cheryl jerozal's Field Reports

It's not enough to be good...

cheryl jerozal — Tue, 29 May 2007 12:50:20 -0600

The Washington Post got a world-famous violinist to play (unannounced) in a DC metro station to see what would happen.

What happened was this: of the 1097 people who passed by during the almost-hour of his performance, only a few stopped to listen for a moment. The violinist did receive $32.17 in tips, which isn't too bad, but still much less than one would expect for a Grammy- and Oscar-winning musician.

So, nonprofit organizations aren't the only ones that have trouble getting people to pay attention even if they are doing amazing work. Our work needs associated communication and the proper context, too.

Shortsightedness

cheryl jerozal — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:43:51 -0600

Have you ever done something quick and dirty even though doing things "the right way" would only take a little more time? Maybe you didn't have a little more time? Of course. Haven't we all?

Here's an example. Recently, I was creating a conference registration form for a client on her Plone-based site. Ideally, the client would have created and maintained the registration form herself, since the tool we were using has a graphical form creation interface. However, the documentation for the tool we were using was out of date. I thought about updating the documentation at that time and then helping the client through it, but that would have required a lot more time than just setting up the form myself. Also, I was going to be out of town shortly (for the NTEN conference) and the client wanted to start accepting conference registrations as soon as possible. In the circumstances, it seemed a reasonable solution for me to create the form, so I did. Many form tweaks later, I think I have spent more time on updating the form than it would have taken to update the documentation, which could have helped others besides just this client.

I think many things in life are like sliding puzzles -- you may have to suffer temporary "setbacks" (moving blocks out of the correct positions) in order to get the optimal end result. Maybe the trick is not to think of them as setbacks but as steps toward a goal. I have started trying to be very conscious of how I do things. If it will make things better or more efficient in the future, I want to choose to spend more time up front for foundational work. It is challenging to try to work according to a long term vision rather than according to what seems most pressing at the moment.

One challenge is when your organization as a whole doesn't really support it. (Do any?) Here's what I have noticed often happens when employees want to work on improving their organization in big picture ways:

Employee - Hey, I was thinking that we should have a system for organizing our files so everyone can access them easily instead of having them scattered in disarray on our server and our website and old emails.
Boss - That would be great. You should set that up.
Employee - Will I be able to spend a little time away from my current projects to do it?
Boss - You know how important our work is -- we just can't afford to take time away from it.

And the boss has to think about things like if grantmakers will be ok with his/her organization having less immediate results because the organization was focusing on long-term effectiveness. (Also, it may be particularly difficult for nonprofits to take "time out" to become more efficient because if they're not spending all their effort heads-down on mission work children will starve or trees will get cut down or... But what about the children etc you aren't getting to help because your organization is not efficient enough?)

Or perhaps acting with the big picture in mind doesn't lead to greater productivity and less stress as I imagine it would, because of the increased effort/costs required. What do you think? Is your organization shortsighted (not that you need to have a simple yes/no answer)? How does this impact the work that you do?

Open Source Development and "Barrier to Entry"

cheryl jerozal — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 10:55:08 -0700

Last week I had the opportunity to participate in my first "sprint". In a sprint, a bunch of people get together and work on an open source project for a few days. In my two days (and one night :p) of sprinting, I learned a lot, met some awesome people, and contributed to the start of a project. I highly recommend sprinting to anyone who gets a chance to do it.

However, one thing I noticed when sprinting was the difficulty of getting to a point where you can make progress on a project. For example, before you could work on my project, you had to download and install particular versions of six different tools. And then you had configure your system properly (set environment variables and run scripts and such).

If there were nice installers that worked for all platforms for the tools, maybe it wouldn't have been so bad. But there are often not installers, and all the tasks multiply -- you have to install other things to allow you to install the things you actually need. Here is the Windows install page for one of the tools my project required, for example.

(There are perhaps the most issues in getting set up on Windows, maybe because most open source developers are not using Windows so they sometimes don't bother to document for it and they sometimes don't have an easy way to test things on Windows. But I think this is a serious issue. Most people are using Windows. If we want anyone to be able to join open source development efforts, we have to make it possible for people to start contributing on the platform they already have.)

I was able to get the stuff I needed running after a few hours because there were people around who I could ask for help when I got stuck. And luckily my pretty-old (from before college) laptop did not collapse from the weight of the tools. But what about the person alone in their apartment who just wants to contribute? And what if they only have a dialup connection?

It's not like people who have trouble getting the tools setup don't have anything to contribute. But we aren't letting them get to a point where they can. I mentioned the issues in getting started to some other sprinters and they said "Yes, the barrier to entry for open source development is high." But no one mentioned anything that is being done about it.

What can we do to make it easier to contribute? Produce better documentation? (Lack of documentation is already a big problem in the open source world.) Set up more ways for programmers to connect to one another in person? Make better operating systems so tool setup goes more smoothly?

A quick note on usability

cheryl jerozal — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 16:59:07 -0700

Am I the only one who doesn't necessarily always fill out online forms from top to bottom? The way some forms are designed makes it seem so.

For example, visit the free Basecamp account signup page. At the time of this blog post, if you fill in item 3 and then fill in item 2 with something different (and then click in a new field to have the change to item 2 "sink in"), what you have entered for item 3 is replaced.

There should be a check for this. I've seen this problem on other sites too. (Though it is kinda fun to pick on the, in my opinion, mostly well-designed Basecamp.)

Teeth and Ants

cheryl jerozal — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 11:14:03 -0700

Before I became a Vista, I naively hoped that the health benefits provided to us would include dental care. Thus, I put off getting my teeth cleaned and checked until when I thought my time of lacking insurance would be over.

At this point I haven't been to the dentist in a while, so when I recently read an article called A survival guide for the uninsured (containing such cheerful news as "The more than 45 million Americans without coverage will get sick more, earn less and die earlier than those with insurance") the best piece of info I got from it was the idea to try to find cheap dental care at dental schools.

I'd heard of people doing that before but hadn't occurred to me lately. It seemed like a good plan. Unfortunately, apparently lots of others think so too. The only dental school in my state takes new patients through a long process which involves being selected through a monthly lottery, being screened via form answers to see if there is a current educational need for you, being placed on a waiting list for up to 6 months, and finally being given a screening appointment to see if they want to work with you. All that for low-cost dental care with people who aren't even dentists yet.

But maybe you'll have better luck - here's a list of dental schools.

In other news, my office has ants. They seem to have formed a colony or something in my trash can. Maybe this'll teach me to take out the trash more than never.

I said I'd post about this in the TA-NPO conference call...

cheryl jerozal — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 09:37:25 -0600

MSN messenger was mentioned as a possible way for members of our priority area to stay in touch. I said that it wasn't necessary to use the Microsoft messenger program to chat through MSN. As long as you don't need voice and video chat, you can instead use Gaim. Currently, you would need to use this version of Gaim (get the "gaim-2.0.0beta3.1.exe" file) for it to work with MSN, at least on Windows. By the way, if you don't already have an MSN ID for chatting, you can get one by creating a Microsoft Passport Account.

CSS is amazing

cheryl jerozal — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 08:18:51 -0600

One of the things I am working on is creating websites for nonprofits. In the past, I used CSS a little for changing background colors, fonts, etc because I saw it somewhere but I had no idea what it was capable of. (For anyone who hasn't heard of it, CSS can be used to create designs for HTML pages. It allows one design file to be used for multiple pages in a website so that changing the font all across a site, for example, does not require changing each page in the site.)

The CSS Zen Garden project provides a webpage for designers to create CSS designs for, which are then posted online. Each of the designs use the same HTML code (so they have the same content) - the only difference is the CSS (including images) design. Of the hundreds of designs posted online, here are a few examples that I liked and think show a good variety of designs: Museum, Pretty in Pink, Obsequience, contemporary nouveau, and Garden Party. Isn't this cool?

PS The reason I am using HTML+CSS for a site vs. one of the CMSs is that some sites don't need to have user logins and have rather static content. But I imagine the CMSs can be customized with CSS...how is that done? I will probably be using the Plone CMS in the future.

vista life stuff...

cheryl jerozal — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 07:54:53 -0600

i really hope we all keep up with our blogs, because i want to be able to keep up with all of you! ok, now for some "vista life" type stuff i've been thinking about / looking into:

*** food stamps ***

according to stuff online, i don't think i am eligible for food stamps since i have too much savings (too much being more than the limit of $2,000). savings in an ira must be included toward this limit, even though according to wikipedia "a debtor in bankruptcy can exempt his or her IRA from the bankruptcy estate" and this seems like it should be a similar situation.

also, higher rent payments (after a certain amount that it is assumed you can pay) leads to being eligible for a higher amount of food stamps. this makes sense in a way -- after all, sometimes (depending on where one's job is) one can't help but get an expensive apartment. but on the other hand, sometimes one can choose between more expensive apartments that are bigger/more convenient/newer and less expensive apartments that aren't. it seems that one shouldn't get more food stamps just because one's rent is higher -- it should depend on other factors such as the average apartment rent in the area.

anyway, though it would have been nice to be able to get better/more food, i am glad i am not eligible for food stamps because i think if i were it would be hard for me to not get them. and i am not sure i think getting food stamps is the moral thing for me to do since i can live decently without them. actually, this is a question i struggle with a lot: how much unnecessary stuff must one have/buy before it is wrong? what do you guys think?

*** health benefits ***

does anyone else think it is strange that we won't get our health benefit cards for a while (what was it, 4-6 weeks)? i think we should at least get our member numbers and stuff like that right away.

i was looking through the guide to the health plan, and some of the stuff was kinda weird. there are a number of treatments that are not covered by the plan even if they were not preexisting, such as narcolepsy and add and aids medicines. i don't expect these omissions to be a problem for me personally, but i wonder how they decide things like that.

one of the "exclusions to covered services" is "Any services related to the treatment of allergies including allergy tests and surveys, injection, medication and treatment (except for emergency treatment including medication and hospitalization for asthma)". so recently i've been having this itching in my ears that i think is caused by allergies but for all i know it could actually be caused by some weird ear disease. if i go to the doctor and then they decide it is caused by allergies, will the health plan not cover the doctor visit even though i didn't know it was allergies at first?

*** cheap stuff ***

for getting things cheaply or even for free, check out the websites craigslist and freecycle.

you guys are great and i hope you have great first days.

blogs are fun

cheryl jerozal — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 13:18:40 -0600

i don't have much to say right now. but in the future this space will be filled with tales of my trials and triumphs as a ctc vista.