SSU_Business_2016

Sonoma State Business Leadership Class Volunteer Team This is your project page. Please use it to communicate with each other about what you propose to do and what progress you've made. This will help the team to stay coordinated and create a written record of the project. Once you've "joined" the wiki you will be able to add to and edit this page.toc

Team
Chase Johnston, http://hcle.wikispaces.com/Chase+Johnston Name, link to personal volunteer page Name, link to personal volunteer page Name, link to personal volunteer page Liza Loop, link to personal volunteer page

Correspondence Archive
Progress: 9-26-16 Initial Meeting/Project decisions

Sept. 30, 2016 Email

Hello Nicole, Gabrielle, Lisa and Chase,

I hope you found our Wednesday meeting helpful. I was very pleased with the way it went.

As I recall our discussion I asked you to do a number of things, including  I'd like to meet again next week so the semester doesn't slip away under our noses. Online is fine by me. Is there a time all of you can be online at once? If you propose 3 meeting times I'll probably be able to make one of them. We'll need at least an hour. I'm available, with notice almost anytime between 8 am and 10 pm except that I'll be away from 9 to 14 October. Please don't hesitate to phone, text or email me with questions, suggestions, worries or brainstorms. You won't disturb or interrupt me with messages. I'll just respond when I can. Sometimes it will take a few hours or even a day. I'll watch the wiki to see how your posts are coming along. If you need help using the interface just message me.
 * Join and browse around the wiki ( hcle.org ). The join code is "DM3MQH4". The join button is on the upper right of the landing page. There's some material about volunteering here . Some suggestions on creating your volunteer page are here.
 * Create your volunteer page. I made a Project Page for you here.
 * Read all the instructions on Kickstarter for a successful campaign. Please let me know when you've done that and we can set up an online meeting/conference call with you 4 and Tom (our project manager) so we can update you on what we've already done. At that meeting we can decide whether all of you want to do Kickstarter or just Chase (I believe he was the one who expressed interest in doing Kickstarter). Whoever works on that will have to decide on role and tasks and coordinate with Tom and me.
 * Find out how many hours of work on this project you are expected to do from your instructor's point of view. I will happily accept as much time and effort as you want to put in. However, if my student days were anything like yours, you are likely to plan more than you can actually fit into 24 hour days. Should that happen it's nice to know what you are required to do for course credit. As we mentioned at the meeting, knowing how many hours the combined staff is investing in a fund-raising effort can be enlightening. It often works out that a nonprofit organization burns more value doing an event than they raise in dollars. If we value volunteer time at, say, $12 per hour and each of the 6 of us invests 25 hours doing a "fun run" that's $1,800 of personnel time invested even though we don't pay cash for most of it. If we only net $900 from the event we've effectively valued our time at $6.00 per hour. My philosophy of nonprofits is that they are businesses that must operate in a competitive labor market. Sometimes it works out that a volunteer would rather donate $150 in cash and have the 25 hours to do something else.
 * Please put together a proposal for the "fun run". This is a practical activity not a school exercise so I don't care about spelling, grammar or neatness. I would like enough detail about exactly what you would need to do to produce and publicize such an event so that you can be fairly realistic about the time you will need to invest, how many participants we can expect and how much money we might raise. Yes, these projections are all guesses and we're likely to get many of the numbers wrong. It may take us a couple of meetings to revise the proposal until we're all satisfied that it's "realistic". After that we can make a decision as to whether to do the project or not. By the way, proposal and meeting time count in the total time invested. Our one first meeting used 5 person hours and you all met about this project before I came along.

Cheers and thank you for volunteering,

Liza

Aug. 31, 2016 email Hello Business Leadership Consultants,

As you are all probably aware, it's good strategy to understand the skills and previous experience of your team before designing assignments or accepting tasks. In this little email I'll share a few of LO*OP Center's needs. I hope each of you will introduce yourselves to me and explain what you hope to accomplish this semester. We'll have to match LO*OP's needs with your existing skills and your learning goals in order to define a project that is win-win for all of us. At this point I don't even know how many people are on Nicole's team.

LO*OP Center, Inc. is a California, 501(c)(3), public benefit corporation. I've been keeping it alive, although inactive in some years, since 1975. Over this time we have run a public access computer center, designed and presented workshops on computing for thousands of young students, adult learners and teachers, and written user's manuals. We have also branched out into Intercultural Communications Training, Futurist Studies and Science and Technology Public History. Currently we are juggling three projects: History of Computing in Learning and Education Virtual Museum (HCLE), Open Educative Systems (OES) and New Economic Thinking, Analysis, Action (NETAA). It's a long and complex tale.

One of LO*OP's urgent needs is to compile this history into a brief story for use as an introduction to the organization for media in general and potential funders specifically.

Another need centers on the fact that LO*OP is, and has always been, a very small corporation with very big ideas. To optimize our impact on real-world social functioning we must develop partnerships with larger commercial, governmental and nonprofit organizations. We would benefit from understanding how other consortia and collaborative groups come together and what formal agreements, document and contracts they create.

We are attempting to fund each of our three projects separately as well as raising general funds to be used across the organization. If the team as a whole, or individual members, are looking for a focused, closely-defined task with local, positive outcomes that can be completed within a semester, well, we can define one together. For example: LO*OP started in Sonoma County and began bringing computing into local schools in 1975. There are several local history museums in various towns and there is the History Museum of Sonoma County at 425 7th Street in Santa Rosa. Perhaps we could make contact with the History Museum and develop a plan with them that would result in an exhibition that tells the story of how Sonoma pioneered in computer-augmented education. This is a dream I have been harboring for at least 3 years. Whether it is the right project for this group remains to be seen. Let's talk.

It's always important for consultants to practice what they preach. Let me invite you, as Leadership students, to organize your group and then communicate that organization to me. I'm happy to be in on the process and contribute where I can. For starters, if you email me individually, please copy the other members of this team. We will thrive if we all agree on our individual roles and responsibilities. Please don't wait until half-way through the semester to begin working on this. My experience as a student suggests that work piles up at the end of the term. Let's dive into the planning right away so we can carve out tasks we can actually complete to reach our coveted positive community impact.

I'll be at the Service Learning & Intern fair in Salazar Plaza tomorrow from 11:15 on so I hope to see some or all of you there. If you're not on campus Thursday, please email me as soon as possible.

Looking forward to a fruitful collaboration,

Liza Loop