Greetings from the warm South West folks!

I apologize for not posting sooner, but gosh, time does fly by, eh?

With the 6-month marker recently passing for all of us being in our first year, serving as an Americorps DASCORPS VISTA, let's give it up for all of us---woot woot! Congrats ;)

I would say a refreshing and assuring incident recently was our 6-month eval report. During that meeting with my supervisor and filling out the online evaluation (thank you surveymonkey, love that service!), it helped to give me a bit of perspective and reassurance of how I was doing as a VISTA. Sometimes, there are moments where I feel uncertain or just in a weird funk where I think to myself, "Am I doing all I can for this organization and my commitment?" This brief moment of uncertainty is natural, and almost comforting as well, because I am confident in saying I have been doing a great job. My performance is credited to the great support system provided by the Quote...Unquote, Inc staff. After these brief moments of self-reflection, I think about all the great partnerships, community building efforts, and the assistance with fundraiser efforts that makes me feel good about my role here...

I will list out a few of the things I have further enhanced or developed over the last couple of months:

* Worked on QUQ goals for the Prometheus Community Radio Tour
* Steve and I met with members from Enlace Comunartio, NPO that provides resources for immigrants and battered women, about ways to partner together--work with their youth program and film some of their community events
* Compiled logos for the partner orgs we work with for Colleen to upload to our "partnership" section of the website
* Met with Gwen and Amelia to discuss initial strategies for fundraising....Researched and compiled information on Small Business Association--this would potentially allow QUQ apply for contracts and non-competitive federal funding
* Organized all necessary information for QUQ to host a table/booth at the upcoming Digital Arts Conference held at UNM Continuing Education
* Organized all necessary information/articles/graphics for the e-newsletter to be sent out
* Worked on outlining and creating an instructional guide for others to follow for the construction of the e-newsletter (sustainability)
* Facilitated Enlace members and Vagina Monologues performers to be guests on Allen Cooper's Indy Media program to promote their organization and their upcoming fundraiser event
* Researched and acquired information regarding ways for QUQ to place an insert in the ABQ Water Utility Bill. QUQ secured the 12/2010 slot which can reach over 175,000 customers. Great way to market QUQ and direct people to our website to donate!
* Contacted person at the ABQ Journal about QUQ submitting the application for having a "Brown Paper Bag" spot inside the newspaper. This program is where they highlight a local NPO. Another great marketing tactic and fundraiser strategy. (FREE)
* Mike and I had a progressive phone conference/meeting with Karen Koch about her possibly submitting her films to Encantada TV and for her to possibly become a QUQ board member (use her connections in the Film Industry and fundraising ideas)
* Created a logo advertisment for Bryan Konefsky's upcoming Experimental Cinema FF (ad to be placed in their program) and a logo slide for Friends of Film, Video, and Arts LOL Film Festival--ad will be on-screen.
* Edited and updated the Master Outreach Document with filmmakers I have helped to outreach to and have them submit their films to Encantada TV (Justin Hunt, Tristan Love, Gavin Gistelle). Their films are featured length.
* Edited brochure and printed off 500 copies and folded them for the upcoming outreach events. Put together 3 different folders and brought the IMac, promo DVD and banner--(1.) FoFVA LOL FF--folder had brochures, submission forms, etc, (2) Digital Arts Conference, (3) Fiery Foods Show
* Mar 5-7 wknd--Hosted table/booths at these events and networked amongst the other exhibitors and attendees. At the Fiery Foods Show it was more effective to walk around introducing myself and to talk about QUQ while I was at the same time videotaping the event. I acquired over 15 interviews and taped a lot of behinds the scene footage. Great outreach opportunity amongst the art and food communities in NM and beyond. The Digital Arts conference was more effective for networking with other exhibitors than the students/attendees.
* Worked with Steve on filling out my 6month evaluation survey and to reapply for hosting my VISTA position
* Inserted all the business cards I received over the weekend at the outreach events into Facil
* Researched funding information through the foundation center website--compiled that for Steve
* Captured and edited together Media Literacy Project's Press Conference footage of their Universal Broadband Campaign
* Steve and I met with Tito Chavez--organized a committee to work on a state-wide HS Film Festival. Great opportunity for Encantada TV to become the main distributor for the films and to use this project as evidence to show Comcast Encantada TV should be picked up on comcast channels state-wide & for NM Filmmakers to submit their films for broadcast
* Followed up with Caroline Orcutt from Digital Arts Dept @ UNM about QUQ hosting Community TV Production courses through their program. Expand the student base and better legitimatize our partnership with UNM and our trainings
*Met with members from Enlace Comunartio about partnering with CitizenSchools to help youth/students learn media production so they can start producing their own media!

On that happy note, I hope everyone is doing well & enjoying their positions! I also hope you are learning as much as you are giving to your organization!

Chat soon!

Cheers,
Erica Jones

LTSC (and quite a few other CA orgs) lost out on a big time federal grant. We're facing a pretty big budget shortfall, and a bunch of projects and plans are going to have to be slimmed down or eliminated in order to keep core programs afloat.

In the past few weeks, I've been putting together a curriculum packet to train resident volunteers in networking. The plan was to offer a small stipend, but now that we don't have that to give, I'm gonna change the recruitment strategy a bit (beg beg beg, and/or possibly find a business who'd be willing to donate something).

Was also planning to fix one of the residential networks. Without any money for equipment, this will be difficult. But rummaging around, I found a bunch of unused network equipment... hope to make this work.

My plan for the next few months will include time spent on trying to figure out how to make other tech programs and projects (ones that I previously wasn't directly involved in, such as our CTCs) stay aloft and be as sustainable as possible. I feel like CTCs are often on a knife's edge when it comes to keeping open and functional, and I think we should start to explore partnerships outside of LTSC's usual realm (there's a lot of turning inward to Little Tokyo/JA organizations, I feel).

My supervisor's replacement has been hired and is going to start working sometime in March I think. Hopefully the transition goes well.

Also, these are awesome and have been a little bit useful for residents with external wifi adapter antennas:
http://urbanwireless.info/index.php/antennas/parabolic-reflector

One of our farmers lost his mom in the Haiti earthquake. We did some fundraising here so that he could travel down and help his family. Adisson is originally from Haiti and started our program here at NESFP in 2008.

http://nesfp.nutrition.tufts.edu/farmer/haiti.html

On a happier note, the distance learning aspect of my assignment is heating up. We found some software that will allow us to capture screen videos. One important element in the small business course is the use of spreadsheets. Our educator is creating the bulk of the distance learning material on her computer. She wanted the ability to record the screen and talk at the same time, basically walking a student through the use of financial planning spreadsheets. In comes CamStudio. This open source software is awesome! You can assign a specific area of the screen for recording. It captures both audio and screen video. Moving spreadsheets are just one element in the distance learning course. I feel like these classes will be very exciting to take as we are incorporating a lot of visual elements to help people learn. Another element of distance learning is the posting of seminars that NESFP hosts. Yesterday we held a day long seminar on how to run a Mobile Poultry Processing Unit (MPPU). This unit is essential in the production of free range poultry. Organic bird farmers can hire this unit to arrive at their site and process their poultry. Through recording these seminars, NESFP hopes to create a virtual lending library on their website so that students will have access to additional resources. I have been using Dogooder.tv to host long format videos. It's a free video hosting service for non-profits.

The rest of the University seems to be on vacation, so I've been in a relatively quiet office for the few weeks. It's nice to not have distractions, but its lonely, too.

I told myself I'd take the time to catch up on the projects that I never seem to have time to do, like writing field reports. What it's turned into is a lot of grant writing, to try and get a program up and off the ground. The program should be amazing. Its a program to teach high school aged youth to make and distribute short documentary films.

I hate grant writing. Its tedious and I always worry that I'm doing it wrong. It feels awkward writing praise about myself and my organization. Looking at descriptions of the programming, I think "Is our work really that cool? Do all those buzzwords really describe us?" Its not that I don't think my organization does good work. We do awesome work. But I don't like finding grants and then trying to make it sound like we do what the grants want.

To build capacity, I think what my org needs most is another staff person. Someone to do purely administrative and fiscal business. Its much easier to find volunteers to teach and run programs than it is to find volunteers to organize and keep track of files.

Projects are mostly slowing to a pausing point as the holidays and a little offtime approaches. Am prepping donated computers for the upcoming computer literacy/computer adoption class and following up with the participants.

My supervisor is leaving sometime around the end of January, so things are a little tenuous.

The broadband over powerline (BPL)/open mesh network is up and running really well. The problem was isolated to the cable modem/ISP. I put a power timer on it, so that its power cycles late at night. So far, so good. The BPL network itself has not had any problems except for a little bit of interference. Check it out:
http://wiki.ltsc.org/index.php/Reno_Apartments

I also redeployed a network. We converted from Meraki brand to Open Mesh brand at Angelina Apartments, with the hope that usage tracking will be easier (not to mention that the new units should have fewer outages and better range). It's working...so far.

My organization recently switched to gmail for their internal mail, so I've been setting up some google sites as document repositories for wireless/community broadband docs and forms that didn't seem relevant to the more public wiki.

Hope everyone enjoys these last few days of 2009!

Project

MEDIA ARTS CENTER SAN DIEGO is a nonprofit organization providing mentoring and training programs for youth in the predominantly Latino communities of San Diego. The program will provide digital media arts training and mentoring to youth who live in these communities. MEDIA ARTS CENTER SAN DIEGO’S goal is to provide youth with the knowledge, skills, and abilities that will enable them to successfully join the workforce in the field of digital media arts. In addition, the program will match young people with mentors who will foster in the youth a commitment to excellence, strong interpersonal skills, and a sense of hope in their future success.

Latest Happenings

Media Arts Center San Diego received a $32,000 grant from the James Irvine Foundation to provide training to students to allow them to create Do-It-Yourself media arts projects. Currently, we are preparing to offer digital media arts classes and workshops to disadvantaged youth in underserved San Diego communities.

Challenges

Almost all of my time is devoted to finding project funding. Without funding, nothing happens, so this is the priority for now.

Resources

All day, every day I write letters of interest and grant proposals to potential funders. I'm using Foundation Directory Online and Foundation Search to identify foundations that would be receptive to grant proposals.

The Future

Securing funding for this project will continue to be a major challenge. For the forseeable future, I will continue to identify potential funders and seek their support.

This past Saturday, the wifi network that is a lovechild between the brutish broadband over powerline adapters and the delicate, flighty open mesh routers was deployed. And like any unholy demonspawn, the birth was painful. It seemed to be working for an hour, but it promptly went out right as we were leaving.

So, the BPL network so far is a no-go, but the good news (sort of) is that BPL is likely not to blame. The router that we're using to run the network is your average household netgear. Even the open mesh router directly connected to the netgear is not working; so likely, this is an issue related to the main router. I've had problems with netgears handling large amounts of bandwidth in the past, but it's more likely just not allowing the BPL adapters onto the network and will need to simply assign static IPs. If it's a bandwidth problem that's freezing up the router...well, maybe we'll have to invest in a better router or a switch. Hopefully we can get the network up before Thanksgiving.

The good thing about the deployment is that the residents at the Reno Building are AWESOME. So cool, eager to help and to learn, really happy that they'll have free internet. I've got to say, open mesh/BPL is pretty neat to deploy. We gave each resident their mesh unit, they placed it and came back downstairs, then we watched each unit come online. :3

I'm getting a little concerned, however, about the sustainability of some of the things I'm working on. I'm starting to realize that things like arranging meetings and training tenants in wifi maintenance and network administration are not tasks that we can reasonably expect most of the tenants to do. It's a lot of work to expect tenants to do. I'm hoping to come up with a more lasting solution (since when I'm gone, they won't have someone to train residents). Volunteer recruitment at local schools? Unpaid internships? I'm hoping there isn't too much resistance to me seeking out "trainers" to train. I've been spending a lot of time doing direct service (training tenants, now being asked to help teach a computer literacy class, running tech support errands). I'm not sure where to draw the line, even though I know there's that magical percentage number. And if I have to say, "No, can't do that," is there a good way to approach it? Will see how it goes.

Since my field report was a massive tome detailing a single day's events that had absolutely nothing to do with what I've been working on for the last month, I figured I'd do a follow-up detailing my actual, you know, work.

Things continue to go well at the Community Software Lab. My work has been split primarily between setting up a new Xen Virtualization Server to host a Virtual Machine of a Linux Terminal Server to pave the way for all of our workstations to become thin-clients (man, that probably makes zero sense to anybody reading this), and refactoring some sloppy code to allow for integration between our two production code deployments, www.mvhub.com and www.northshoreport.org. Right now, the mvhub.com site is running an older but more feature-complete version of our backend software and it needs to be migrated from v2 to v3, but in order to do that some of the missing features in v3 of the code need to be ported over. The ultimate goal is to setup a maintainable, structured development cycle for the CSL's codebase and making it so both mvhub and northshoreport run off of the same codebase is the first step towards that effort.

It is looking that my primary focus for the next few months (and perhaps the defining contribution of my VISTA year) will be creating this code development cycle. I am enthusiastic about this work as it follows the VISTA motto of infrastructure building and will definitely leave a lasting impact on the CSL's operations for years to come. Right now, the MVHub software is developed in sort of a hodge-podge, let's-release-whenever-we-feel-like-it way. My plan is first to consolidate the various versions of the code that is deployed on the two production websites into one version, then package the software to be installable as a one simple Debian package (in contrast to the mess of CPAN modules and Debian packages it is now), and lastly construct a monthly release cycle for the debian package leveraging the bazaar-launchpad environment I previously setup. Seems like a lot of work when I type it all out, but I'm hoping to have this all done by the end of January. We'll see how it goes!

In month 2 I got in touch with Prometheus' roots with the activity at the core of the organization's mission: I learned to build a transmitter! It felt good to take a step back from regulatory policy docs to pick up a soldering iron for an hour. The means of controlling your own media are surprisingly simple...though influencing the rules that govern media is a little more complicated.

Other highlights included attending the NAMAC conference and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) radio trade show, where I learned about the broadcasting lobby that is often on the other side of Prometheus on policy issues. Both of these events were very focused on new opportunities with digital media, an interesting topic at low-fi Prometheus. We are working to understand the implications of HD radio on low power community stations, and part of my job is figuring out how to communicate the tricky world of HD policy to the non-engineers of the world. At the NAB conference, it was easy to see that commercial broadcasters are struggling to maintain relevance in a digital world, but it’s also clear to me that the solution is not just the integration of new technology, but the integration of new models that make use of broadcasting’s uniquely local focus. The crisis in the broadcasting industry could make room for new ideas in public media, if we take this opportunity.

Anyway, projects in month 2 included lots of writing and editing, again helping me to build a sense of the org as a whole and informing what I hope will be more capacity-building for our communications outreach in the future. This has included more work on revising the organization's mission, vision, and values statements, general editing and improving of written materials, particularly press releases. Loving the job.