This is my fourth week at the Diskovery Center in Little Tokyo. I have been setting up meetings to meet with the Lanterman Regional Center for a Introduction to Inclusion training/discussion on ways to improve our center to be more accessible for the disable. Hopefully i'll get to learn more ways to make the center better. I have been doing a lot of research on what I can do and thinking up questions to ask our training instructor. I have tried out some software that we have here at the diskovery center and download demos. Some of the software are not easy to use, even for me. I attended a class that the diskovery center here offers and tried using a trackball with the lessons given, it was not easy to use. I will have to learn ways to improve the lessons taught here to be inclusive for the disabled.
I have also set up a meeting for Asstive Technology training. We have to decide what type of software/hardware we are going to buy for our center with the budget we have. The training to use the software/hardware will be held after we buy the materials. Hopefully i'll know what to get and make our centers better for the disabled.

We have been very active acessing our infrastucture and looking at electronic "edge" solutions to connect the 47 Acre former jail site. Coax cable litterally runs everywhere. As a former jail site, cameras were posted on poles with Coax and power. What a great way to light it up with Wifi ! Open access to this would be good.

I have been talking with AT&T about T1 lines. Two campuses are physical seperated by about 3 miles. Unfortunately, there is no line of site short of repeating off a mountain, and tower space up there is maxed out. We can leverage the Teleconnect fund and got our requests in very early for this year. I should have a solid quotation on Monday July 16.

The community access computer lab is taking great shape. Enough very nice, alike computer tables were donated to us by Gruman Aero - Space. We ahe some very interesting tapped in senior voluteers. One is a Physist another an electronics engineer. I really having fun with them.

The lab is connected to our "core" with a 12 strand fiber! Air conditioning and dedicated power branches go into the double wide mobile. How cool is that?

I have been "collecting" volunteers that fit our senior Digital Story Telling mission. Thus far I have on board a very talented photographer (Adobe Photoshop), a grad student that knows Dreamweaver and Java Script, the next move is to approach the local cable company for video...things are happening!

I will be manning our other campus lab next week to observe how it is being utilized. We have (6) dells on the Inet there. It is a "walk in center".

Sorry for the delayed report. I have been posting to the site but forgot about the report area! Jim

I have been learning about the system we have set up at the CSL and doing odd hardware/software related jobs. In the course of learning about the technology I look to find resources to learn from, and have found good ones. I think it would be a good idea to set up a group or a forum so that we could more efficiently exchange ideas, which is especially important with regards to technical questions. There are free forum hosts that have a good interface, but I would like to see if we could set up a CTC Vista forum on CSL servers. Also, there is Google Groups, but I think a forum would be better. If there are any organisations that need computers , hardware, etc, there is http://www.techsoup.org/stock/rci/ which provides hardware to non profits at ~20% market value. The conference/PSO was an excellent idea! It exposed people who normally wouldn't go to those sort of things to a new and rewarding activity.

Comment from Ben Sheldon on July 17, 2007 - 4:01pm

Hi Jack,

I'm glad to hear that you're settling in at the CSL.

I appreciate the interest in setting up a forum or otherwise improving our VISTA communications. We have had forums on the CTC VISTA website in the past; it is not especially difficult to set up with Drupal (which ctcvista.org is based on). Unfortunately they tended to go under-utilized. At the moment we have a triumvirate:

1) Listserv: immediate push out to people (at least those that don't filter it to trash)
2) Field reports: chronological "journal" of what you've learned
3) Wiki: information and resources that are incrementally improved

We're somewhat reluctant to add another facet to our communications infrastructure just because of the knowledge/explanation overhead for other VISTAs (especially the non-technical ones) to understand its role. That being said though, if you think there are enough people on the listserv that would benefit from a more structured, but less immediate discussion, let us know and we can set up a forum and try it out.

It is Friday afternoon, and I am about to conclude my first *official* week as a CTC*VISTA at Cambridge Community Television. To sum it up: I feel like I have been given the key to a secret door that leads to the land of 21st-century innovation.

I don't mean that in a dorky way...really. (Judging by the listserv emails, I'm quite the airhead compared to all you techies.) I just feel this is giving me a huge leg up over everyone else I graduated with 2 months ago. Ironically enough, I found out about CTC*VISTA through a job/internship opportunity newsletter of BU's College of Communication. It's ironic because I had never heard about CCTV at BU, even though it's located less than a mile away from the BU Bridge, offers full access to equipment, much more freedom to create content (as well as a larger viewership base than BUTV has), and classes that are simple to get into and teach you things like podcasting and HTML (while my multimedia class last semester merely taught me Microsoft FrontPage). I did hear about WGBH quite often, and it was through my internship there that I first heard about CCTV. The reason I am recalling this stuff is to emphasize what a turn of luck it was that brought me here. Ever since Penguin Day I've been realizing more and more what a necessary component this VISTAship is in completing my media education in today's world. (And I'm getting like $11,000 for it!)

I just read Meegan's comment about the Knight Foundation news challenge. I looked through the winners and saw organizations like Harvard and MIT...both involved in groundbreaking digital media projects, and both located around the corner from my host organization. Lisa Williams, founder of placeblogger.com and h2otown, resides in the neighboring community of Watertown and my supervisor just told me to set up a meeting with her. Not to be profane but...WTF!? This entire experience is blowing my mind right now. I'm going to have a blog on CCTV's website and I'm currently working on a new program (worthy of being crowned by the Knight foundation, I'd say) to place citizen journalists around the city and use all of CCTV's awesome resources to become the glue that holds these communities together. When the school year begins, I'm also going to be working in a state-of-the-art media studio (which I got to see the other day and it totally blows BU's facilities out of the water) to create new youth media programs for the educational access channels. I didn't even know what PEG access was a month ago...or open-source software, for that matter.

And the icing on the cake would be that the people here are all really great, and I get to interact with some really diverse members of the community.... and on days like yesterday, I even get to experience surprise visits from Sir Ben Sheldon himself!

Comment from Morgan Sully on July 13, 2007 - 11:44pm

Hey Julie,
that's awesome to hear and read. Starting a VISTA year is always exciting. I'm doing it a second time and really loving it. I was just asked to join a virtual community of media policy reformists all working towards democratizing media structures to the best of their ability using the power of networks. Very cool for my first week of work.

In going through their database, NAMAC realized that CCTV is NOT a member. Surely I would have though y'all were!

We're kind of an 'organization of organizations' and throughout the next year I'll be looking out for 'stories from the field' of independent media practitioners and indy media centers. I look very forward to hearing more about your work with CCTV.

sweet,
m

hello there ctc vista project. things here at homeless prenatal are going right along-- i'm unofficially the interim technology manager. this means that i have been doing insane amounts of troubleshooting and teaching for both clients and staff. in addition to managing the lab, i have also been working on creating policies and procedures, technology user guides and new website content as well as organizing the file server. most of the guides are in the revisions process, so any suggestions for resources would be greatly appreciated.

since my last post, i have had the opportunity to attend a couple of workshops including: one at the center for digital storytelling with jessica, a drupal dream makeover course, an adobe interactive forms course and soon another photoshop course! if you are interested, i can review and recommend (or not recommend) the courses.

today i had lunch with the lovely morgan sully at my favorite little taco truck in the mission. thank you $3 lunch. being with other vistas is quite nice.

My first day at my host org, I arrived minutes before the moving truck. My organization got new digs and I was just in time to help set up. On Weds of that week, we had the annual staff retreat out on Watauga Lake, and I got a good introduction to all the staff and various projects going on here. As an environmental nonprofit, much of our work is the type of advocacy campaign that VISTA wants me to step carefully around. My project is more of an education program -- teaching landowners about sustainable forestry techniques -- so that's my main focus.

Early in my second week, I sat down with several folks in the organization to get an in-depth feel for the sustainable forestry project and it's future. We're planning a forum for landowners and forestry professionals, as both an online community and an information resource. Much of the initial planning is done, but I get to carry the ball into the endzone. This means working with the project partners, finding and arranging hosting, working with a professional web design company, developing initial content, and recruiting others to continue the content ....seems like most other aspects of the project (hopefully, with the exception of fundraising!). Our in-house meeting went well and I'm arranging a conference call to introduce myself to our project partners.

I'm also working on maintaining and extending their technical capacity, by assessing their needs and expanding their current capabilities. I've already extended their LAN and WirelessLAN capabilities with an older Linksys WiFi router (I *heart* OpenWRT!). The WiFi router provided by our DSL supplier, it turns out, doesn't play nicely with newer MacBooks.

I'm working through an issue with their fileserver (minor things, ya know, like replacing a drive in the main RAID set that decided that Friday afternoon was the perfect time to die). One drive dropped out of the RAID mirror, and I got the local volunteer who built the server to stop by and help me kick off a rebuild. Most of the time this works fine and things are back to normal (the rebuild takes forever, but you can still access the existing drive). Unfortunately, around 3pm last Friday I realized the network drive wasn't accessible, and sure enough the rebuild had encountered a serious problem with the offline drive (think "click of death"). I consulted our volunteer, rebooted the server, and waited until everyone was done for the day before trying the rebuild again. Sure enough, the problem drive started making its click of death again, and the server locked up. Now we're up and running, but without a mirror, and waiting for a replacement drive to come in.

I'm also rolling out an intranet webserver so I can evaluate and demo the CMS systems we're considering for my project. The hard part in all of this is making it sustainable: documenting the setups and configurations that make all of this work, so that other techies can understand, duplicate, and extend the work I've done while I'm here. Fighting tech fires is fun and all, but I won't be here forever, and those tech fires always flare up no matter how robustly the system is designed. I'm thinking an intranet CMS could play that role here.

Can anyone tell me if WDS is really helpful? I'm debating the right way to make sure our facility is adequately covered by WiFi, and right now I've got two AP's that don't really cooperate. (Well, only one answers DHCP, so it's cooperation, but our laptop users still see two different networks.) I don't think I can get our DSL router to do much in the way of WDS, but I can probably get someone to donate another Linksys, then setup WDS between the two, one at the front of the facility and one in back, and just turn off the DSL router's WiFi altogether. Any tips?

Comment from Ben Sheldon on July 11, 2007 - 1:20pm

Hi Sil,

it sounds like you got a good orientation to the organization. I wish we could have our PSO at the lake.

Sounds like you have a lot on your hands and that is always the time for a hardware failure. I hope you've backed up that sole hard drive :-)

I've used WDS at my house and it works pretty well. It does though halve your throughput (since half the bandwidth is reserved for inter-router communication). You probably won't notice this though. I've never used OpenWRT, but I'm a big fan of DD-WRT. Those linksys routers are pretty easy to come by---though watch out since the later hardware revisions won't run the custom linux firmware.

Thanks for the update!

Comment from danielle martin on July 11, 2007 - 4:54pm

Hey Sil,

Great post! I almost feel like I'm sitting there at work with you.

I went through quite a bit of work evaluating custom vs. open-source CMS options earlier this year with the StoriesForChange.net project, so let me know if you need any help in that area. We put out an RFP so I got a good range of proposals from folks doing everything from custom CMS to Plone to Drupal. [We went with somebody doing Drupal, btw, because they included a really great technology planning component to the project planning.]

-Danielle

Comment from Sil Greene on July 11, 2007 - 6:37pm

Well, technically I've installed X-WRT, which is OpenWRT plus the webif^2 configuration interface. DD-WRT is similar, running an OpenWRT kernel with a few added packages and a user-friendly web config. (Using OpenWRT naked is NOT for the faint of heart!)

Comment from Tony Brown on July 12, 2007 - 6:06pm

hey sile u can try to go into the router's config. & set one up as the gateway & one as a router that should fix the problem

Comment from Josh King on July 13, 2007 - 3:39pm

I've never had much opportunity to fiddle with it, but besides WDS you can also install OLSR through OpenWRT's package manager. It's an open-source mesh routing protocol, and while I'm not sure how much set up it requires, it can scale up to clouds of 5-10 nodes pretty easily (don't have exact specs for running it on WRT's, which are a little less than ideal for mesh node hardware). But it might be overkill for just two or three nodes. Of course the easiest way, unless you really need a reason for roaming through the building is just to partition the network. That's what we do here in our building, where we have "OpenUCIMC0-3" in different parts of the building, and they all route to the same physical subnet. If you can't run ethernet lines then you could also run two routers back to back, with one in wireless client mode and the other in AP mode. Finally, you could just get a big antenna. Super Cantennas (http://www.cantenna.com) have pretty great signal penetration, we use two to provide coverage in a pretty huge old stone building. You could hook one up to your first WRT and just blast it through the whole building (depending on layout and the kind of materials your building is made of). Or just use WDS, which would probably work fine too. Just wanted to suggest some other options.

Comment from Sil Greene on July 13, 2007 - 9:47pm

re: partitioning... are all your "OpenUCIMC0-3"'s on separate channels? or are they all sufficiently far away that they can all coexist on the same channel... we're in a building too big for the Linksys by itself, but too small to put to AP's on the same channel. hmmm. the antenna option might actually be the right one; i'll have to dig farther into that.

Comment from Josh King on July 17, 2007 - 4:56pm

I believe they are all on separate channels, though I'd have to go check to be sure. The thing to remember is that channels 1,6,and 11 are the only 802.11b/g channels which are fully orthogonal (if that's the right word). So if you have multiple routers, try and put them on those channels to minimize interference.

Week 2 of my VISTA year was more of the same from the first week. I'm still working on cleaning up the service listings for the counties on the 4People website. While tedious, it's rewarding knowing that when people look at the county listings, they'll be more accurate with regard to the exterior links. (www.4people.org)

One nice thing is that much of the work is done by telecommuting. Last week I went in to the office only two days: one to collect the mail, the other to discuss how the clean-up project was going. Misty (the other Vista) collected the mail 2 other days.

On a personal note, I found out my horse has laminitis. It's a good thing I brought her home -- she had been put on pasture for too long, too soon (one of the causes of laminitis is too rich a diet, such as too much pasture right after being on hay only). Now she's on dry lot and can't go onto the pasture all summer (bummer). I have to find a source of hay since I can only buy so many bales from my neighbor.

I

Comment from Morgan Sully on July 10, 2007 - 2:04pm

Hey Marilyn,
just checking in to say hi. I'm a bit of a tedious geek myself when cleaning up data. I love figuring out ways to clean large amounts of it (though it can sometimes be all consuming:)

Sorry to hear about your horse. Maybe you could post some pictures?

Hope your VISTA years is going well,
m

ps. http://www.freecycle.org is a good resource to find free stuff (like bales of hay perhaps).

"All that is possible is seeking expression though human beings."

So I've been here for a little over two weeks. It's very interesting, I'm working on researching the digital divide. My first project has been to visit different communty computer labs and have them fill out surveys. I'm creating a database of all of the computer labs in tri-county area of Southern Florida. So far I've gotten about three organizations to fill it out and libraries have been taking them (and they have the capacity to get all of their branches, up to 50 in one pop, at a time). I'm still waiting for a lot of these surveys to come back though. I'm learning a lot about computers. I think I'm realistically on the wrong side of the digital divide. I hardly know anything at all but I'm learning. My favorite part of this job has been dealing with people and feeling like I can really help some of these non profits. We're not only creating a databse of computer access but also pinpointing computer lab needs (i.e. funding, grants, volunteers). There is one senior citizen computer lab who really wants a playstation, I think the request is kind of funny and I'm not even sure if it falls in my jurisdiction, but I'll see what I can do about helping them out. I've been working closely with Kevin Bulger, another VISTA at the Collins Center. And he's really helped to integrate me into the workforce. I got to meet with my supervisor for the first time last Thursday night and that helped me a lot with deciding which tasks to utlize my energy and focus towards. Still, there is alot of down time sometimes, and sometimes I wonder how efficent I am being. There is also a lot I still don't know, so I think I've got to be patient. Still all in all I'm really enjoying my first two weeks here.

Comment from Kevin Bulger on July 9, 2007 - 12:23pm

And Victoria is doing a good job. Plus, she is very popular.

Comment from danielle martin on July 11, 2007 - 5:00pm

If you're doing all that in two weeks, then you're being more than efficient!

We're doing almost the same exact project up here in Boston at MassIMPACT, trying to create a working database and map of Neighborhood Network technology centers (in housing developments), complete with a survey. I've actually got a couple interns working on it, one of which is a former CTC VISTA, Shannon McCue, who's also doing a project to create a database of community technology resources for folks with disabilities. We even hired Ben to build the database. We should definitely compare notes.

-Danielle

Comment from Ross Musselman on July 16, 2007 - 11:53am

Victoria,

It sounds like you have had a great start! Enjoy the downtime now, because I would be willing to bet that it will wane as your year progresses. :)

I see why you are amused by the Playstation. Have they explained why they want a Playstation? I think that it could be really cool. I actually know some seniors who play to maintain hand-eye coordination. I also know some seniors who play with their grandchildren as a means to create connection. I'm not saying there aren't other tools, but it demonstrates the practical (and productive) applications that are possible.

Keep up the excellent work!

Ross

Ross Musselman
ross@zanlus.com

I'm looking for a more professional way for my organization to send out emails. Currently when we send out mass emails, we send them from our individual addresses and put our members' emails in the 'BCC' (or even the 'To') field. Once I used an Outlook plugin called "send personally," which sends individual emails to everyone in the "To" field. Ideally our organization emails would like to send emails our from something like 'announcements@our domain', we would have some way of managing where the replies go, and some way of managing two overlapping groups of contacts. So I'm wondering: do your organizations use specific email newsletter tools? Are they web-based (like the ones in Idealware's rundown) or locally installed software?

Comment from Ben Sheldon on July 6, 2007 - 4:52pm

At the VISTA Project we use a Mailman newsletter list. It's the standard... which doesn't necessarily mean it's that powerful or pretty, but it has basic features like individual emails and configurable From and Reply-To. It's also nice because we can set up a form on the website where people can automatically sign up. It came with our commercial hosting service.

It is important though how you manage your mailing list. Depending on the services your nonprofit offers, it may fall under the CAN-SPAM Act. Here is a decent article on determining if the CAN-SPAM Act applies to you.

Comment from Josh King on July 9, 2007 - 12:17pm

I definitely vote for Mailman. At my organization we use it to manage hundreds of email lists, and there's nothing more powerful and featureful around (the only competitive mailing list package I've come across is Sympa, which is needlessly cumbersome and complex). Ideally, you would have an MTA like postfix setup on your mail server to run email to Mailman. I'm by no means as expert as I could be on email systems, but let me know if there's any advice I could offer. If hosting your own solution isn't an option, I don't know enough about the commercial or web-based solutions to offer an opinion.