Things have been going pretty well at the Community Software Lab. I've spent the majority of this month on a pretty interesting project of migrating the current code repository for the CSL's main web product, MVHub (www.mvhub.com), from subversion to bazaar. I had no experience with version control software prior to this and it was a great project for getting some experience with them as I researched how the two VCS implementations were different in order to do a smooth migration from one to another. The migration is 99% complete and I just performed a presentation of how to use bazaar to the volunteer coders at the CSL. It should be complete by the end of the week and then I'll move on to my next assignment.

I went to a meeting of the board members earlier this month as well, and it was great to get to meet them. They are a really enthusiastic and approachable crowd of people. We mostly discussed how we can get the CSL actually have an income stream, not a small task. I was involved in the creation of the budget for the next year, and I hope that by the end of my VISTA term my contributions have allow the CSL to meet the goals we set.

Comment from Mira Allen on September 9, 2009 - 4:58pm

CSL is an awesome bunch of people. Glad to hear you're stoked on it.

Reviewed the current equipment at NESFP, and created a wishlist of new equipment that I feel would benefit the organization in their media expansion. New Equipment: digital HD camcorder (Canon VIXIA HF S10), one External Hard Drive (G-Technology 1TB G-Raid3), an external Disk Burner (LaCie d2 Blu-ray Drive), blank disks and a spare battery for the camera. The Blu-Ray burner is for archiving raw and edited video for their long-term storage. The new camera and accessories have arrived! I am getting familiar with our new toys. The Canon camcorder is great. We had our annual open house farm tour this month. Our first shoot was successful. I worked on creating a database of footage from Final Cut. This is a pretty straight forward process. In Final Cut Pro, you can export a batch list of any bin or bins with footage. This file can then be imported into a spreadsheet. The idea behind creating this database is to enable a user to search the existing video library for footage and interviews. Hard drive space management might be an issue as we shoot more (ie: running out of room for all footage). In field with Don and Ben to videotape the assembly of a greenhouse. Also went to video Swine School in N. Grafton. This was an all-day event including lecture and demonstration with all things Swine. Rough cut shot and edited of Equipment training. Also edited a rough cut of photo promo. Using Vimeo to host rough cuts, and eventually Youtube for promos. Shooting schedule is busy through October. and now..back to you.

It's like being in Hawaii with the extended family. Being called "hapa" brings back the memories.

At the moment, I'm writing a manual that will serve as a crash course in wireless networking, networking hardware, and monitoring/maintaining the networks that are at LTSC. The goal is to recruit residents from LTSC affordable housing to take care of the wireless internet and have this manual as a resource for them. It's been pretty interesting to learn about wireless mesh networks, and I think they're a pretty neat alternative to traditional wireless networks. It is a little weird to be writing a manual for something I am only just learning myself, but the outgoing tech coordinator has been patient and there are tons of great resources online, so it's been a fairly speedy process. I worry that not enough community members are interested in volunteering to become "network caretakers," but hopefully there will be more interest in the upcoming meetings.

Meanwhile, have also been working on planning and deploying a new mesh network that will provide wireless coverage to a new section of Little Tokyo. This network will for the public and for small businesses (as opposed to the free access LTSC provides for affordable housing). The next month is going to involve planning the deployment and working with an intern to approach businesses and see if they will host a wireless node and help us build out the network.

The work load so far has been manageable, but am anticipating a lot more work in the next few months as our outreach meetings with tenants become more frequent. I do feel like I'm juggling a lot of disparate projects, between the deployment of the new public wifi, the affordable housing wifi stuff, and other little projects.

I'm really looking forward to meeting with residents more often. One of our older residents is a monk...she is awesome and is totally up on technology and using the wireless (and nagging us if anything goes wrong). There have been sad moments though, like when one of the residents hung himself. :( Brings home how isolated and unhappy some of the people who live here are... Still trying to process that, makes working on wireless feel a little silly you know?

Attached: a laser reading of the temp on top of the Japanese American National Museum. At least the routers get heat shields.

Last Monday marked my first day of work at the Minnesota Legal Services Coalition. The office isn't very big, but that suits me just fine since it's easier to become familiar with the area, names, faces, etc. The first day was basically going over office policy, meeting everyone who works here, and then an extremely brief overview of the computer programs I will be working with for the next year.

So far, I have been familiarizing myself with HotDocs, a program developed by LexisNexis for the legal community to help create automated interview forms for court forms and documents. As of right now, I’m still struggling with a form for requesting a legal name change; I’ve been working on it since last Thursday or so. I got off to a slow start at first because the program wouldn’t install properly on the laptop I’m using (I don’t get my own computer/desktop until after the 12th; I’m also sharing my office until then), but it seems that things are in working order now.

As of right now, the challenges I’ve faced have mostly been technical issues with the laptop, but as I mentioned before, I’m still trying to familiarize myself with the scripting language for HotDocs, which is a bit difficult. I was expecting it to be easier since I have knowledge of other programming languages, but it seems that I have to debug ever other line of code that I write. I’ve been reading up on the HotDocs manual and online help guide to address this problem, so hopefully I’ll become accustomed to the program soon.

One thing I'm worried about is the fact that the former VISTA (Kristyn Martin) will only be here until Friday, and I have yet to learn how to use A2J. She's been an invaluable source of information and help with HotDocs, so I'm a little worried about how I'll have to manage and navigate A2J when she's gone.

Comment from Mira Allen on August 31, 2009 - 3:55pm

Sounds like a busy week. Are you fairing A2J okay? Let us know if there are any resources we can get for you to help.

I keep telling myself to post a field report and then it gets pushed under the table, because like Claudia and others I have not found very much down-time! So I thought I'd go ahead and post some stuff I wrote up in my first few days with a few updates.

I've jumped right in to my work here and have hit the ground running (or at least I'm trying!). In my first couple of days I worked on getting up to speed on Miro and Miro Community, and trying to do a little bit of research on tech-related stuff that I'm less familiar with, like CSS, so that I can know the vocabulary that's being used. My supervisor and I spent some time brainstorming ideas for language simplification on the Miro Community sites, and also coming up with more long term things we'd like to see - I've been doing more of that this week as it becomes a priority to develop features for the sites. I've been getting introduced to PCF folks and sitting in on a few related meetings to get a sense of the context of our work, and to learn to explain what I'm doing!

One of the first things my supervisor suggested that I do was decide on a community that I could make a Miro Community site for, which I could moderate and build so that I would be able to get a better sense of what's needed and how things work. I guess this is a little like running through a curriculum in order to know how to improve it, except that in building up the site I'll also be leaving behind an infrastructure that someone else, or ideally many someone elses, can take over when I'm gone. I came up with a bunch of ideas for communities (this is why the Miro Community project is so cool - it has so many potential applications!). A few that I considered were an Americorps site (there is a surprising amount of Americorps video out there!), a site having to do with poverty and community programs, and one related to groups I've been involved with, like the Lesbian Herstory Archives and the NYC Grassroots Media Coalition. However, I decided that for this it would be best for me to focus on something I'm pretty familiar with and could really dig into, with the idea that more could be built later. So we agreed that I would focus broadly on feminist video, and within that I would particularly focus on the practice of fanvidding, hopefully working with the Organization of Transformative Works. This is something I'm really interested in, and while it doesn't directly contribute to the "end poverty" mission, I think it will be a space where I can learn a lot and get a lot of more widely applicable ideas. I also see a lot of potential for coalitions and partnerships, including ones related to poverty. So far I've reached out to a couple of contacts about this and they're excited - it's starting to come together in a way that's really energizing.

Things move very quickly here, and I'm a little worried that I'm not getting enough done/ not keeping up well enough. But I'm trying - reading up on some blogfeeds my supervisor suggested and really just jumping in on developing the Miro Community sites. I tried to set up a call with one group and have been a little disheartened at the lack of response, but we'll keep trying. My supervisor and I met with several groups last week about building partnerships, and it was really valuable for me to hear what their concerns were as well as the potential uses they saw for the project. One thing we heard a lot of, especially from the Public Access folks we met with, is that their supervisors are very wary of new technology until they hear about it externally (so, they don't get why they might want a site like Miro Community but they're really into Twitter because they're heard about it in the news). There's also a lot of concern about adding extra work and anxiety about prioritizing core functions because of the financial crisis. One thing I feel we really need to focus on with these folks is the importance of building sustainable systems so that they can come out of this recession stronger than ever, otherwise I think this could be a near-fatal blow.

I also decided it would be beneficial to attend the NAMAC conference and am working on setting that up - has anyone else heard from the volunteer coordinator? I found Bolt Bus tickets NYC-Boston for $1.50 each way, so I'm pretty happy about that.

Well, I think I should get back to work now, but that's a taste of what I've been up to so far! I've loved hearing about how things are going for you all, too - keep it coming!

Comment from Ben Sheldon on August 17, 2009 - 4:17pm

That's really cool (and smart) that you're starting small and really trying to target one particular community to build.

The Cable Access crowd is always a tough nut to crack. Because of their super-local focus, the majority haven't built a culture of sharing. And since their money comes from franchise fees (rather than donors) they focus more on political issues (since the fees come through the city and are regulated at the state and federal level) rather than developing community competencies. If you haven't already, talk to our VISTAs John Haffner at CMAP, or John Montgomery at Deproduction, since they are doing collaborative partnerships between Access Stations.

Don't get disheartened: it sounds like you've already done a lot!

Comment from Anne Jonas on August 17, 2009 - 4:26pm

Thanks, Ben! Actually, one of the places we're talking to is Medfield, so I think Jason was happy to hear I was part of DAScorps. I'm pretty optimistic about things, though it's kind of funny to see how there are such different cultures - we have a very tech culture at PCF, I think, and it's very different than the traditional nonprofit culture. It should be interesting!

By the way, do you know if Colin Rhinesmith's master's thesis on public access in the age of youtube is available somewhere? He seemed like someone you might know.

Comment from Claudia Escobar on September 1, 2009 - 7:53pm

Anne: If this was your first week, I can't wait to read what you have done in a month!

Though for most, this is the end of the VISTA term, I'm sticking around through at least February, which I'm excited about. Lots more work ahead. No time to be heading out. Things have been so busy that it's hard to remember exactly what this month has brought. I've done a lot of work with our summer intern, getting him trained and working hard. But also really digging deep into the thinking about planning about how we use volunteers, outreach and market to them, and how we help communities meet their goals. We're experimenting with flipcams as a tool that communities can use to document their stories and I've been working on developing language around the outreach for them. I've also been developing our archive of artistic work to make it accessible and usable for us and our constituents. As we think about moving forward into a new stage of our website, it's important to have a clean and useful database of artistic content.

This next month I'm headed out to Eureka, CA for a professional development residency in community theater. I'm really hoping I'll be able to bring back some ideas and plans for how to strategize theatrical work in our web-based project.

Since my previous field report, I have:

• participated in a discussion of how the CCTS (the org I'm serving)
  should develop its "business" in the future.
• helped the hiring process by placing ads and by participating in
  the interview of a candidate;
• studied some existing, alternative, Content Management Systems
  (CMS) not invented at CCTS, as candidate replacements for the CMS
  that was invented at CCTS;
• demonstrated a pattern for adding automated tests for the CCTS
  CMS, documenting the tests, and at the same time, documenting the
  requirements;
• investigated somewhat into how we might be able to achieve
  a cleaner separation between
  the core CMS and the customizations of it to the needs of specific
  clients;
• maintained a file server (made backups, etc.) for the office files
• maintained an environment for our software development
  (using the Ubuntu distribution);
• supported workstations running one of Microsoft's operating systems
• helped move the office;
• constructed a "sandbox" installation of the CCTS CMS for
  demonstrating its ease of use;
• contributed time to the maintenance of the CMS;
• participated in an interim edit of the old, static, CCTS web site
• taught other personnel about programming techniques and principles
  (e. g., finite-state machines).

Please keep in mind that since the purpose of the CCTS is to build the
capacity of other organizations, anything I do that helps CCTS,
contributes to capacity building in the social-profit sector.

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.

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

Comment from Denise Cheng on June 26, 2009 - 1:27pm

Thanks, Mary! Your work sounds really effective! What are you doing after the CTC Project?