Assistive Media [2]
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.
