Digital Arts Service Corps - volunteer coordination

Month 10: IMC Fest & A Return to Research

Stephen Fonzo — Sat, 09 May 2009 23:18:53 +0000

April-May started with the IMC Fest, three days of music featuring nearly 30 local performers and an art show in partnership with the Champaign-Urbana Boneyard Arts Festival. I was stage manager and worked with volunteer stage and sound techs, as well as artists, to keep us on schedule and make sure everything was working. The event, which was great fun and raised money for our organization, was largely planned and organized by Dan Blah, our VISTA Supervisor at the IMC. The weekend gave us a chance to promote the IMC, attract new members, and support the thriving artistic community here in C-U.

On the training side, I offered three sessions - one on WordPress; one on radio automation (using ZaraRadio); and one on live sound. For those curious about live sound, you will see by searching the Internet that most training guides or courses are not free. Here are some links to free information to get you started: Basic Introduction by Lou Gross; sound reinforcement system article on Wikipedia; and mixing article from Wikipedia.

Nearly everything else this month has been about preparing for the summer. For the IMC as a whole, this has meant the recruiting of over a dozen summer youth positions, funded through the Champaign Consortium and organized by Nicole, while making internal space and institutional improvements for staff and guests. For me, this has meant getting ready for my last two months as a CTC*VISTA and working towards leaving a useful legacy in media training documentation. So far this year, I have offered dozens on hands-on workshops, helped to create and organize two large fundraisers, built partnerships with other local organizations, formalized working group procedures, and updated and suggested improvements to the IMC's production facilities, all of which have involved networking and collaborating and spending long hours at the IMC working with others. Throughout the course of these last ten months, I have kept detailed notes and drafted some training materials, but seldom have had the time to sit down and compile it all. So, from now until mid-July I will be working more independently on creating and archiving training documents, and have already begun doing more research to this end.

During April and May I did most of the substantive budget and curriculum development for the first session of the Don Moyers Boys & Girls Club's Teen Computer Lab program, which will begin in June. This has included outlining computer workstation and media peripheral specifications (with guidance from VISTA Leader Josh King), compiling training materials and exercises, organizing meetings of team partners, and researching new and innovative technologies, especially Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) for use in the lab.

Here are just a few links that I have found to be very helpful in my research and documentation:
- List of open source software packages
- FLOSS Manuals
- The OSSWin Project: Open Source for Windows

There is much more available, but those are decent places to start.

Month 8: Internal Improvements & Video Training Advice

Stephen Fonzo — Sat, 09 May 2009 06:43:34 +0000

Feb-Mar was a time of organizational self-assessment. I was part of, or led, several discussions about needs for the IMC, including grants, involvement with social justice issues locally, more public-access computers, reliable building maintenance, and perhaps, most importantly, the consistent presence of volunteers to be available to staff the main space meeting areas to answer visitors' questions. This was the month when early winter conversations started to yield actual volunteer mobilization, in the form of a Community Connections group, to assess the relevance and accessibility of the organization to visitors and members, staffing of the building for increased hours, a functional library with more public computers (running Ubuntu), and 1-day projects to inspire people to work together.

I planned and facilitated a volunteer workday with the University of Illinois Alternative Spring Break club, who came to the IMC to help a) catalog our library collection; b) catalog and organize our radio station's music collection; and c) move boxes of books for our twice-a-year Books to Prisoners book sale. Trainings on video and audio editing continued, culminating in another set of productions for UPTV. Even though the IMC hosts many concerts, a real highlight this month was Roy Zimmerman, a clever and entertaining singer-satirist who was kind and fun to work with.

In all, this was a month of vision, mobilizing others, and meetings. The IMC is filled with people who have more ideas than they seem to be able to implement, and as a VISTA I am often the person they share every new inspiration and request with. It is, in turns, distracting or informative.

Due to our members being so over-extended and busy, and due to the DIY ethic of the IMC itself, I have relied upon a very simple format for teaching video editing, which I would like to share. This is crucial if you have people asking you for training who are also expecting to immediately begin working on their pet project. I often receive these types of requests from activists and academics who have already filmed a bunch of events, or long lectures, and want to turn it into an informative video after the fact. I just tell them that there are essentially only five elements to editing a digital video (outside of planning a video, which is different):

1) Cuts: Cut the scenes that you need to include to tell your story; nothing more, nothing less.
2) Arrange: Re-order the scenes creatively to maximize your message, or merely arrange them chronologically for a simple educational video.
3) Transitions: Decide the types and lengths of transitions between scenes (i.e. crossfades, dissolve, etc.)
4) Captions or Titles: Add text and/or still images for clarity and information, or to break up scenes.
5) Audio: Normalize, remove or gate unwanted noise, clean up hum/buzz; then add any necessary music, overdubs, or voice-overs - making sure to keep levels balanced. Also, make sure audio is in sync with video!

This is a really simple approach that is ideal for quick learning and for basic, educational videos that are not aiming to be grand cinema - perfect for citizen journalism, YouTube, event documentation, and anything that prizes speed and accessibility over perfectionism and budget.

3 External Resources for Volunteer Management

Kevin Palmer — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 14:37:28 +0000

Listed below are a variety of external links related to Volunteer Management:

Management Help's Extensive Volunteer Management Resource

Volunteer Today's Volunteer Resource Clearinghouse

Idealist Nonprofit HR Center