Reflections

Having the opportunity to work with San Francisco Pride these past four months have been so much more valuable than I thought. Not only was I able to lend a helping hand to a non-profit organization, but I was able to contribute and learn from the community. The shadowing I did with Imani gave me a chance to learn about the non-profit environment. There were a lot of similarities to my regular paid job although I did find working in a non-profit to be more touch based.

The community reach out along with the social mingling with local government, businesses, community, and other non-profits really brought light to the environment I was in. Though there was a lot of training to be done for both on the staff and volunteers, I found it quite exciting to learn with the crowd being apart of both parties.

I did end up doing a lot of office work to help out the organization but I was also able to contribute some insight to new technologies that may continue to help the current staff with outreach duties.

As I have mentioned, I have chosen to work on a San Francisco Pride celebration training portal as my ITEC 894 project. I believe the research and skills I have gained with this opportunity will help to better build a successful training portal. I will be building out training in the Information Booth for now as I have gained the most information about this area of duties. I will be looking further as next semester starts.

I will continue to lend spare time to San Francisco Pride in the future. The relationships that have been built are priceless. I hope to be able to continue to bring something new to the organization and the community.

Holidays are busy times for everyone!

I really haven't had much time to do much of anything lately. Not only have I been sick with some weird flu (not to worry, not the swine flu), but I have been trying to rush to get someo of my other school projects finished.

This week I actually spent most of my time at Pride working on personal items. I did check in with Imani but there was nothing for me to do. She was busy getting a bunch of things done herself. So as I sit her in this room I am writing my blog and working on a report for my other class. I did tell Imani that I am on stand by if she needed me for anything. I drove all the way up there.. I might as well be of some use.

Reflecting on the past few months, I actually think that I have learned a lot. I will be writing this in my concluding blog entry. I hope that I can use what I've learned here to add something to my 894 project.

More Office Work, More Documents

This week was filled with a bunch of office work. I looks as though since the Thanksgiving holiday is next week, we are trying to get all documents taken care of and out. I am using the handy mail merge trick Imani showed me to get proper headings on all of the letters that are needed to be printed out.

While working on stuffing envelopes I was aking about the upcoming Pride celebration. I was wondering about how they planned to tacked training this year. Imani looked at me. He kind of laughed it off but since being at Pride for the past few months, she wants me to be a major part in training this year.

As I told her before about my final 894 project, it looks as though I might be able to build out one of the mondules to see it it'll work. I told her that I had some stuff built out for information booth already. So I will be using the information booth module as a test run for Pride 2010. I am excited and hope that it will be useful. We'll see.

Various Pride Facebook Accounts

I must admit that I am very much so a Facebook junkie. I go on it to see what all of my friends are doing. I think it's a great way to connect with current and past friends. Today I was sent a request to add San Jose Pride as a friend. I added them as I added SF Pride. On both accounts, you can see parties and events that both organizations are throwing. It's a great way to find inforation but is it really interactive?

I bring this question up because I associate SF Pride to an organization not a person. When I want to talk with someone, I look to find someone not an entire entity. So maybe my thinking for creating a community needs to be re-thought. I think I need to still create a community in which information can be shared but I also need to have a figurehead as the spokes person to the site.

I think this relationship will draw people in rather than keeping them out. I want to make people comfortable and welcome. Having a personal touch I believe is a good asset.

Re-Thinking Using Flash

The portal I created using flash doesn't seem to be a wise choice as I seem to have way too much content to add. It would take too long to the file to load. With only one post built, it's already taking forever. I am having to look towards some new ideas for content management.

I have had suggestions of UDUTU, Ning, and Google Sites as possible solutions. I will be spending more time trying these out. I am going to see if some of these service can work with small flash modules. It might be that a paid version of the service will work but I will try and see what I can use for free for now.

I had a small amount of time to talk with a bunch of volunteers around the office about Pride Training. A lot of them are returns so they already have experience with various posts. A lot of them also say that things are usually pretty clear once they are doing the job. My only concern is with safety issues. There are a lot of things that might be overlooked if effective training is not conducted.

I talked to Imani about my findings. She said that training is very important and necessary. She believes that training could be done better and has asked that I help with this. I want to be able to get people involved and excited about Pride. Maybe this training portal will be the trick. How can I make learning easy and engaging? If I could use the model of facebook here, craeting a Pride community maybe that would help.

Office Work Today

Since the move, there hasn't been much for me to do. People are still getting things organized so I have just been trying to help out where I can. I asked if I could look over some of the training document from previous Pride celebrations. I was given a bunch of word documents and some poster graphics.

I sat and analyzed the materials I had for the remainder of my time there. I realized that there was a lot of information missing. From my personal experience working many of these posts, I found that the training document itself really was nothing more than an outline. I believe it was meant to work as an outline for the trainer to use when doing the training meetings.

I talked to Imani about maybe using one of these for one of my projects for school. She was all game for me to find innovative ways to create a better document. I told her about my proposed ITEC 894 project. I am hoping to build a training portal to aid with Pride Celebration training. With these documents, I'll have a better idea on how to tackle some instructional material. I will now need to see how I can use web 2.0 tools and make things interactive.

E-mail Etiquette

The new office headquarters is very much different than it was in the LGBT Center on Market but it is making a home for itself. The place is still kind of in shambles but offices are getting slowly redone.

Today I found something interesting as it has never really happened to me in my professional job. There was a strong of e-mail going around the office which wasn't necessarily professional. It started with an e-mail from someone asking for certain tasks to be done. As the string grew longer, it turned into a more casual kind of talk. Some jokes were passed around which have offended some staff members. The Executive direct came to speak about proper e-mail etiquette in the workplace. It was explained how things like this can be spread to people it was not meant to be. She also warmed that e-mail sent from the office is also backed up on their servers.

I guess I always thought it was common sense to not write personal things in the workplace. This was a wake up call that people should watch what they write in a professional environment. Luckily no one lost their job over this e-mail debacle.

SF Pride Offices Moving

The SF Pride Offices are moving. I was told I wasn't needed for the next two weeks.

Check Granting Ceremony

The meeting with the various presenters went very well. I learned how to deal with the various personalities professionally. I work with professionals everyday but this was a little bit different. There was a mix of staff and volunteers. A lot of the volunteers were either late or at point seemed to not care. It was pretty amazing to see how Imani was able to get their attention and keep such a warm and welcoming personality.

I asked her after our meeting about this. She told me that it was pretty much the same as how I usually interact with people just that in a non-profit, you might have to extend you hand a little bit more. People like to be praised more about their work since volunteers don't get paid. She advised me to make sure everyone is comfortable and that they are appreciated. Without them, a lot of the great things that SF Pride does for the community would not happen.

I used the tools that she showed me during the meeting when it was my turn to deal with the volunteers who were there to help with the event. There were a lot of faces I knew already but a ton more that I didn't. It was nice to interact with them. As the night went on, it felt like I had built a team. We worked hard and after the ceremony was over, we went for drinks. It's so refreshing to see so many people so happy after volunteering.

Back in the Office - SF Pride Central

This week I am back at the main office. I have heard news that the office will be moving in two weeks. The new location will be right across the street. We will have this week to finish the check granting ceremony tasks before the event takes place on the 24th. Then I will not be needed until the office is moved.

We worked on a few more edits before the script was printed. We had some letters that also needed to be printed and signed by staff members. These letters were an official congratualtions and thank you to those beneficiaries. I learned how to do a mail merge. This task basically saves much time putting information in a letterhead without having to type everything per letter. I basically created an excel sheet which then was accessed by word to create certain fields. What a great trick to know.

Next week we have the event. I will need to arrive a little bit early to go over the script with the presenters. We have a dry run planned at 3:00pm with showtime at 6:00pm. Let's hope everything goes well.

Writing a Script - A Collaboration

This week I worked from home. I setup a call with Imani and worked through some of the previous weeks tasks we talked about. With the check granting ceremony coming up, we needed to work on creating the script for the various presenters.

Imani had a skeleton script which was used from the previous year. After having her create a gmail account, I had her upload the skeleton script into google docs. From this point on, we worked together editing the script while talking on the phone. We could have done this completely without the phone, but I thought our conference call was necessary as we were speaking lines back and fouth, seeing what sounded better.

As we worked down the script, Imani was very pleased with the tool. I had her export the file to a Word doc so that it could be saved. We will be continuing to work on this document but I will be back at the office next week. We have this one week to have it finished.

09/03/09 - Meetings After Pride

The 2009 San Francisco Pride celebration happened in June although the community activities for the celebration are still quite active. After meeting with Brendan Behan the Deputy Director of San Francisco Pride I had learned that there would be a pretty big turn over with staffing in the coming months. He suggested that this would be a great opportunity for me to be doing research there as new people would be coming in for training anyway.

We talked about some of the upcoming projects tat I could possibly learn from and give some suggestions on how to improve them. The check granting ceremony was going to happen which I have been involved in with one of the new Event Coordinators Imani.

I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting with Imani discussing what the Check Granting Ceremony was and what role I would play. She gave me a breakdown of what was planned and how she planned on reaching out to volunteers for the event. We also went through a rough agenda. We took notes on what kinds of documents needed to be created and how they traditionally distributed them. We looked at every position and how they were to be filled. My role for this event will be to be Imani's assistant and make sure everything was running if she ever needed to attend to anything else.

After our discussion, I had suggested that she might use Google Docs to help with collaboration instead of sending e-mail and or having multiple Word Docs. She had not heard of Google Docs before. I took her through a quick tutorial of the application. Shw was still pretty weary of the tool but we are planning to try and use it for this event next week for the script that we will be collaborating on for the emcees. Next week I will not be going to the LGBT Center but instead will be collaborating online using Google Docs and talking on the phone. Let's see what happens.