A blog from the developer September 11, 2007

6 years later... Today is the 6th anniversary of the tragedy in New York City. I'm an MPC (Monterey Peninsula College) student and I participated in a lunchtime ceremony to honor the 3,000 victims - very emotional! Today was also the Back-To-School night at Pacific Grove Middle School. Our daughter attends and we look foward to meeting her teachers each year.

PowerSchool Introduced. Before parents were set loose to visit the classrooms tonight we listened to the school principal make some standard announcements. He also introduced an online software program the district has invested in - PowerSchool. PowerSchool allows parents, students, teachers and administrators to access information about the goings on at the school and more specifically with your student online, very cool. I was suprised to hear about the new software and looked forward to checking it out. As a software developer myself, I'm always interested in new tech ideas, services and products. I was pleased with what I saw in the few minutes I spent snooping around the PowerSchool application. I didn't find anywhere for students and parents to keep track of their community service, not suprising ;-)

ProjectPG Promoting. A message has been going out at the top of the community emails about our plans and progress so far. Looks like we need to get some promotions going or our project may fizzle-out. If you know anyone not on the mailing list...let them know. There are several organizations in town that are taking advantage of the online calendar and it would be nice to distribute their important information to a larger group - any promotion help is appreciated ;-)

June. 16, 2007

Great News about Community Service Records The original idea for this project stemmed from a need to track community service hours. In other words, we wanted to allow people (mostly young people) to keep track of their community service online. This process would allow someone to manage a permanent history of all the communtity service they may have performed.

Students are Entering Records! There are many, many community service records in the database and students have begun to recognize the importance of good recordkeeping. Hopefully these records will come in handy in the future (job apps, resumes, college apps, etc).

The Community Calendar seems to be growing with content but the mailing list has not grown in several months (a few new addresses every few weeks). Also, there still seems to be some confusion about how to get things on the calendar. We had hoped to make some changes to the way calendar items are added but havn't had time. This is a busy time of year for activities and time to work on this project just hasn't been available. Stay tuned.

Mar. 11, 2007

About a month ago we decided not to babysit the information network as a kind of crude test. It was important to us to try and determine how the community would manage the information network without our involvement. The results were both positive and negative.

There appears to be some confusion as to how the information database is setup. We receive email often with subjects like: "How Do I add things to the calendar?" and "Can you put our organization in the project?"

The original plan was to allow people in our community to distribute their information without site developers needing to do it for them. This may end up not working ;-(. In the future, site developers may need to manage the content and take the flexibiltiy out of the publics hands. If this is the case, it will be a matter of completing a "request" to get inforamtion posted in the network.

The pros' of doing it this way is simplicty (from the public viewpoint) and consistency in the distribution of information. The cons' are mostly related to latency. Site developers will have to "service requests." This means if you asked us to put something in the network it may take a few days to get it online. This may not matter.

We'll plan to post in a few weeks with more information about how to get things in the network. In the meantime you can help us grow our mailing list. We were growing well for a few weeks but seemed to have slowed?

Jan. 24, 2007

An e-mail went out today to civic leaders in the community explaining the potential benefit of the project if large numbers of citizens join the mailing list. It will be interesting to see how they respond?

The list of organizations is growing. Mostly because I have been inputing them. We need to get a substantial list of organizations in the directory so site visitors can create Project Pages associated with events. It is unlikely that anyone will create a directory listing for a community organization they are not closley related to, so....I've entered them myself. I wonder how long it will be until someone involved in one of the organizations I entered thinks: "Hey, I should have entered that organization myself", giggling.

Businesses in town have yet to figure this out. There is one business in the directory. Seems weird. The site offers any local business an opportunity to tell a large portion of the community what they sell and why we should become customers...and yet, only one has? I guess paying for advertising is too enticing? I really hope this site helps to revitilize our downtown...it can't if there are no business owners that understand the significance of the directory and the automated information distribution process??? Time will tell.

Jan. 8, 2007

Things are getting easier. It's amazing how much support we've received in the first week! Very Cool. There are some misconceptions floating around (amazing how news can spread) about how projectPG.org works and what it is designed to do. There seems to be some general confusion about what a Project Page is, who creates them and how they are organized.

The Community is helping to shape this process and your input is valuable.

We are not building web-sites! The system is not designed to allow people to build a "web-site". Web-sites are built and maintained by professional web-designers and programmers using specialized software and skills. Individual sites offer developers the ability to "flavor" or "design" an image, a brand, a marketing edge over competitors. Or..sites are used to deliver informational content.

projectPG.org is self serve. It is designed to allow a novice to take advantage of the power the system has to offer in it's ability to deliver important community information. If you have some community information (yes, local business info is community information) log-in and fill out the web-based form to create a Project Page. The entire community will benefit from your effort.

Every Project Page is associated with an organization (business, community group, government group, etc). Project Pages are found using the Project tab except community event types. Those are found on the calendar.

Information Distribution is via automated e-mail. We are still working out the details behind the scenes in terms of what get's distributed and when. The "who" part is easy, e-mail addresses owners decide that. The when part on an individual basis is also easy, e-mail address owners determine how often they get an e-mail. The challenge is what should be contained, how far in advance of a notice, etc..

Volunteers normally need to know a long-time in advance about an event. This means that if you have an event that will need volunteers...get it into the database MONTHS before the event. This way, the system can promote the event over a longer period of time, increasing your chances of getting help...

More to come...

Jan. 4, 2007

My latest thoughts....

The projectPG.org web-site was launched January 1st 2007 in BETA mode. For those of you not sure what BETA means, don't worry. Basically, it means that this site is new and the next few months will bring many improvements, bug fixes and feature additions.

The citizens of Pacific Grove are the driving force behind this web-site. You, me, the mayor, everyone in PG. It is entirely possible that this site won't exist in a year or two. We hope not, but time will tell. If very few people in town end up benefiting from the project why bother?. The process is supposed to be simple, the reality is, projectPG.org has some ambitious goals and nothing worth doing is ever easy.

If all goes well thousands of residents will visit the site and register an e-mail address so they can receive community information via the automated system in a predictable, consistent manner. If the plan works, active community members will create and maintain Project Pages so we can all stay informed about the latest goings on in town. Project Pages are designed to be easy to create and manage, even for a novice. This isn't about "fancy" or "flashy", it's not about "one organization" trying to establish an "edge", it's about an entire community working together.

If only a few active citizens create and manage Project Pages the automated system won't have anything to tell us. If you are an active citizen involved with a group, organization, school or anything else the community wants to hear about, create a Project Page! Get your events on the calendar, list some volunteer opportunities, lots of people want to hear about your upcoming events...in advance!

If you do create some Project Pages, give us some feedback. We are not rocket-scientists and don't have all the answers. We put together a system with SIMPLE in mind. If it doesn't do something you need, if it does something really bad, or it just won't work for you, we need to know about it. Again, what's the point?

If you entered your e-mail address (hundreds already have) in the "box" on the home page you will begin receiving e-mails shortly. It will be interesting to see what kind of information the first few weeks of messages contain? Until there are Projects with events, notices and other community related info, the automated e-mails won't have much information. As time goes on, lets hope our "daily info" is full of events, notices, coupons, news and other important community stuff.

It's not possible for one (or even a few) people to "enter" everything in town into a giant database. In order for this to work active community members, business leaders and political leaders will need to be involved. Yes, we could look at the newspaper (and other sources) and start typing events... Monday..this..Tuesday..that...Wednesday..more of this.. but what's the point? We are trying to help organizations, mayors, leaders, and others spread THEIR message on THEIR TERMS. If your a leader in an organization that has a message for the community, get your info in the database so technology can send us all a message ;-)

All done, no more ranting ;-)