More Workshops, Instructors, & Blogs

Marketing
January 2011 is the first month of my redesign of our workshop brochure. The original lacked our image of who we are- a MEDIA ARTS center. It looked more like a school lunch calendar, or a hospital manual. I added images, descriptions, and tried to make it easy to look at. Please!! Any input is appreciate on what works and what doesn't with this design.
This is my first attempt with Adobe InDesign. It's a great program for designing print material, and has plenty of add-on scripts users can share with one another. I would like to have a template designed so that you can just drop in new images, and paste new descriptions for each workshop without knowing anything about graphic design. The time and skills needed for the task will be cut tremendously.



Meetup.com helps incredibly with organizing events.
Most of our ShareSD jammers have found us through meetup.com

Volunteer Recruitment
Our members and visitors are growing. We've had visits from high school and university classes, independent artists, and local residents attending events and workshops. Thankfully, we are receiving more interns, donations, and volunteer instructors to help with all the new attention.
One goal is to have a migration of our curriculum onto a web-based system. Our server is slow, old, and has duplicates of everything running around all over the place. Google docs is my current stomping grounds for keeping new curriculum and managing new and potential volunteers to teach workshops.
I just created a Google Form so potential instructors can submit their workshop proposals to us. It clearly defines their goals and outcomes, while creating a contact database of those interested in volunteering. The form is a spreadsheet in disguise, so this information can be visualized, redirected, and published in several ways. Here is a copy of the form I've created: Proposal Form And here is how I want the information presented and archived (on its own): Doc View.

Tracking our Technology
As we approach closer to our annual 10 day film festival, the need for a reliable and organized system to track our equipment grows. We have seven screenings that happen simultaneously, and it all happens outside our walls. I discovered a Drupal program called MERCI(Manage Equipment Reservations, Checkout and Inventory), it can extend any content type into a list of unique reservable items (like studios) or buckets of interchangeable items (like DV cameras)." Developed by Chad Phillips for Open Media Project. (Thanks to Gavin for directing me to MERCI contacts!) This has everything I've been looking for, BUT...

1. 1. Do I have the time to learn Drupal and fix any bugs before I leave?
2. 2. Will anyone have the ability to maintain/update MERCI once I leave?

Before I step into uncharted territory, I'm going to see if I can Excel my way through this assignment. I recently took advantage of my IST and had a six-hour excel training, which gave me a few tricks to try out.

CMS
We have Kintera. And I do not like it. I had to call tech support. Their solution to my problem was that I had to be on Internet Explorer, clear my cookies, and restart IE in order for my duplicate contacts to update. Not exactly good workflow, especially when you are working in a Mac lab. I'd like to hear your thoughts on Kintera. Email me if you have any!

A growing community: http://macsddiy.posterous.com

Last month's Videographer's Lounge,a free gathering, was hosted by video artist Ilan Katin. This is a video mapping demo. Photo by Miguel Vega: portfolio.accent.tv/