Digital Arts Service Corps - NTEN

Field Report #11: The Importance of Knowing Your Neighbors

Morgan Sully — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:14:09 +0000

The N-TEN Conference and Meeting Other VISTAs

The N-TEN Conference was fantastic. Aside from the high-quality speakers, panels and opportunities for meeting other professionals working in the field of non-profit technology, I was fortunate enough to meet up with Ben, Kevin, Wes, Karl, Ashley and Anita from the CTC VISTA Project. We also had a special surprise visit from CTC VISTA Alum Jessica McCoy as well as another AmeriCorps Alum Jules (who we'd previously met at the NAMAC Austin Conference in October!).

Opportunities like this, I feel are crucial to supporting VISTAs during their respective years of service.

The conferences that VISTAs are 'mandated' to attend via their org/Project agreements are EXCELLENT opportunities for VISTAs own professional development. I for one came away feeling more knowledgeable, empowered and inspired to continue my work.

Panels I enjoyed attending were:

Changing Your CEO from Barrier to Partner

Project Management for Techies: Delivering on Time and Budget

Building, Growing, and Sustaining a Vibrant Online Community – How to Reach Beyond Traditional Tools into the Web 2.0 Sphere

Photo: bensheldon

The face-to-face OFFLINE interaction with our national network of VISTAs is priceless in adding a sense of value, shared experience and belonging to something bigger than ourselves COMMUNITY. It's half of what we as CTC VISTAs do...

New Orleans
On a personal note, another highlight for me was the impromptu tour that Ben, Kevin and myself were given by Lisa Stansky from Southeast Louisiana Legal Services (who are also hiring a CTC VISTA for this upcoming VISTA cycle). We were given a very sobering tour of many parts of New Orleans that still, three years later, are being rebuilt after the 'storm':

I
waterlines on houses
stained where water had risen trapping and drowning people inside their homes
where people died
spray painted x's like graffiti on people's homes
marking where people still might be able to recover bodies or animals
perhaps still living
perhaps not
dead animals in attics
II
impromptu mini economies of resilience
and resourcefulness amidst little
schools and libraries becoming community centers
churches with broken windows still but with people singing gospel
people, families children dressed for church among demolished houses
III
and a kind stranger inviting us into our home
a cheerleader for New Orleans
IV
a lively city
people come to rebuild during the day until they can't anymore
party at night and then back to their tents under the freeways amidst the educated and homeless
only to do it again
the next day

As AmeriCorps VISTA Members, I feel we are very fortunate to be part of a national program that helps people out of poverty, increase literacy AND allows us to develop our potential as professionals in the public sector. There is still so much that we as AmeriCorps (and beyond) can do to help our communities.

The one 'take away' I can think of from my trip to New Orleans was on the importance of knowing your neighbors. After the storm came, many neighborhoods were simply eradicated. Houses were simply picked up and then deposited two blocks down, perhaps on someone else's property. Sometimes exquisite old mansions laid tattered, while more poor-looking homes remained intact. Other areas had pristine houses - separated by only a few feet in elevation - standing proudly amidst it's peers, now in shambles. It was as if the lines of people's property and class and race were perhaps uncomfortably, necessarily pushed together, merged or erased.

It was as if God had taken a giant Etch-A-Sketch and shaken the neighborhoods (I saw) up.

The importance of knowing your neighbors I think, is the single most important part of being the community builders that we are. When there is strife in the world (only aggrevated by the terribleness of poverty), it's important to be aware that communities can in fact come together to bridge lines of class and race. I don't think we should have to wait until tragedy forces us to. Perhaps in our arrogance it's necessary.

I'd like to think not.

Chicago: You're Stuck Here

Karl Otto — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:55:52 +0000

The big story of the week is that I was supposed to speak at a conference in Ocean City, MD about free and low-cost tools for nonprofits. Unfortunately (or fortunately), I live in

Chicago and weather conditions made it impossible to fly out in time to give the talk. Nuts! Then again, who wants to go to Ocean City in February? My next trip is scheduled later next month--which starts tomorrow--for the NTEN Conference in New Orleans. If anybody is getting there on Wednesday, I suggest you go to the NTEN Science Fair if for nothing else than to see the exhibits and take place in the raffle. I got an email from them and it looks like they're giving out a million iPods, but don't quote me on that figure.

Speaking of New Orleans, does anybody need a room(mate)? My organization, Grassroots.org, has put me up at the Sheraton (where the conference is being held), but I'm staying in a double and would like to save some money for them if I can. If anybody's interested in splitting the room, email me at karl@grassroots.org.

Aside from that, does anybody know about good resources for website accessibility? I'm supposed to be researching it in preparation for making our site more accessible, but I'm finding guides that might be more trouble than they're worth. Any suggestions?

Finally, I had a good experience the other day with regards to my position. My roommate was wondering who Grassroots.org gave its services to. I told her that we typically give our services to nonprofits (especially 501c3s). She then told me that her family had just applied for nonprofit status for an organization that centers around her cousin and the rare medical condition that he has. They were looking to make a website for the organization. "Sure," I said, "We can get you that." Yeah, I'm cool. I work at a nonprofit.

10 Tactics for Growing Your Community Online

Morgan Sully — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 20:56:22 +0000

Last week I attended an NTEN Member Appreciation Webinar entitled: 10 Tactics for Growing Your Community Online. As NAMAC's Online Community Manager, I found this webinar very helpful, engaging and well worth my time.

The webinar, provided by the awesome N-TEN, can be found in context here:
http://tinyurl.com/2mtekz

The following are the main bullet points that were discussed at the *session:

1) Let the potential members of the community know why you are providing an online community, and how being an active member of a community would benefit them.

2) Use every opportunity to showcase your online community.

3) Seed the community with groups, forum postings, blogs, etc., so that early adopters aren’t faced with an “empty” community.

4) Make it as easy as possible for people to sign up and to use the community tools.

5) Designate a staff person to be the facilitator or moderator of the community.

6) Acknowledge those members who use the community frequently.

7) Seek input from the members on your organization’s agenda and other organizational issues. Take what you learn from the community and put it into practice in the organization.

8) Use wiki and/or forum functionality to publish ongoing lists of group events.

9) Announce new initiatives and other important organizational news in the community first.

10) Keep the community content fresh.

Feel free to watch the powerpoint below (click on it to go to a download page):

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| View | Upload your own

The powerpoint was provided on kind permission from Christopher Dworin, VP of Business Development at GoLightly - thanks Chris! GoLightly provides communication and collaboration solutions for community-minded organizations. [Their] social networking tools give your members the ability to interact with you and each other in powerful new ways.

To read more about GoLightly, see: http://www.golightly.com/

Getting settled in

Rob Heck — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 06:42:51 +0000

So after the flight home to Florida from the PSO, I made it to Portland in 4 days. We found a house on the outskirts of the city and were able to get our place furnished all with free stuff from craigslist and freecycle :D (still looking for a table though). We even found some free tomato plants and some other pre-started veggies for 50 cents each.

Portland seems pretty cool; I think it's different than Florida yet similar at the same time. I like the fact that there are a ton of parks, local business, co-ops, collectives, biking and gardening stuff. The city itself is comprised of distinct yet compacted and connected neighborhoods so suburban sprawl has been kept to a minimal level.

But I was expecting there to be more trees in the city (there are zero downtown and not much old growth in the residential areas) and really surprised to find out that there is a lot of heavily polluting industry here. The port is actually a Superfund site, meaning the government is funding the cleanup of toxic waste since the original responsible corporations are no longer around (the actual people might still be, but ridiculously, corporations are defined like people under US law so they usually get off scot free when the business goes under or is sold, etc).

Besides the view from NTEN's office (as long as you don't look at the port), I like the fact that my supervisor is really nice and seems to be way more open and respectful than other supervisor's I have had (especially in grad school). However, I have been doing nothing but data-entry and administrative stuff since I arrived. Although I certainly don't mind some if it helps others, my wrist was sore from all the repetition. It helped a little bit when I located a decent macro application to slightly automate the transfer of thousands of member entries between two different databases we are using for "constituency relationship management" (CRM). Yes, this is only one of the many buzzwords I have learned over the past few weeks. Personally, I am not a big fan of wannabe catchy pop phrases. But I'll have to save that for another post :).

Fortunately, it looks like I will be moving on to doing less data-entry. I will be posting weekly round ups of interesting discussion on NTEN's Affinity Groups (fancy mailing lists that are user-driven, i.e. anyone can create one). I also will be developing materials for assisting moderators of the groups. To get practical experience, I created my own group about free/open-source software and Linux. Hopefully, the trend of less data-entry will continue as I become more familiar with the organization.

Btw, I highly recommend you check out NTEN's website if you have not already. There is a ton of information and lots of different groups in the Affinity Groups platform that might be a good resource for a wide range of things.

Intro

Rob Heck — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 20:25:17 +0000

My name is Rob Heck and I'm originally from Gainesville, FL. I will be serving as the Events and Program Coordinator for the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) in Portland, OR.

I became a VISTA in order to use my experience with technology and organizing in an attempt to make a difference and help further social change. I'm also excited to get out of Florida, where I have lived for 23 years.

I have never been out west at all, but according to Mr. Ben Sheldon I will like it since I'm very "Portland Oregonish." According to another new VISTA, John Van Houdt, I am something of an anarcho-transcendentalist, but I think he drinks a little too much and is a bit of a Eurocentric neo-Hegelian. Don't let these people bias your opinion of me though. And no, I'm not Mormon. I am looking forward to all the great grassroots activism I hear goes on in the NW though.

Nonprofit Communications 2.0

Ben Sheldon — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 16:18:35 +0000

Last week I attended NTEN's 2007 Nonprofit Technology Conference and sat in on a wonderful session entitled Nonprofit Communications 2.0: Seven Steps to Transform Your Organization. Led by Lauren-Glenn Davitian of the CCTV Center for Media and Democracy, the session provided a strong framework for nonprofits to better communicate in an increasingly networked society.

(crossposted from my personal blog)

I am also very lucky to serve with Lauren-Glenn on the editorial board of the Community Media Review.

The video itself is approximately 1 hour, 24 minutes long and worth every second, but I included my notes from the session below.

Community building talent is the single most important resource in the modern world.

Peter Drucker

How to engage and mobilize members

A Communications framework for thinking about how organizational objectives are met through interaction. The correlating Development framework is in parenthesis.

Welcome (Prospect)
Educate (Cultivation)
Ask (Involvement)
Thank (Stewardship)

The Seven Steps

Assessment: Defining your goal (What behavior are you trying to change in undertaking a communications strategy?), audience (an explicit, targeted "who" and their values), evaluating your infrastructure (orthodoxies, structure, time, leadership)
Awareness: Start by searching NTEN, TechSoup, Idealware, etc. (Link Research)
Training: A discipline of doing things. How are stories told, infrastructure built and actions communicated to regular people?
Content Production: "The currency of the new world"
Technical Support: An example: how to know when to build and when to buy
Partnerships: Who is going to stand up for you?
Planning: What are the components that revolve around your goal?

The NTC, a Bike Ride, and a Discovered Website

Karl Hedstrom — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 17:48:27 +0000

Everything’s going quite well here at NTEN as we’re of course very busy tying up all the loose ends before the NTC. As far as what's new and exciting in my work, I finally managed to make a breakthrough in using our sometimes unwieldy CMS (netFORUM) to design a searchable member database for our website. That project had been on my plate since the beginning of January (and until yesterday I’d made very little progress), so it was nice to finally make some real headway there - and it should soon be up on our website and ready for use.

Outside of work I’m loving the longer days and beautiful weather out here in the Bay Area. Last weekend I went on a really cool bike ride down in Santa Cruz. Looking at the map beforehand we had thought the route was maybe 7 miles with maybe 600 feet of elevation gain. After the ride though (which at points was quite exhausting), my friend pointed me towards a very cool website that lets you track the actual distance of any path, anywhere in the world, and also creates an elevation map of said path (using the wonderful google maps interface). So after playing around with this, it turned out that instead of our planned 7 mile ride, we actually had gone close to 13 miles with nearly 1,000 feet of elevation gain (here’s the link to see our actual route: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=785895) ... so it was a much more difficult ride than we were planning on, especially after several months of winter inactivity.

Well, that’s about it from here, so I hope everyone else's work is going well and I’ll see many of you in a couple weeks at the NTC,

Travel Tip

Corey Funderburk — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 22:00:15 +0000

Our fellow VISTA, Carl, sent me a website for a great airfare finder: http://www.farecast.com/

It's pretty cool because it not only tells you where to find the cheapest fare, but gives advice on whether to buy now or later based on trends in airfare prices. If you haven't bought your airfare for the conference yet, I definitely suggest you check it out.

Thanks for the help Carl! (Especially since he lives in DC and doesn't even have to travel. What a swell guy!)

Issues and Updates

Corey Funderburk — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 20:16:47 +0000

It has truly been a while since I wrote a blog. Anyone who reads Laura's blogs, however, pretty much knows what I'm doing. My friends here in San Diego call Laura my "life partner" because we spend so much time together - living, commuting, working. Thankfully, we get along and haven’t killed each other yet :). I feel like recently most of my time has been spent in trying to overcome a lot of bureaucracy.

Issue #1: Ed Award. I recently discovered that my loan doesn't necessarily fall into the "qualified" definition of a loan for which an Ed Award can be applied. Apparently, for a loan to be “qualified” it has to be given by the state/federal government. Why then, don’t they say “qualified state/federal loan?” I received a special loan through my school’s alumni association that is interest free so it is considered private. To transfer a loan to a federal one, you have to be currently enrolled in school. Well, had these “qualifications” been explicitly written on the website when I was first looking into AmeriCorps (I was still in school) I might have been able to change it. Instead, however, I joined up and even completed orientation without the slightest inkling that my loan would not be accepted. Thankfully, after a lot of conversations and some letter writing I have been able to get my loan approved. Yae!

Issue #2: Healthcare. For details on these shenanigans, you should read Laura’s blog. The basic gist – it is pretty much impossible to find a clinic in San Diego. The one clinic listed within 30 miles on Seven Corner’s website is only for children. Believe me, it’s true, we went there twice. How many juveniles are AmeriCorps members? Probably not many. I did look into finding a doctor when I first signed up but never followed through. My bad. Honestly, though, that wouldn’t have helped in Laura’s situation unless they had after-hours, same day appointments available. It is important to be able to go to some sort of 24-hour emergency center and in San Diego, that doesn’t seem to be a possibility with AmeriCorps benefits (not insurance). By the way, downtown inner-city emergency rooms = not so fun. Thank goodness for the Purell dispenser on the wall. I read Danielle’s reply to Laura’s blog and I was absolutely shocked by the advice Danielle had been given, “…show up at the ER and declare you have no insurance - depending on the state, you sometimes get better coverage that way than if you tell them about Seven Corners.” That is so sad. I told Mike Denegal what Danielle said about asking him for advice, he just laughed and said, “I love Danielle :).”

Now that I’m pretty much done ranting and raving I can tell you all about the things I’ve been up to at Pangea. Pangea is a non-profit software development company that specializes in web-based resident data management tools (I know it’s a mouthful). Our current systems include: AASC Online, AASC Families, Abilities4RSC, and Mercy Families. Here’s a little rundown on what these actually do: The systems are designed for service coordinators (like social workers who live on-site at an elderly home, low-income family housing project, etc). These service coordinators have daily contact with their residents in which they sort of act like a concierge would at a hotel – they provide services for their residents, whatever those might be. These services are provided in hopes that residents can improve their livelihoods and/or become self-sufficient. For example, say Mr. Johnston is living with his family in government-funded, low-income housing and needs to get a job but doesn’t have many skills. The service coordinator could invite him to a computer class that he/she is putting on, set him up to attend someone else’s, or possibly even help him get involved in a degree- or certificate-earning program. Anything she does for him she inputs into one of the systems. Two months later, after finishing his classes, Mr. Johnston lands a great networking assistant job at a local company and is able to move he and his family into an independent apartment building (that is, he no longer requires financial assistance to pay his rent). Well, this outcome is also recorded into the system. So, in the end, the system has recorded the steps the service coordinator took to assist Mr. Johnston in becoming independent. Having it in an electronic format allows the service coordinators to run reports and have tangible proof of the good they are doing. This translates into more government grants and funding for their residences and, therefore, more people helped. To try to keep track of all of this by hand would be mind boggling, whereas the systems can do it in about 5 seconds.

So that’s the basic idea, and now you may be wondering, “So what do you do AmeriCorey?” Laura and I have been working on the design of two main information systems: Abilities 4 Mentoring and Abilities 4 Education. Basically we get to design all of the forms and reports from the front-end perspective. The Mentoring system tracks mentoring relationships and their outcomes: Did the mentee’s grades improve? Did he/she stay out of trouble? The Education system is specific to San Diego City Schools and is being built in coordination with a grant given to track AP testing and its effects. The schools want to see if students who take part in programs like AVID or AP classes are more likely to go to college. In addition to these new systems, all of the older systems are constantly being upgraded so we end up doing lots of testing to find the bugs and quirks as well as field tech-support calls. Additionally, we’ve been working on updating training materials for all of the systems.

By the way, we got a little gift from our buddies at Microsoft. Apparently, this is what half a million dollars looks like:

Enough about work. One thing I am very excited about is the change from CNET to the NTEN conference. I went to college in LA and I am totally over that city (No offense to true Los Angelens, I just want a change of scenery). I am definitely excited to have some Washington DC adventures: new maps, subways, dead presidents, dollar theaters, the possibilities abound! Oh yeah, and learning at the conference too I guess.

This blog has become freakishly long. I’m making up for lost time I guess. Anyhow, I hope you all had amazing holidays and are refreshed and ready to get back to saving the world!

Corey