Week 13

Have you recently visited one of the organizations for whom you are writing? If not, please do. Visiting the organization at this point may shake loose a fresh idea or new energy renewal to see the importance of your work. If there is no "organization," which is the case for some of you, visit with the person or a person or someone who you know with the "organization." What did you find?

Actually, I’ve spent quite a bit of time at our church this semester. And there’s been a great deal of what I expected: some general dissatisfaction with the current playground, and a widespread acknowledgement that we just don’t have the money to fix it. At least not all the money. But I’ve also learned (and included in my proposal) that we have a new design that’s been done by one of our members. He’s an engineer, and apparently has considerable experience with designing and building playgrounds. I shouldn’t be surprised by this: our church has a large congregation, and we’re in a college town which also has some surprising industry resources. The end result is that you never who you’ll meet, and this guy not only has experience but he seems to be willing to donate his time and knowledge. Very, very cool.

Week 12

What is one proposal one of your task force group members is working on? Describe it in a few sentences, and then point out one strength so far of what you seen and one thing that can be improved upon. You might include a hyperlink to your peer's specific proposal.

I’ve tried to familiarize myself with Lennie’s first proposal: providing documentation for the latest version (ver 5) of the encore learning environment. EnCore is a MOO, which means it’s an object-oriented software bundle for real-time communication. It is an open-source, volunteer project, and various implementations of the encore MOO are used by universities, schools, and other educational entitities.

Lennie’s strength is his dedication and wide breadth of knowledge concerning this software. He’s been using it for year—literally years—and knows about others who use it and want to develop it. I know Lennie personally, and he’s always looking for ways to promote and improve the MOO.

Weaknesses: I don’t know if this qualifies as a weakness, but this project strikes me as having two distinct difficulties: the MOO is open-source and developed by volunteers. This means that developing good documentation will be subject to the whims of individual timelines and the vagaries of a changing software package. In other words, version 5 may not be the same from one installation to the next, which means the documentation may need to be modified from one installation to the next. Hard to handle.

The other difficult I foresee here has to do with managing a project over multiple organizations, including volunteers from TTU, nationwide, and even in Europe. To me, this spells Organizational Trouble in terms of keeping people up-to-date and working on the right things at the right time.

I have to admit that I’ve seen Lennie (face-to-face and online) work as an administrator and I think he’s up to the task.

Week 11

No MOOting again this week. Many professors are at 4C's this week. But, please spend a lot of time really digging into the rhetorical aspects of budgets, which you read about last week and some this week. The numbers you relate are very telling. Think carefully about what in-kind is. What is in-kind, exactly, and what in-kind sources for your two projects are you thinking about relaying in your budget and why?

I have to admit that I’ve have to spend time considering what I think “in-kind” means. For the most part, I’ve been thinking of it in terms of payment. Can I pay so-and-so for services by a return in services? But, truthfully, I’ve had to also begin considering “in-kind” in terms of what church members can do for the project. This can include services that they may perform as a professional, but often provide for free with regard to friends or the church. My mother is a music teacher and has offered her talents, but musical and pedagogical, on many occasions. I have quite a few friends my age who do construction of various sorts, and they often build/fix/improve things for the church.
What are the in-kind aspects of the playground project? Well, we’ll have to have the existing gravel hauled off, that’s for sure. And we’ll need to do the same with the existing playground equipment. None of that work takes trained professionals, so I may be able to get a group of college students to perform it as a service project, so long as I can round up some trucks and a place to take these things. Installing the new equipment is something which can be done by volunteers so long as we have a supervisor. And the design itself is being taken care of by one of our members already!
So I guess that means the only part of the project which cannot be handled by in-kind sources is the placement of the shredded rubber pour-n-play surfacing. Hmmm.

Week 9

Okay, we're in the nineth week.
This is now, officially, the half-way point to the course. Think about all
you've learned. We've made it through more than half of the book. There is still
much to learn, of course, and then we need to keep putting our learning into
practice. For this blog entry, please list out the seven steps on page 278 and
point out how you are following (or plan to follow) those steps with one of your
projects.

1. Begin by restating each objective as an outcome. The more SMARTE criteria (specific, measurable, agreed upon, realistic, time-bound, evaluable) that you have built into your
   objectives, the easier they will be to restate as outcomes.
   


1. Reach more international
   parents by providing a safe, fun place for their kids to play.


2. Increase safety for
   children using the playground.


3. Bring the church playground
   into compliance with suggested guidelines.



2. Look at each outcome to see if
   it answers the “So what?” question. Just because you have some quantifiable
   data does not necessarily mean you have evidence that you achieved your
   goal.
   
   
   
   1. The children’s ministry
      keeps count of numbers (attendance, a rough estimate of
      ethnicity/nationality, male/female children). So we should know within
      a year whether we’re increasing our international contact.
   
   
   2. Safety is a rough goal to
      measure. Perhaps fewer injuries in a given year? I’m not sure the
      church keeps records. Will have to look into that.
   
   
   3. Bringing the playground
      into compliance with suggested guidelines should be easy to measure.


3. For each outcome that does not
   answer the “So what?” question, identify secondary outcomes that would
   provide satisfactory evidence that you have achieved your goal.


4. If the secondary outcomes are
   quantifiable, determine what or how much you would need to attain to
   consider them successful.
   


1. I would think that a 10%
   increase in international children using the playground would be a
   pretty good goal, but I’ll have to ask Lisa how much growth there’s been
   in the last five years so we have something to compare.



5. Determine what kinds of
   monitoring or reporting you will have to do to collect evidence supporting
   the achievement of your primary and secondary outcomes.
   
   
   
   1. The children’s ministry
      keeps records, so that part’s taken care of.
   
   
   2. Compliance with suggested
      playground guidelines won’t have to be monitored except for once, I
      suspect. We will need a maintenance schedule, though.


6. Describe both your primary and
   secondary outcomes, and write a paragraph or two explaining how you will
   monitor and report on them for the Evaluation section.
   


1. The primary outcomes are
   increasing international student visitors to our church. We aim to do
   this via increased children’s facilities, of which playground
   improvement is a major part. The secondary outcome here is increased
   numbers of children being able to use the playground.


2. I think that monitoring and
   reporting will be taken care of as I mentioned above, but we may have to
   increase playground reporting in order to satisfy our funding
   organization. If so, the playground usage would only have to be
   monitored periodically, and might be done by a single person once per
   month. The count could include total number of children, ratio of male
   to female, and an approximation of nationalities represented.


3. Actually, recording the
   nationalities of our visitors would be a sticky problem anyhow, given
   that many are not fluent in English. How do I prepare a survey that is
   universal in nature while still reporting information in such a way as
   to be useful to English speakers?



7. Identify any tasks or
   activities that you would have to perform to monitor or report on your
   secondary outcomes. You can list these tasks in one of two places, either
   under the tasks related to that particular objective or establish a new
   objective dealing specifically with evaluation and list the tasks under the
   new objective.
   
   
   
   1. I thought that I already
      answered this by suggesting a monthly survey of playground activity. In
      retrospect, however, I’ve only begun the process of thinking about it.
      Which days will I survey? Sunday, of course, but there’s a great deal
      of playground activity during the week. And, while I know that the
      children’s ministry keeps track of numbers, I doubt that we have stats
      on past playground usage.
   
   
   2. If I had been really
      ambitious, I might have suggested a grant to simply expand our
      international outreach via parents of children. This “expansion” might
      take the form of having volunteers of various nationalities available
      for watching kids, such that a Chinese mom could know that on certain
      days her children could play with other Chinese children and have a
      volunteer on hand who speaks Chinese (I wonder if our labor is so large
      as to accommodate Mandarin and Cantonese? I doubt it.).
   
   
   
   

Week 8 - Makin' it Hap'n, Cap'n!

Okay, time to make it happen. By now you need to have both of your projects in mind. Please send me both of your preproposals if you haven't already. For your blog post, please detail your timeline for the completion of your projects. I need to know when you plan to complete your grant proposals, but also an estimated timeline for your project completion.

This is my timeline for the playground project.

Preliminary Design - May 1
Finalized Design - June 1
Request for Bids - June 8
Acceptance of Winning Bid - June 15
Removal of Old Equipment and Gravel - June 16 (performed by church volunteers)
Resurfacing (needs at least one week to cure) - July 3
Installation of New Equipment - July 17
Safety Testing - July 24
Open to Public - August 14

The timeline for the CPR Equipment project is somewhat different:


Research on costs - April 1
Meeting with church staff (Brian and Lisa) to finalize equipment decisions - April 17
Proposal letter to Mustard Seed Foundation - April 18
Proposal, with budget and timeline - April 24
Receipt of funds - Depends upon MSFDN
Equipment purchase - Depends upon MSFDN (as soon as funds received)