Transmission Project

Principal Task: Archive.
Accomplishments: Research best/appropriate RAID system for CDS archive of story data. Arranged for purchase of system. Migrated data onto new system. Met all deadlines. Research and purchasing assistance from Apple Certified Support Professional, Clinton Gilbert. Migration assistance from Jennifer Nazzal, CDS Post Production Supervisor. Needs analysis and design of custom organizational system to accommodate over 8TB of story data covering over 10 years of various types of Digital Storytelling workshops and projects conducted around the world. Set-up, installation and troubleshooting of dedicated computer station to operate the RAID. Review and organization of over 8TB of story data into custom system. Collection and integration of additional data from 4 Field office staff members. Creation of record of files for review purposes. Creation of multi-chapter guide for institutional use of the RAID system and data management. Training of staff and interns for continuation of RAID maintenance. Archive intern selection and management overseeing data entry by archive interns during May-July.

Additional Archive Task: CDS Online Story Theater.
Accomplishments: Organized existing data and back-end of Theater. Compiled new submission form for CDS Staff to submit entries to Theater. Compiled new stories and associated data and added to Theater. Participated in promoting new stories in CDS quarterly newsletter. Creation of mulit-chapter guide for institutional use of the Online Story Theater platform and back-end data management. Training of staff and interns for continuation of Story Theater.

Patrick also undertook a complete proof-reading of our book entitled Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community. This task included revisions on nearly every page of the book as well as considerable copy-editing of our new revised curriculum chapter: The Seven Steps of Digital Storytelling.

Goal #1 for our second VISTA was to “Make FCC regulations and lawsuits relevant to media reform accessible to a broad audience.” Brandy Doyle has developed a working knowledge of FCC regulations and telecommunications law that she’s used to educate both the general public and other staff members on the rules that impact community radio. She has written a number of brief, plain-English articles about complex regulatory subjects, including digital radio, radio spectrum policy, and broadcast media ownership. Brandy led the effort to develop a comprehensive plan for the organization’s regulatory work, including a 20+ page document on regulatory work – the most comprehensive the organization has ever produced. This plan proved instrumental gathering input from the entire staff collective in decisions about future regulatory priorities. As part of her goal to make regulatory procedures more accessible, Brandy designed and led a series of public workshops in different settings. In April Brandy held an educational workshop at WMNF Community Radio in Tampa, Florida on media ownership and FCC rulemaking process. In May, Brandy co-presented on “Community Journalism: Its Relevance in Radio and How to Bring it to your Newsroom” with Terri Klemetson, news director at KMUD, and co-presented “The D.C. Report: Community Radio, Politics And Policy” with Pete Tridish at Grassroots Radio Conference. Also in May, she facilitated a discussion with Davis Media Access about the challenges and benefits of community radio/public access television partnerships. Brandy has been aided by her coworkers in the regulatory policy team who have taught her how to research FCC dockets and given her context and information to make sense of them. She has also received support from the rest of the staff.

Because of her own interests, skills, and experience, Brandy has chosen to taken on a number of general writing and editing projects for the organization. Brandy has worked with the communications staff to think through a more comprehensive press strategy, not just a press strategy for outreach, as described in her VISTA assignment, and has played a role in improving our process for media advisories and press releases. Another responsibility Brandy has taken on has been to help coordinate aspects of our new website launch. She’s also taken on responsibility for responding to requests to volunteer at Prometheus, a role that rotates amongst collective members.

In her capacity as Assistant Editor of “The Community Technology Review” (www.comtechreview.org), Danielle ably undertook a wide range of responsibilities including taking over the reins from the previous Associated Editor and completing all organizing and author communication already in the works, coordinating sections and writing a substantial number of articles for the fall issue. She oversaw the development and production of the online version, dealt with university printing services in arranging for hard copy printings, and did author/contributor follow-up. Following this, she was helpfully involved in working with the Advisory Committee in undertaking future planning, and when the decision was made for the publication to go on hiatus and be replaced in the interim with the Project newsletter/report, she accepted oversight responsibility and published the first issue (see www.cpcs.umb.edu/vista/newsletters) in its entirety. She has followed this up with taking primary responsbility for planning future issues for the remainder of the project year, including coordination with the Priority Area Coordinator materials, as that dovetails and integrates with her work with them in developing curricular material for the project that can be integrated with the College’s Community Media and Technology Program (www.cpcs.umb.edu/cmt). In addition to these things, she has proved to be a key and invaluable member of the project leadership team at office headquarters.

Danielle serves as liason between the Community Media and Technology Program curriculum building efforts and the VISTA project’s content focused learning groups. She has been extremely effective in working with faculty in curriculum design, making real connections between the field work of the VISTA’s and the CMT curriculum. She has also worked to assist me in the Tactical Media project, a project-based learning initiative of the program, in coordinating planning and research, presentations and communications flow for the project. She has also taken the leadership in creating and presenting a number of new media workshops, digital storytelling, for example. Along with her VISTA partner, she coordinated a digital media mini conference for students, faculty and staff. Danielle has undertaken extensive curriculum research for a study on community media our program is doing in conjunction with the Benton Foundation, as well research for the development of future courses in the College of Public and Community service. Danielle has performed at a very high level of thoughtfulness and strategic insight. Danielle has made an enormous contribution to the CMT program’s development.

Danielle has quickly become an important part of the Project headquarters team. She has shown admirable persistence in her efforts to draw some useful ‘curriculum’ from busy VISTAs and under-utilized ‘priority area coordinators.’ I actually think that she has accomplished more in this area than she gives herself credit for– mostly through her exchanges with VISTAs in the field but also through her (and Shannon’s) efforts to get VISTAs involved in workshops and events related to the CMT program. She has in some sense become an unofficial VISTA leader through here extensive contact with VISTAs across the country. She has also done a good deal of evangelizing for the Project– a number of new organizations will be applying as a result of these efforts. She’s a gifted/natural-born communicator and that’s just so helpful in so many ways.

Jessica has used technology tools to facilitate organizational communication and information gathering/sharing at TCP. These tools included an Intranet, the Vienna newsreader and a del.icio.us account for the organization. This work has enabled TCP to stay on top of cutting edge issues in the field of youth and technology.

She has also made major contributions in researching, writing, editing and design work for some of our products. This has helped TCP achieve its mission of advocating for digital resources and access to benefit the nation’s 73 million children and youth, particularly those who are low-income or underserved.

Jessica has also completed several projects for CCTPG, working towards meeting the broader goal of advocating for all communities’ access to broadband and advanced technologies and the benefits they offer.

Working with several colleagues, Jessica helped create the new CCTPG Web site and edited, updated and posted a majority of the documents currently available. She uploaded the contacts currently in the CiviCRM and created an automated sign-up form for new members. She was also responsible for many listserv and Web site updates and helped with several outreach efforts, including a videoconference. She gathered information for an online map of CTCs and helped with CCTPG’s network restructuring.

One of the measurements of Jessica’s success was whether CCTPG won any legislative victories while she was serving. Of the four pieces of legislation CCTPG focused on last year, three of them passed.

As VISTA Leader, Dan
• Helped coordinate CTC VISTA PSO held in Boston August 30-Sept. 1;
• Developed a plan for VISTA Leaders and the Resource Specialist to facilitate monthly regional group conference calls and individual check-in calls with CTC VISTAs serving outside of the Boston area, replicating the MA CTC VISTA monthly in-person meeting, and implemented for his assigned groups in the Midwest and South;
• Redeveloped quarterly CTC VISTA News, the Project’s newsletter for the VISTAs, edited and published in the fall and winter;
• Participated in monthly MA CTC VISTA meetings;
• Provided feedback on various Project office communications and support systems: CTC VISTA Project web site relaunch, CTC VISTA Project blog and individual CTC VISTA Project blogs, Fall “care package” to VISTAs, various memos and resource sharing via email lists.

Notable challenges include: Making sure as many VISTAs, if not all, participate in the check-in calls and blogs, and dealing with VISTAs having particular difficulties at their site and/or in their lives, requiring a lot of time, patience, and tact.

As Assistant Editor, Community Technology Review,
• Developed new features for the journal, including expanded Resources section and Perspective endpiece column with guest writers.
• Did outreach for writers and resource contributors for Winter 2004-05 issue.
• Coordinated and helped edit Winter issue, sections and individual articles.
• Produced web site version of the Winter issue.
• Developed editorial plan for Spring 2005 issue.
• Developing ideas for redesigning web site, and developing advertising opportunities.

As Associate Producer, Commonwealth Broadband Collaborative
• Participated in planning meetings and discussions for future of CBC.
• Developed relationship with The September Project, a community remembrance and civil liberties awareness project focused on September 11 event.

Diana has posted over 1,200 services on 4People.org and has been instrumental in helping the database to grow and advance. She has also designed marketing materials, learned to build computers, trained people on computers, written documents, designed web pages, and done lots of editing. With her help, RECA and 4People are advancing at an amazing pace.

At the six month level Diana has completed a great deal of work towards populating the 4people.org database, which includes youth, seniors and family community services. She has developed a web page for another non-profit (Catholic Family and Child Services), and taught a class on beginning web page design. By posting services to 4People and continually improving the database, Diana is helping our online database become a viable community resource. We currently have over 4,300 services listed in Eastern Washington, largely thanks to her efforts and the efforts of the VISTA that preceded her. Diana has been instrumental in helping to design the front end interface of 4People to be first time user friendly. See 4people.tcfn.org.

Melissa’s work in serving as Assistant Editor for the Community Technology Review online journal involved overseeing most communication with the authors; manuscript editing and development; online line production and design (a task she’s undertaken concurrent with learning to use online tools such as Dreamweaver); outreach; subscription management; and general systems and procedures development to insure a more smooth-running operation. She has laid some useful preliminary foundations for advertising and fundraising

Melissa’s work in overseeing the project’s outreach and information pages on the Corporation for National Service’s information web site and dealing with prospective program VISTAs has been organized and efficient. Through the late spring and summer, this extreme demands of this task involving communication not only with all VISTA applicants but with project supervisors can be appreciated by the fact that the CTC VISTA Project is the most popular in the entire CNS system. A combination of work in both these arenas lead to a natural taking on of project-wide development work involving support for Project VISTAs in numerous arenas, the most visible of which were her work in producing a VISTA-focused project newsletter (www.cpcs.umb.edu/vista/Newsletter) and overseeing/coordinating the project’s joint VISTA-Supervisor Advisory Committee. Along with her contributions to the monthly Boston-area VISTA meetings, serving on the “First Tuesday” television production team, filling the gaps and undertaking other initiatives for project support, Melissa’s leadership is generally recognized by both her peers and the project administration.