CSC 322.01, Class 03: Partner meetings

Overview

• Preliminaries
  • Notes and news
  • Upcoming work
  • Extra credit
  • Questions
• Quick introduction
• Project 1 - Mayflower
• Project 2 - PALs
• Project 3 - Heartland
• Debrief

Preliminaries

Notes and news

• Your mentor will be setting up office hours. Please respond to her email.

Upcoming work

• Get your résumé up to date. We’ll be using it in class next week.
  • You’ll bring multiple cpies on Wednesday
• Refresh your knowledge of Ruby by doing https://github.com/saasbook/hw-ruby-intro. (Due Monday.)
  • Those in CSC 321 will be doing those problems as part of the second homework in CSC 321.

Good things to do: Academic

• Met opera
• CS Table and Extras

Questions

Quick introduction

Mayflower

• Six folks in the project, but just one representative here today.
• Kent McClelland, Prof. Emeritus of Sociology
• A few blocks south of campus.
• Mayflower is a few hundred people.
• Formed as a retirement center for ministers.
• Has now broadened. For example, lots of faculty live there. Lots of people who think it would be nice to live near the College.
• Mayflower community does lots of things.
• On paper.
• They should be doing some more things on computers.
• First goal: Directory
  • Like DB
  • It’s been slow going
  • We have a working version, but …
  • Not yet released
• Issues
  • Fixing blemishes
  • Better stylings
• Future projects (one of which might start this semester)
  • Calendar
  • Online minutes in easily accessible spot
  • Smart Phone application
• Needs some user experience stuff as well as UI stuff
• Needs testing and some new features
• Want it in a stage that students don’t have to support it
• New people move in every month (and some depart)
• People also move around
• Privacy issues are important

Volunteer Board and Grant Application Management

• Volunteer board provides a way for nonprofits to advertise volunteering opportunities and for volunteers to indicate their interest in doing so.
• Picked up and mostly finished last semester. It should be done. Fairly far along.
• Unlikely to be picked up this semester; Sam hopes to have those students finish it, rather than pass it on to yet another group
• Grant application management: Applicants and reviewers (and administrators)
• Greyson and Matt attempted to comment the code to help you understand what it does.
• Our partner Nicole is amazing and helpful.
  • But you also want to talk to the front-line people.
  • And to some of the clients (organizations)
• The Volunteer board will help your peers get connected to community partners.
• About GPCF
  • An organization that oversees a number of nonprofits.
  • A kind of a cooperative of nonprofits
  • Funds a lot of things, such as Tiger Packs
  • Back office support (financials, marketing, business management, etc.)
  • Unique/innovative model
• No CS background, but can talk well about what works and what doesn’t work.

PALS Preview

• Powesheik Animal League Shelter (cats and dogs)
• No public funding; entirely donations (and fundraisers)
• Established in 2007
• The current PALS project could be finished in one or two semesters.
• Currently have an overall Web site and a community forum (discussion board) and the administrative structure (accounts, admin control) etc.
  • Looks like 1998. Bring it into the 21st and a half century.
• Other planned features/issues:
  • Shift calendar - volunteer for shifts, keep track of shifts
  • Some “minor” bugs
  • Needs to be deployed
  • Mass texts to subgroups of people (“all catpeople at the college”_
  • Statistics about volunteers (helpful in grant writing)
• PALS just had a massive organization (administration, funding model, etc.)
  • Most excited about the volunteer management piece
• We may get the joy of shifting clients
• We support the organization, so there’s less playing with the animals.
• PALS of PALS is our campus group.
• We have lots of service work study positions.

Notes about transportation

• Sam the Cabbie
• The CLS has an “apply for transportation” link on GrinCo. They need about a week’s heads up. They use campus vehicles. So there’s a bunch of coordination.
  • Make sure that it’s clear that it’s a class project.
• If you are nineteen years old (or older) and have a clean US drivers record for two or more years, you can drive a campus vehicle. Plus you can get paid to take people elsewhere.
• We know that many of you own your own vehicles; we would prefer that you not use those.

Continuing your work on projects

• Opportunity to finish it
• Opportunity to do continued support if you think it’s valuable to do.
• There’s an application online under service-learning work-study on Grin-Co.
• Service-learning work-study is a chance to work with community partners, sometimes a continuation of projects from classes, sometimes Spark (no longer tank) projects, sometimes things coming from our community partners.
• “Not everyone has the privilege of time to volunteer”
• Also provides some education.
• (Your community partners may not distinguish the different ways in which the College partners with them.)
• There are also some students partnered with these organizations; you can draw upon their expertise.
• Email [WilsonKe].