Long time no field report. In the past few months, there has been a lot of progress and change. Tiffany is our new and awesome VISTA, and with her added support, DIY Media (a program to train youth in documentary filmmaking, social media, etc) has launched. I've been working with her and staff to develop the curriculum for this project.

Comment from Bill Brown on February 17, 2011 - 3:54pm

I think it would be worth it as well! FYI I posted your promo video and the web design mock-up on the Transmission Project's resources page.

Things got a little busier over November and December. Expectedly I had an increase in phone calls/e-mails during the "Storming Phase" but nothing too out of control. I've been lucky that major issues with different VISTAs have not overlapped so I haven't had to juggle too many concerns at the same time.

Comment from Devon Smolca on February 9, 2011 - 12:24pm

I like those happy tools! Did you create them?

Comment from Bill Brown on February 9, 2011 - 12:29pm

yep yep

My third month at Prometheus has been a time of increasing responsibility. As a step towards my goal of improving the org’s communication reach, I’ve helped to build a press strategy team. We’ve gotten together some media best practices (writing press releases, etc.) and once we build a digital version of the file I’ll be happy to share it with others here.

Hellooo DASCorps!

Work at NAMAC has been busy, albeit running smoothly. I had the opportunity to take a Web Design Intensive at BAVC, and am currently relaunching our site's new look (it'll be finished on Sunday.. http://namac.org). The intent is to make it a bit more friendly for navigation and usage. I also attended a free Bay Area Drupal Camp in Berkeley...

Back in January, the folks at the Community Software Lab were asked by a university-based non-profit if we could translate an artist's Photoshop mock-up into HTML and CSS. Eager to please (and needing some money to keep the budget balanced), we said "sure" and submitted our estimate for 20 hours of work. It's March, and we're still working. What's the deal?

For my part, I gratefully ignored things until the last week of February, content to let Dan, my boss, manage the project. He had subcontracted the work to Erich, our soon-to-be VISTA, and for the most part, let things be, receiving changes from Erich every few days. It worked great--as long as changes didn't need to be made immediately. Erich put together some pretty good code and certainly earned his 20 hours' paycheck. Then things began to pick up.

Am I the only one who doesn't necessarily always fill out online forms from top to bottom? The way some forms are designed makes it seem so.

For example, visit the free Basecamp account signup page. At the time of this blog post, if you fill in item 3 and then fill in item 2 with something different (and then click in a new field to have the change to item 2 "sink in"), what you have entered for item 3 is replaced.