all skates
We had the chance to attend an interesting Executives Club meeting yesterday on Social Networking.
A few points I'm hoping to get the alumni group to chew on/inform:
1) facebook social graph - the idea that what you say, anywhere you say it, can automatically feed back to your facebook page. does this mean we should have a facebook widget on the vault so that your posts here automatically get posted on your facebook page?
2) second life ("in world") - it was apparent that virtual meetings in second life have an advantage over webex and actual physical meetings in that you can present REALLY LARGE maps/diagrams of information that attendees can zoom all around to read. anyone have any candidates for how we might use that concept for virtual information sessions, e.g. timelines, project overviews?
3) second life II - we need someone to do research within second life to find out if it would be a good recruiting ground, and how to advertise in there most effectively.
Since 2001, I've been seeking to solve a core information problem that frightens me is still not solved by *anyone*: a single contact database from which all applications could connect. This single database would need to authenticate people and allow them to update their own contact information, but would not require people to have online accounts (eg. i get a business card and enter them into the system and we can start interacting with their contact record). If at some point they did create an account on our site, the system should match that account to the contact information we already have on file, but have the ability to keep some information we have private. The database itself would need to be open enough where we could extract contact information (emails) for use in other applications.
The road to this point has been long and disappointing:
2000-2001 - site server (discontinued)
We are trying to build relationships with community papers to get alumni stories published. Will everyone please take a moment to state which papers would be highest priority?
Thanks!
Austin Voice
Austin Weekly
Austin Weekly
Back of the Yards Journal
Beverly Review
Bridgeport News
Bronzeville Chamber
Chicago Free Press
Chicago Journal
Chicago Sun-Times
Chicago Sun-Times
Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
Citizens Newspaper
Wednesday Journal
Chicago Journal
Chicago Defender
Crain's Chicago Business
Crain's Chicago Business
Daily Herald
Chicago Defender
HydePark Herald
Inside
LaRaza
Lawndalenews
Naperville Sun
Northwest Herald
Post-Tribune
Rolling Out Mag
SouthStreetJournal
Teleguia
The Herald-News
www.soldiermorale.com COME OUT AND SHOW SOME LOVE TO CYCLES 15 & 16. HANG OUT WITH US, HAVE A DRINK, THEN GET WHOOPED IN SOME LASER TAG!
COME SUPPORT C15 ON THEIR JOURNEY'S INTO THE REAL WORLD!
COME MELLOW OUT WITH C16 CELEBRATE THE END OF PROJECT 2! www.soldiermorale.com
ALSO: Check out our website, if you have any family and friends in the miltary, sign up to our site and create a profile! www.soldiermorale.com
READ ATTACHMENT
We are hoping to start engaging i.c.stars candidates earlier in their process and start adding value for them right from the start. In addition, there have been multiple requests for ongoing learning opportunities for alums.
I'm hoping to evolve the vault into a community that could serve both groups needs.
The first step to achieving this goal is to provide opportunities for online learning through courses. I'm hoping to use the drupal organic groups capabilities for this purpose on the vault. A course would run for 2 weeks or so, have an instructor and an assistant and students. The course would contain online resources and exercises. The instructor and assistant would comment on students posts for exercises as well as answer questions about the exercises themselves and resources. This model is primarily suited for curriculum that has text/document based solutions to exercises, e.g. programming, business analysis, leadership.
The biggest challenge facing non-profits is measuring impact. For-profit businesses have it easy, put the bottom line in the context of employee, customer, and community satisfaction and you can pretty much identify the short-term winners, long-term winners, and the struggling.
For the non-profits industry, its not that easy. There are increasing complaints about a lack of transparency, a lack of measurement of basic things, but I feel those complaints run the risk of over-simplifying and exacerbating the problem.
As you all know, i.c.stars does a great deal of measurement of the easy things: earnings before to after the program, graduation rate, placement rate, retention rate, salary increases over time, total cost of the program vs. total increased wages, etc.
Someone appears to be clicking the ads on the sites for cycle 15. While the intention is good, this is click fraud and google has a very severe policy about it. All teams have an adsense ctr over 10% which is way above the fraud threshold. You have no idea how much hurt we will endure if google cancels all of our groups, emails, calendars, everything we have setup in the last 3 months.
PLEASE STOP
We need help coaching/advising on personal time management for cycle interns. Here's a link to a good method that reflects kind of what Sandee and I use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done
Here's a great analysis of GTD including a summary of geeks personality traits:
http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/08/getting-started-with-getting-things-...
Please feel free to comment with additional resources. ALUMS - we need your processes for how you get stuff done!
While we have implemented activeCollab (http://pmo.icstars.org), its not cutting it from a time/task management standpoint, so I'm considering implementing one of these:
http://www.rousette.org.uk/projects/ (Dmitry will be happy to see us implement a Ruby-based solution :-)
http://www.nozbe.com/
and incorporating the whole methodology into the program. Let us know your thoughts.
