Well...it seems just like that my Vista life is over. My 2 years kinda flew by. I learned so much I can't even imagine where to start. Along with tons of software, I also had numerous chances to practice public speaking, attend business meetings on behalf of the company, and interact with all types of diverse & fascinating people. I suppose that's what I'm most thankful for. Also, I've becoming an expert on stretching my dollar-lol

A lot of my time here at The Media Aid Center has been consumed by building and updating our website mediaaidcenter.org It's a shame that I'm just now getting a handle on the whole process, but it takes twice as long when you have high school students in the room who need attention. An important rule I've learned this yr as far as programming & design is "don't reinvent the wheel" ! If there's a 3rd part app or excellent tutorial on a related subject matter, use it ! I mad the mistake of approaching things as if it had never been done before & I had to rely on myself.
My time here has been pretty smooth. My boss is an excellent communicator and always kept a casual and encouraging atmosphere. If money was no issue, I'd probably stay here longer.

I'll be using my two educational stipends to attend an audio school here in the LA/ Hollywood area early next year. I'll also have the time to better focus on my new hobby/website Fantastic Disaster Poetry at www.fdp.me (shameless plug). I'd like to thank everyone involved in making this program work. The conferences were great, I always got paid on time, and the leaders always showed passion for what they do.

Oh and to new Vistas, never make a separate Vista email folder & filter to automatically sort emails. You'll forget to check it for months on in such as myself and not receive important training/conference info on time!

Comment from Edward Gonzales on December 9, 2008 - 6:00pm

Thank you for your service; thanks for the advice. Keep in touch!

Comment from Morgan Sully on December 10, 2008 - 2:33pm

Hi Mike (and Ed!),
Sounds like you did a great stint of service and that you're off to explore other great things for yourself. We didn't chat with each other as much as other VISTAs, but the times we did were awesome.

It's inspiring to see other fellow VISTAs actively exploring what they want out of life, be it school, social change, media arts advocacy or poetry;)

If you want to stay in touch with former CTC VISTAs, we have an alumni (along with current VISTA and fans of CTC VISTA) on the CTC VISTA Project Group on LinkedIn:

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=93820&trk=anet_ug_grppro

It's a great way to stay in touch with other VISTAs, share what you are doing and stay engaged in the network.

Best of luck to you and do keep in touch!

Comment from Edward Gonzales on December 12, 2008 - 5:14pm

Thanks Morgan!

Hi everyone,
Well here we are at the holidays again. I have been very busy here at the Academy. The community programs I am helping to develop here are really helping people to expand there skills in an effort to work and be self sufficient. Especially great is the Ticket to work program.
I have learned so much about social security and found a lot of resources for disabled. The goal of the ticket program is to help people in the community to work or earn money and still keep SSI or SSD benefits. I help people learn academic content and pre-workforce soft skills, but also link them with real-world work experience through participation in our community service programs: Distance Learning Programs, KidTech Program, Community Computer Academy, Recycling center, Work Readiness Ticket to work program. Just to name a few. It find it really surprising the number of disabled that want to work. I can help them get around there disability and expand on their abilities which makes me feel great. Not to mention how the community feels.
I have been part of a project that provides community assistive technology and educational outreach to the community and faith based organizations that we work with. I help provide AT educational services to these organizations both on site and by remote distance learning I am managing Ticket to Work project.
I am learning myself and teaching Assistive Technology software and hardware. It’s very rewarding. I love what I do and hope I can expand my skills to become expertly proficient in them.

I have been working on updating our existing website with new content and better information architecture/navigation. Balancing the time commitment for this project has been tricky, as a completely new site is being speced out and will go into production via a third party soon – but won’t be finished until January or February. I have mapped workflows, created mockups and activity diagrams and revised site content to give users a better understanding of the organization’s mission/brand and to provide clear calls to action.

My other big project is creating a Marketing Plan and associated Marketing Calendar to cover the coming year, assuring that the plan incorporates metrics to measure the success of individual marketing campaigns. The new Marketing Plan outlines and defines the major target audiences and competitors for my organization. I have been performing usability reviews for the 2.0 builds and am working on a “Train the Trainer” presentation about usability testing so that everyone in our office can serve as a tester/moderator – training that will hopefully be beneficial long after my Vista tour is over. I have also been studying and reporting on the organization’s Google Analytics and Salesforce stats as well as making SEO/SEM recommendations for the new product launch in January.

Comment from Morgan Sully on December 10, 2008 - 2:54pm

Oooooh, geek. ee. I love this stuff. Metrics? Workflows? Mockups and activity diagrams? These are things I wish i had known just teensy bit more about when I was redeveloping NAMAC's site.

Having a marketing plan in place BEFORE launching a new campaign is always great too.

So glad to hear a usability advocate at work as a CTC VISTA. I think you might quite possibly be the first (of hopefully more!.

P.S. Do you have any shareable pictures from these designs?

This story takes place in Ohio. I know some of you coastal VISTAs are longing for more Ohio news and charming Midwestern commentary, like you were getting before the election. Perfect timing for me to wake from my procrastination hibernation and write my very first field report!

I am serving as Youth Channel Facilitator at Media Bridges www.mediabridges.org, a community media center that operates Cincinnati’s four public access television stations. My job is to develop a youth media program that will allow Cincinnati youth (ages 12-25) to run Media Bridges’ youth channel. The youth channel, called the Youth Block, airs youth-created programming on Media Bridges’ education channel. Part of my job is to acquire 10 hours each week of programming to be played on our Youth Block (currently we have about four hours), and to develop a plan for volunteer youth to run the Youth Block.

Our goal is that youth who participate in the program will learn the tools to understand how media represents youth and constructs messages which affect them. We hope that students will gain the confidence and ability to use video and radio production skills to represent themselves and get their voices out to the community.

My first month here I worked with the kids in our summer video and radio camp. Each class finishes with the production of a video or radio show by the kids. Right now, the summer media camp is the only established youth program at Media Bridges, and a primary source of our Youth Block programming, so I am hoping to expand on that. I’ve also been taking crash courses in all the cool technology toys we have here: I’ve learned to use a video camera, operate studio cameras, lighting and sound equipment, run a live studio show, and edit digital video. Yay!

The past few months have been spent researching existing youth media programs in other cities and meeting with local organizations that work with youth in order to build partnerships and get the word out about the Youth Block. In September I organized an event for One Web Day at Media Bridges (http://mediabridges.org/onewebday/). In October, I attended the Alliance for Community Media Central States Region conference and I also supervised a high school student who interned with me for a week as part of a senior project. In November I have been helping to revamp Media Bridges’ volunteer program to help recruit younger volunteers, and I am taking a proposal writing course online and working on writing grant proposals.

That’s just the basics, but stay tuned for more lively and detailed reports from the heartland as I get caught up on my field report quota. Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!

Howdy dowdy!
Currently I am the last stages of helping out the Communications Team test email blast services. I know Vertical Response was highly recommended, but correct me if I'm wrong, I found that if an org has multiple campaigns (i.e. newsletters) and one person subscribes for all of their campaigns, and then decides to unsubscribe from one campaign, then that person is unsubscribed from all campaigns. So I have decided to check VR off of my list and check out iContact, mailChimp, and constant contact. At this point, the skill that I need to learn is HTML. That way our org doesn't have to spend on a newsletter template consultant. Guess how much that costs? ~$350 bolivares (Venezuelan currency), jk...dollars.
Oh one more thing, Drupal and Joomla! may be on the backseat for a while, since our org is leaning towards redefining it's purpose etc. Which means that I will still be posting my articles relating to "community technology" but not so much trying to learn how to manage a CMS. Nevertheless, I have set a secret personal goal: to learn how to upgrade Drupal from v. 0.00001 to version 6 point something.
Last time I reported, Dia de Los Muertos at Olvera Street happened and the CTCNet Conference near Inglewood happened. One challenge that I overcame was not having foodstamps for about 2 weeks. This meant that there was no more peanuts and pistachio snacking at the office, sad face. But now I am changed man!
I am looking forward to eating sweet potato (aka Camote) pie (maybe one purchased from Albertsons, I will try to get one from a Farmers Market) and watching/playing football out in Mendota, Califas. Happy Turkey Day!

*forgive me for the dearth of postings (thanks GRE!).

Comment from Morgan Sully on December 10, 2008 - 3:03pm

je je,
a wise move to hold bac a bit on the Drupal part until your org gets their purpse redefined a bit. They should REALLY talk with Helen De Michiel at NAMAC. She's really been pushing this idea of a 'Digital New Deal' http://www.namac.org/node/4526

Remember that session at the CTCNet Conference where we went over challenges and opportunities for the CTC movement? Many of those issues are THE SAME ISSUES that the field of media arts is facing. We also want to align with larger policy goals to not reinvent the wheel and synergize change that is broad and deep. Hope that's not too out there, but it was a pattern I noticed throughout the strategic planning session my org had, the sessions we had at CTCNet as well as what I see happening in the larger picture. whoa. anyway.

do you have a 'sand box' server to play around with Drupal on yet? Maybe Josh King might be able to point you in the right direction...

Cheers!

While I spent a considerable amount of time updating links in our database, I also prepared the case management system we have for a new client in Kittitas County (Washington).

Aspiration recently held the 2008 Nonprofit Software Development Summit in Oakland, CA which was basically a three day event to get a bunch of nonprofit techie geeks into a room, hash out the industry and then get them all drunk afterward. It ended up going very smoothly but for those three days I was pretty stressed. There's a lot of things to do to make an event run smoothly for 115 people. On the up side, I learned how to navigate the Bay (SF, Berkeley and Oakland) in the car (read: mini-van) and realized how incredibly small it is. Also, people swear at you. But outside of picking up boxes of Aspiration T-Shirts and wildly swerving on I-80, I got to meet some really cool people doing crazy stuff in nonprofit technology. There was this little man named Arun from India who is developing a computer program for disabled kids to use (think of Stephen Hawking's wheelchair computer) and it made me really excited about getting involved. I also got to meet a bunch of people in the nonprofit tech industry who I interact with a lot but never actually meet because they're all over the world. For instance, the Brattleboro Tech Collective in Vermont develops Social Source Commons and I finally got to meet Josh, the guy I talk to all the time on Skype. It's crazy how technology totally takes down distance to nothingness. Also, at the Summit, there were a bunch of former CTC VISTAs which was cool to find out. They all basically felt bad for me and bought me booze which was a perk.

Gunner, my boss, is going to be out of the office for the next 6 weeks which means that we're going to be working with a remote boss for a while. It's been kind of hectic as we prepare for him not to be here for so long but it's finally easing down. I'm vaguely worried because a lot of my tasks for my position are kind of set up so that they require Gunner's approval before they can go through. Right now, when he's here it can take him a while to get to things, but when he's in India? We'll see. I mean it hasn't been a problem, it's just one of those things that you find to worry about a new situation, you know? LAME.

San Francisco "winter" is supposedly low 60s, high 50s, dreary with rain. I think we're at the beginning of it now. Luckily, I am told it only lasts from December through January (big contrast to the 28 months of winter we get in Michigan a year). I think that's it for me for right now. Later

Comment from Morgan Sully on December 10, 2008 - 3:18pm

seven words: Second Annual Nonprofit Geek Trivia Pub Quiz.

awesome. that and the haikus.
and the sessions.
and the food.
and the awesome staff.

and meeting LOADS of people equally as geeky and concerned about making a positive change in the world.

oh yeah, and the shirts? don't even get me started.

Comment from Dan Stangl on January 5, 2009 - 6:15pm

Matt,

You make us all look bad with your timely field reports.

Much has happened since I started with HOME. It's my second year working with Brighton High School and we're hard at work on the first episode of a show similar in form to English High School's ETV. We recently had a screening of the TV show produced during our summer intensive program called Teen TV over at EHS. The three episodes from this summer can be viewed at http://teentvboston.blip.tv. Teen TV mostly highlights local organization doing positive work in the community and with teens.

We've added Somerville High School to the list of school we work with, so I'm doing whatever I can to support our new lab coordinator. Craig has been teaching a video production class as well as collaborating on video projects with other classes, including a Spanish class and a music composition class. He's also been using a Drupal website I developed for the school which allows him and his class to post assignments and projects and interact with one another. Over the coming months I will be continuing to develop our Drupal websites, organize our resources online and put in place an infrastructure that will support our expanding programs.

This is my second year, and I don't believe I've posted a field report before, so here's a rundown of what went down last year with some clips for anyone who's interested. Last school year I split my time between Brighton High School and Social Justice Academy, mostly keeping our program afloat but also expanding it at the schools to cover multiple disciplines. Some notable projects at Brighton High School included a series of videos with a history class based on some landmark Supreme Court decisions and a weekly program with a group of students with behavior problems where we held discussions about making choices, which were videotaped by the students. The after school media program also taped and edited school events with multiple cameras such as the Senior fashion show and the school musical Little Shop of Horrors.

At Social Justice Academy my associate and I did a documentary project with a group of students exploring the presidential primary race and what it means to have two minority candidates with a legitimate shot at the highest office in the land. The project was not entirely successful, as I expected both the students and their teachers to take more initiative and have some student involvement in the editing process, but it did get them doing some research, thinking and talking about the subject.

We also got involved with a project called The Peer Justice System, an alternative disciplinary system being pioneered at the school based on principals of restorative justice. A group of students from the law and justice class met weekly with a group of Northeastern University law students to learn about legal issues and restorative justice, and eventually hold a series of Youth Courts where the responsible party(s) would be given a remedy by a jury of their peers, with students advocating for the responsible parties, the school community and presiding over the court. We documented several of their meeting from which a video was produced, as well as helped students record the two Youth Courts that were held.

The Suffrage Centennial Workshop, teacher professional development on the subject of Women's Suffrage in Washington State, has been my primary focus for the past six months. Coming up December 6th our third seminar will be held focusing on the contradictory methods used by the two sides of Washington State to win suffrage. The SCW is funded by a grant from National Endowment for the Humanities and is classified as a We the People Project. I am currently serving as Project Director on this grant and has been a wonderful learning experience. The SCW is composed of 6 seminars over 18 months with 5 humanities scholars from area universities. We have 20 teachers participating from elementary to high school teachers. You never realize how much planning and work goes into a workshop until you have to do the work.

In addition to this I've been doing grants research for my organization. Since it is the nature of the beast and is necessary for us to keep running. I'm also learning how to write grants and with a mentor that has a very high return on grant success it has been extremely beneficial.

Over the summer we finished our documentary on small town museums. This is available online at http://history.tincan.org. So check it out if you have time.

When I say we I mean that I've worked with other members of my organization to make these projects happen. After attending the CTCNet conference this month I realized that I am extremely luckily. I have a wonderful organization that I work for, that has never made any kind of distinction between my status as a Vista and as an employee of the organization. And when my service ends in 2 months I will become a full time employee for Tincan. I feel that I have accomplished my goals as a Vista since I've been able to assist in securing funds to make Inland Northwest Memories Project sustainable.

This has been an unimaginable opportunity for me and even though I've made several sacrifices to make these past two years possible it has been well worth it.