Digital Arts Service Corps - san francisco

1.5 months out

brittney fosbrook — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 21:25:16 +0000

hello there ctc vista project. things here at homeless prenatal are going right along-- i'm unofficially the interim technology manager. this means that i have been doing insane amounts of troubleshooting and teaching for both clients and staff. in addition to managing the lab, i have also been working on creating policies and procedures, technology user guides and new website content as well as organizing the file server. most of the guides are in the revisions process, so any suggestions for resources would be greatly appreciated.

since my last post, i have had the opportunity to attend a couple of workshops including: one at the center for digital storytelling with jessica, a drupal dream makeover course, an adobe interactive forms course and soon another photoshop course! if you are interested, i can review and recommend (or not recommend) the courses.

today i had lunch with the lovely morgan sully at my favorite little taco truck in the mission. thank you $3 lunch. being with other vistas is quite nice.

when transitional periods become the norm...

brittney fosbrook — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 18:31:57 +0000

hello from san francisco.

it has been almost 3 weeks since my boss left and there is still no permanent new hire in sight. currently, my ex-boss's niece is filling her position but i think it is only until the end of the year. it is strange to automatically fill such a huge role in the organization. i am now teaching a technology class to the community health workers on staff and going full speed ahead on website reworking. everything is finally settling back down and the only huge obstacle is my lack of proficiency in spanish. when i am the only person in the lab (which does happen often now) and a spanish speaker comes in i feel so useless. my spanish skills, however, are rapidly improving.

it turns out that there is a free "website makeover" happening this weekend that i was invited to. a bunch of drupal experts will be there to help orgs convert their websites over to drupal. this is really exciting to me because i have felt less confident doing it on my own.

also, i attended the sf wifi conference last friday and met a new ctc vista named karl hedstrom at nten. although i thought the conference was a bit of a bust, i did link up with the bay area video coalition (amazing organization), see heather from aspiration tech and a network with couple of other new bay area non-profit technology people.

to top it all off, fellow ctc vista rebecca white and i ate some amazing vegan japanese food in the mission on monday night. although it was pouring down rain, the hot soup and tea totally made my night.

after two weeks

brittney fosbrook — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 17:45:44 +0000

I have officially been working with HPP for almost two weeks now. Besides becoming formally oriented with the organization, I have spearheaded a couple of interesting projects. My host organization, formally titled Homeless Prenatal Program although everyone calls it HPP, is made up many smaller departments: Community Health Worker Training, Wellness Program, Substance Abuse, Childcare Center and the Technology Center. I am working in the technology center as a tech specialist. I have also been assigned to being the volunteer coordinator. At this moment there is nothing to formally monitor and organize volunteers.

Everyone in the organization is super friendly; I have even dined out with a couple of the staff members. I’m attributing this smooth adjustment to my boss because she has made a substantial effort to ensure that everyone in the organization knows who I am and what my role will be at HPP. After only two weeks, I already feel like I belong here, staff members go out of their way to say hello to me!

As for my projects, I currently have three different tangents for my own work in addition to the training help and website updates that I supply in the lab. First, I am looking at creating an electronic volunteer management system, that will either be online or through Access. This database will allow HPP to organize their volunteers more effectively. My other project is to create some sort of online portal through some CMS (maybe Drupal, but I am also exploring others) specifically for case managers. We have a website called helping-sf that will be used as a starting point for some organization and content, but I am just beginning the design process. If anyone has any suggestions for training, either online or otherwise, I would love to hear about them. Ideally, HPP would like to be able to expand this resource to the entire San Francisco community if everything goes well in the testing phase. Lastly, I am going to try to strengthen the connections between the numerous community technology centers and vocational services in SF. I am looking into working with the SF WiFi project and other local community technology groups.

Mostly, San Francisco is amazing and there are many cheap and free events all over the city. Check out: funcheapSF for more!

I must go. I have to help with a tech class in Spanish. Oh how I wish I could speak Spanish fluently! I suppose that I am working on it.

First Day on the "Job"

Tim Wescott — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 22:46:52 +0000

Well, it seems most people have been at their postions for at least a week. I just started today. I'm working for Aspiration in downtown San Francisco, which is incredibly cool. I got a nice computer and a nice workspace. This morning Heather (my supervisor) went through all the tools I'll be using, and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on them. Gunner (my other supervisor) took everyone at Aspiration out to lunch (that's easy when there's only 3 people). Right now they're at a meeting, and I've been playing around with my computer and the Social Source Commons (which Gunner will show me more about when he gets back).

Last week I spent moving. First driving down to South Carolina where I gave my parents my car, and then flying to Oakland on Tuesday. My furniture all arrived on Thursday, and my wife and I were completely unpacked and organized by Sunday (more or less). We actually invited a few people over for a movie Sunday night as inspiration to us to get everything done.

welcome to the bloghouse

brittney fosbrook — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 19:28:47 +0000

i a feeling mighty unreflective, but that is what happens sometimes in new places. however, i am looking forward to moving to san francisco and starting at the homeless prenatal program. after the first day of this training, it excites me that i will have much to learn technologically speaking. welcome to the new blog and hello san francisco (although this picture is a bit of posh SF--it was all that i could find).