Last week we relaunched Assistive Media: a nonprofit that provides audio recordings of cool magazine articles for the visually impaired. Articles are read by talented volunteers and then distributed online or in a podcast.
As George likes to say, perfect is the enemy of done. Certainly the case with this project, but fortunately David Erdody and Ed Vielmetti pushed to just launch the site, warts and all. We’ve been making small improvements since, and some parts of it still aren’t working quite right! (So please let me know if you happen to look and find anything surprising.)
I’m glad that I had the opportunity to work with David and everybody else, and to feel my way around the nonprofit. And it’s nice to see that many more people are using the site.
Now that I am working elsewhere in the local nonprofit scene, it’s nice to retain the perspective I got from Assistive Media. It’s just one of the many “micrononprofits” — organizations getting great results from part-time and volunteer labor on small budgets and smaller physical footprints — that are under-served by the traditional apparatus.
Disclaimer for SI students
I did most of the work on this project as DFE fieldwork through the School of Information. This consisted of trading a few hours of totally useless departmental paperwork and busywork for the ability to block off time in my schedule and earn a few credit hours for the project. While these DFEs are one of the dumbest aspects of a all-around brain-dead curriculum, I wouldn’t have had the time for such a time-intensive volunteer project otherwise. Nevertheless, the support or involvement we got from the department for the DFE was marginal. This seems like a pretty common hallway complaint, so I wanted to get it out here in blogland.
Noor | 07-Jun-06 at 9:37 am | Permalink
The site looks very nice!
Regarding DFEs/PEP points, the amount of time students have to spend documenting what they did is ridiculous! Even with all of that paperwork, people can (and do) get away with getting more credit for less work or for positions that don’t fit SI’s narrow definition of DFE work.
Mentoring/support of masters students is very lacking at SI, in general.
Sadly, I don’t think anyone is listening to these student concerns.
Edward Vielmetti | 10-Jun-06 at 12:36 am | Permalink
Thanks Brian for doing all this work (& for putting up for change requests long after the DFE is over). For lack of a better way to describe it, this was a web 1.0 to web 2.0 transition - from static content edited laboriously by hand to pages produced through Movable Type coerced into being a content management system.
As for DFEs, I suspect the hardest part of that process is getting SI students out of West Hall and into the community where those sorts of projects can be found in abundance once you learn where to look.