at the University of Baltimore. We help nonprofits in the Baltimore, Md. area with their IT needs, which mostly amount to putting up web sites. There are two kinds of service offered: "consulting" and "development". The "development" division uses Ruby on Rails to implement the client's web site. The "consulting" effort involves talking to the clients and helping them assess their IT needs, and advising them about solutions. Some of the clients are neighborhood associations. Two examples are the Greater Homewood Community Corporation and the Historic East Baltimore Community Action Coalition. Neighborhood associations and corporations help with education, the physical beauty and safety of their communities, and generally various aspects of making their community strong and the life there good for the residents. Another client of CCTS is the Baltimore Urban Debate League. A person who is involved with that told me that he took his teen-aged children to one of the events where the members of the debate league meet the public and display their abilities, and the children thought that since the debaters were so knowledgeable and smart, that they must have come from privileged, wealthy families. Of course, the opposite is the case.

I finished (at least well enough for a few examples tried) implementing the upload into our generic Content Management System (CMS) of documents saved in HTML from Microsoft Word.

I started prototyping a design change to the CMS that would allow multiple components to be collected and stored for a page, to be displayed in some format. For example, the format could call for a photo at the top with a caption to its right, and the main text below. Our prior design would handle components (such as a sidebar) shared among many pages, but the version I was working on would work well where for instance many pages have photos and captions not shared with other pages. Due to changing priorities, I had to suspend my work on this subtask and turn it over to a colleague.

Now I'm looking into uploading a broader class of HTML documents than the CMS could take. This will help clients who need to post documents in a freer format. For example, the CMS would not allow tables within tables.

At the same time, I'm learning some of the changes with Rails 2.0.2.

It's amazing how one day you can be questioning the worth of the work you are doing. And then the next day you realize that yes what I'm doing is important and worth the sacrifices. INMP has applied for a number of grants in the past year we have received several rejection letters making me question the sustainability of the program. Today I'm not sure why or how but I felt renewed. Last week we were notified by one of our state senators that INMP will be receiving one of the grants that we applied for. This is great!! I have had a renewal to my drive for this position. I want to see things grow and change. The idea of possibly redefining our goals and purposes will mean success. I'm sure everyone goes through this during the course of their year of service. Questioning the personal sacrifices you are making on a daily bases and thinking what benefit do I get out of this? Well I think the best thing for these times is to take a look around see what others are doing around you. Look at the people that you are serving do they appreciate your efforts? They may not know what steps you have taken but when you see the joy in their eyes when they learn something new or are having fun with a program you are running. That is what is important. So for anyone else who is having these thoughts just take a minute and step back and look at what is going on around you.

The handbook I've been working on for the past few months is listed below (and it's also found on the Volunteer Management Wiki.

rian

An interesting article just crossed my desk (well, email inbox) and I thought it would be good to share. It's about a VISTA member who served during the late 1960s and has gone on to be an immigration lawyer named one of the Best Lawyers in America for ten years running.

It's really great to hear about where VISTA members go after their service. VISTA isn't service-learning: our bottom line is community impact, not necessarily personal development. But of course, VISTA is a profound experience for all of us who are serving or have served. It changes the way one thinks about the world and the people in it. And that's a something that we don't always remember to talk about.

Personally I get a little tired of the standard VISTA historical standard bearers: Senator Jay Rockefeller, Xerox CEO Ann Mulcahey and Car Talk radio host Ray Magliozzi.

I would really love to hear more stories about the B-list VISTA alumni heroes: people who are integrating what they learned from their service into their everyday lives. You don't have to be famous to make a difference in the world.

We concentrate a lot on what VISTA members leave behind at their sites and in their communities---the programs, the volunteers, the resources---but it really is valuable the increased awareness and compassion that you'll carry with you throughout your life.

But enough inspiration. Back to work! :-)

HCN's Hairston project is coming to a close. We are at the point were we are having the stragglers come to our office to get their computer, instead of having the two hour training program at the middle school. I felt this project went as well as possible considering that there was a high number of students that did not have working phones and did not want to be contacted by me or the school (trust issues maybe....still not sure about that one). Also it was extremely difficult to get the parents to attend and stay for the duration of the training, due to lack of interest or too much going on at home. I have been doing my best to reach out to the students that were left behind, and will continue to make calls during free time, but I can only do so much for them when they are unwilling to communicate with me. Overall we have been able to get out 200 computers to these students so I think thats pretty awesome!

Anyway moving on. We will be being stage 2 of our strategic plan next sat. I hope to use this time to develop the committees we need and flush out the four main goals that we want to focus on for the next 5 years. I will be conducting this retreat with one of our Nonprofit Consultants that do a lot of our grant writing. She has been a great help to me and I think we are going to get a lot accomplished, because as of right now our broad is pretty dead, no one is that active and if things don't start picking up fast we will be in trouble. I think once we have the components set that I mentioned before, it will give the org and its broad more direction and a feeling of ownership which should get things moving. I just recently participated in recruting two more members for our broad, an HR specialst and a VP of a local bank, I am excited to see what they bring to the table. We are also looking for a new president.

I have recently started a new project within HCN. We have developed a contract with the ARC of North Carolina (Association of Retarded Citizens) To place a computer in selected group homes all over central North Carolina. I am coordinating the training, training materials and distribution schedules for this project. These computers will include W2000,open office and educational software that has proven to improve certain skills and prolong the life of people with disabilities. This project will carry on till June.

Of course I am constantly trying to find new outlets for money and computers to be brought into the org. I have started contacting more people about coming to tour the facility, it is so amazing to watch these people with DD (Developmental Disabilities) do the work they do and to tell you the truth they have already taught me a lot about refurbishing computers, I am even thinking of building my own soon:)

Well thats about it for now, take care everyone!