Digest and outreach

Hey everyone, here's a quick update on some things at UMass.

With the Digest deadline quickly approaching, Danielle and I are working to get articles, bios, images, and video up in Drupal. If you wrote an article and have a photo that’s relevant, it would be great if you could send it to me or let me know where I can find it. It will be interesting to see how the Journal works as a finished product in the context of our new site. The Digest has been great because it’s allowed me to see a little more of Drupal and also created an appeal for web based documents and spreadsheets, neither of which I’d given any prior thought. I’ve been using Google’s versions and for my purposes they’ve been just as functional and easy to navigate as Excel or Word.

I’ve also been doing some outreach for the Project, researching local Community Media and Technology (or similar) programs to get involved with. Our aim is to strengthen both the university programs and the Project by sharing connections and resources and providing opportunities relevant to each other’s members. For example, people in these programs are presumably great applicants for the CTC VISTA Project and often these universities offer graduate programs that would be of interest to VISTA members. I’m going to be taking a series of workshops in November with Nettrice Gaskins at MassArt on InDesign so I can get some tangible materials together for some face-to-face meetings.

On the organization side of things, I’ve been searching for non-profits that could potentially use a VISTA in Detroit, MI. Recently, we’ve had more applicants interested in working in Detroit, but the Project doesn’t currently work with anyone there, and as I’m from the Metro Detroit area I was excited to do this. If anyone working in or from Michigan has any thoughts, let me know.

Hope everyone enjoys the weekend.