Only Daniel and I participated in the conference call tonight because Shane and Hannah weren’t available. First, we talked about our general updates. I’m is in the process of connecting with Kirsten, the Environmental Studies advisor, and Allan Hall Advertising. Daniel and Shane met with Green Empowerment on Friday. At this meeting they discussed what ODA should be researching. Jason suggested that we use the database Science Direct for our research searches. When Anna goes back to Peru, she will be gathering information concerning needs assessment so that Daniel and I can put together a needs assessment survey for San Pablo. 

Next, we briefly discussed past action items. Items still on the to do list:

• Find project on arsenic filtration at U of O (me)
• Start finding different organizations that might fund the project (Shane and I)
• Discussion about advertising (Shane and I)
• Create a research priority list (Shane). 

The major topic of this conference call was the Clinton Global Initiative grant. The great news is that the grant deadline is now August 4 (Daniel has confirmed this via email). This will give us more time to revise our work. So far, we have responded to all of  the 125 words or less questions. During the conference call, Daniel and I read through the grant and made some minor changes. One of our major concerns is the length of each of our responses, most being 40+ words over the requested limit. I will try to shorten some of the responses, while Daniel is going to work on the longer additional questions that still need to be answered. We now have seven more days to complete this grant!

Hannah is shortly leaving for New Zealand and will not be back until the beginning of September. She will have difficulty checking-in with us due to lack of available phone and internet service. Her duties of looking for grant possibilities have been passed off to Daniel, Shane, and I until she returns. 

This evening’s call also discussed Green Empowerment as a technical partner. As we interpret it, our partnership with Green Empowerment essentially boils down to us raising funds for technology and transportation, going to the location for a few weeks to install the technology, then leaving. How does ODA incorporate other elements of development into our project (i.e. looking at both quantity and quality of the water source, health, education)? 

Finally, a date has been set for our beach retreat: August 10, 11. Hannah will unfortunately not be able to attend the beach retreat, but Daniel, Shane, and I will be present. Our goals for the retreat are the same as before (”getting to know each other better, talking about our mission statement and theory of change, and how we are planning on structuring the organization”).

Agenda/Minutes - ODA - 27 July 2008 [Google Docs] 

 

 Standard Podcast [72:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (9)

The Clinton Global Initiative - Outstanding Commitment Awards are a series of $10,000 to $250,000 awards from President Clinton for student projects addressing these areas: energy and climate change, global health, human rights and peace, and poverty alleviation.  We feel Oregon Direct Action and its projects fit this criteria well, and Shane, Hannah, and I been drafting our responses to the prompts over the last week.

We need readers!

If you’re interested in proofing our application, please download the draft [DOC] and either comment on the file and send it back to us, or leave your general comments on this post.  Specifically, we’re looking for feedback on overall presentation of ideas and how well we address each question.  If you find gritty grammar mistakes, though, please point those out too.  Originally, the due date was supposed to be the 28th of July, although the website now says entries must be submitted by the 4th of August.  In any case, we hope to submit this as soon as we can.

If you’d like to subscribe to updates from Oregon Direct Action with either RSS or Email, there are now a few stellar ways to do so.  We’ve broken down how the updates we write get sent out, in the hope that, when you subscribe, you only get information that is relevant to you.  With this strategy, everyone that is interested in working with us can be engaged to the degree they want to.

According to Wikipedia, a “feed” is a “data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it.”  In layman’s terms, this means that when a piece of content is published, you receive it in whatever inbox you would like (instead of having to continually go back to the publisher’s website).  We’re hoping this offers a hassle-free way for the ODA community to keep updated on what’s going on.  Read what we write about when it’s delivered to you, and if you have something to contribute, leave a comment on that post.

Let me make this a bit more concrete.  At the moment, we have four tiers of feeds, this metaphorical river channel of information:

• Updates for Everyone - These are posts we write which are the broadest of updates, like this one, that we think are relevant to everyone interested in what’s going on with Oregon Direct Action.  As an example, these posts might include monthly project updates, large events, and whenever we have super huge news to announce.
• Updates for our Community - For our community at the University of Oregon and around our projects, we intend to write posts of a bit more comprehensive nature.  They might also include news relevant to the community, and opportunities for different members of the community to get involved.
• Updates for our Partners - These are posts geared towards our partners, including findings in our research and ideas or opportunities directly related to our projects.  As a note, this feed also includes a summary of ODA-relevant links saved with our del.icio.us account, reports, podcasts, and tools we find and think will be useful.
• Updates for the Team - High-frequency updates from the different parts of the team intended to keep all of us up-to-date on what’s going on.  Ideally, this feed will take the place of email, for the most part.  Currently, this also includes links from our del.icio.us account and all audio podcasts.

As time goes on, the way that these feeds are structured, and the types of content they receive, will most likely evolve significantly.  We’re making this strategy up as we go along and, as far as we can tell, no one has ever done something like this before.  Conceptually, we’re solid on the idea on “crowdsourcing” as much of our projects as we can, but how we actually do this is bound to have a few rough edges.  Any and all feedback is warmly welcomed.

One thing to note is that you should only need to subscribe to one feed.  With how we’re planning on structuring this, everything that gets published in “Community Updates” will also be received by the team and our partners, but not by “everyone.”  The feeds will also have tiers of frequency, with “Updates for our Team” having the highest traffic and “Updates for Everyone” having the lowest.

Cool.  On with the show.

Update: I almost forgot.  Thanks to DJ Strouse of EWB USC and all others with the open source organization quasi-working group for helping map out this and upcoming strategies.

This is a summary of what I’ve accomplished so far.

What was the goal?

We are currently looking for information, ideally from scholarly or published sources, about reforestation/aquifer recharge initiatives as part of a large sustainable development project, and about public health assessments following rural water improvement projects in Latin America.

What did we find?

On the subject of sustainable development:

• The Watershed Organization Trust is a group working in Ahmednagar, Maharashtra, India to provide sustainable development.  Though they don’t seem to do much with aquifer recharge, they do work to increase the quality of the local watershed through reforestation and education.  Here is a link to a detailed paper on their work, and here is a link to their articles page, where they have many more publications on their work.
• The United Nations Division on Sustainable Development published a report of case studies on sustainable development in Africa.
• I found a report for a project in Venezuela that attempted sustainable development through encouraging rural farmers to grow organic coffee in the shade and reforestation initiatives.  Unfortunately, the report is in Spanish so I can’t read it, but I would encourage anyone who can to do so, because it seems like a valuable report.

On the subject of public health assessments, the best papers I’ve found were the following:

• Interventions to improve water quality for preventing diarrhoea: systematic review and meta-analysis - This article examines data from various studies and looks at the effectiveness of various water projects in reducing diarrhoea.
• Reducing Diarrhea Though The Use Of Household-based Ceramic Water Filters: A Randomized, Controlled Trial In Rural Bolivia -  This article describes a study in which half of the households in a rural community in Bolivia receive ceramic water filters.  The result is a marked decrease in the occurrence of diarrhoea.
• Household-based Ceramic Water Filters For The Prevention Of Diarrhea: A Randomized, Controlled Trial Of A Pilot Program In Columbia - A similar study by the same journal that takes place in Columbia instead of Bolivia.

How did we find it?

Google Scholar was my main source for finding information on public health assessments, probably because there are many papers on that subject.  Still, props to Google for creating a resource that allows quality information to be so easily accessible.

For the papers on sustainable development, I had to be a bit more creative.  The first thing I did was call the U of O Libraries and get my account working so I could use U of O’s research tools.  There’s a lot of sources of information there, and U of O does a pretty good (though not the best) job of allowing you to use them easily.  One thing that bothered me was that a lot of resources, such as ScienceDirect, are IP based, so you have to actually be in the library to use them.

Still, I would encourage anyone to look into your university research resources if you’re a student.  Your tuition dollars are paying for some high quality tools.

Those tools found me some decent articles, however, I felt like I really began to tap into a gold mine when I began searching for sustainable development blogs.  These are sites from people like us (after all, this is a sustainable development blog), many of whom have implemented projects and have valuable lessons to share.

What’s next?

The plan now is to find more sustainable development blogs, to post them, and then to comb through the best of them for detailed reports of actual projects.  I also want to find analysis of projects, in terms of lessons learned, problems encountered, and ways they plan to address these problems the next time they go into the field.  Also, as we find blogs, we are finding potential partners who we can contact and work together with.

For the community:

So, to all of you reading this, I have some questions/requests:

• How do you feel about this research summary?  Did I go too in depth or not deep enough? How do you like my format (ie. “what was the goal,” “what did we find” etc.)?
• Is there anything I’ve mentioned here that you’d like to know more about?
• Do you have sources of information and research tools that you would suggest?
• Do you know of blogs/organizations that relate to what we’re working on?

Wow.  Tonight’s call with Adrien, Hannah, and Shane was absolutely stellar.  Right at the beginning, Adrien volunteered to keep track of the amount of time we spent on each section of the agenda.  By having those specific start times on our Google Doc, everyone could keep track of how long they should be talking.  Going through the agenda quickly at the very beginning to determine how much time to spend on each section also proved tremendously useful.

While she was able to connect with us, Hannah spoke a bit about the funding opportunity we’ve discovered with the Clinton Global Initiative.  Students can receive up to $10,000 USD and universities up to $250,000.  The program funds projects in four areas (energy & climate change, global health, human rights & peace, and poverty alleviation), three of which we think we can meet.  Our angle of attack will be to reconvene on Tuesday evening to discuss how we pitch our goals and split up the questions.  The entire proposal will be due on the 28th of July.

Because of work schedules all over the place, we most likely won’t be able to get together a beach retreat until the beginning of August.  Shane will check his calendar to see if this can happen over the 10th and 11th.

Also notable on tonight’s agenda is our continuing push to outreach to the community, and ideally “crowdsource” various components of project(s).  Adrien now has a number of fresh leads to contact over the next week, more specifically professors who either teach or are interested in our topic areas: sustainability, development, poverty, and innovation.  We look forward to drawing from as many minds as we can as this project progresses.  Shane, on the other hand, has started sketching out a community portal he and I will continue to work on in the next few weeks.  Our goal with this little project is to create a way for people to participate with the project to the degree that they want to, one take on Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail.”

Shane also talked briefly about the research he has begun coordinating on the ODA Wiki (I didn’t link directly to the research page because the URI might change).  It sounds like he has made an excellent start on the series of questions Jason of Green Empowerment proposed last week.  I know we all look forward to a blog post on what Shane has come across shortly (hint hint, nudge nudge. Wink).

Lastly, we’re still looking to fill two positions, Tech and Communications, as we try to round out the launch team.  For the Tech position, we’re looking for a super motivated and knowledgeable chap (or lass) to lead web/tech systems management as we progress onwards to being an Open Source Organization.  This person would ideally: know Wordpress inside and out, have familiarity with other CMSes, have skill with digital media, and be an all-around geeky person.  For Communications, we’re looking for a PR-esque student interested in social and environmental justice who wants to help put a smiley face on ODA.  If any friends or colleagues fit this description, please do send them our way!

Agenda/Minutes - ODA - 20 July 2008 [Google Docs]

 

 ODA - 20 July 2008: Clinton Global Initiative, summer retreat, and what we've researched [61:14m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (8)

I have been officially delegated to be head of research for ODA by Daniel, the man who long ago officially delegated unto himself the officially delegate powers…

Anyway, in this position, I’ll be the go-to guy when we need to find out about something.  However, there’s a lot more to my job than that.  I also try to figure out what we should be researching, I work with others so we can help each other out when researching, I record the fruits of our research, and I blog about this whole process so that members of the ODA community can see what we’re up to, learn from us, and maybe chip in and help us with our research.

With that in mind, I’ll be blogging regular research posts that you can track if you want.  In this first post, I’ll talk about progress we’ve made in helping our partners, GE (Green Empowerment, not General Electric), find the following:

• papers or publications exist on reforestation and aquifer recharge/restoration initiatives that have been tied to meeting local human and agricultural demands for water
• papers on water projects (within the last 10 years) that have been paired with public health assessments in Latin America for communities with 20-100 households

I began to search first for papers that paired health assessments with water projects, utilizing Google Scholar.  An immediate problem I ran into was that most publishers want you to pay for their articles, offering only abstracts for free.  I kept track of promising abstracts, figuring that GE could look them over and see if any were worth paying for.  I was able to overcome this problem, however, because most articles gave links to similar articles, and so I was able to quickly look into a large number of good articles and find a few that were free.  I’m going to keep track of the pages that offer free articles and eventually create a page of good sources for research that all can look at and add to.

In addition to these articles, I also remembered that a friend of mine, DJ Strouse, is working on a similar water project in India and one of the things they’ll be doing is installing a software system that improves patient health by giving clinicians the ability to keep patient records electronically.  However, this system also collects data on health trends in areas where it’s installed.  Global Medical Brigades, one of DJ’s partners in this project, is the organization that provides this software, called the “GWB Data Informatics System.”

I then began to search, again using Google Scholar, for papers on reforestation/aquifer recharge initiatives, hoping to find some that also mentioned water needs, or rural areas in developing countries.  I wasn’t able to find anything promising that was free, and little at all, money or no.  I plan to continue searching tomorrow.

Before I end, I have a few requests for all of you:

• What are good sources of information?  I’m thinking especially of sites that offer free journals/scholarly articles, but also of environmental/humanitarian blogs/news sites, good blogs/news sits in general, or even other groups that might have information that could help us with this current task, or our overall task of improving the lives people around the world through the provision of water and energy.
• If you’d like, feel free to join me in the search for papers on the aforementioned subjects by linking to resources in the comments or tagging them with “for:oregondirectaction” with del.icio.us

DJ Strouse, of USC’s Hubli Water and Health Project, wrote a whiz-bag summary of Urs Heierli’s “Marketing Safe Water Systems” that I passed along to him the other day.  He’s apparently a quicker reader than I, and more focused with his time.  All the power to him, I’m only halfway through.  In his assessment, DJ highlights these points:

• Central idea: Don’t treat poor people like poor people.  They want to be marketed to just like everyone else.
• Recommendation one: Don’t ignore marketing.  Use “local leaders, teachers, celebrities, and pop culture to promote a branded product.” Why? Because lifestyle marketing is a proven method of selling products.
• Recommendation two: Understand the local culture.  This ties into the marketing concept above; if you’re planning on “selling” your SODIS, BioSand, or other purification system to a population, you had better make a case for why they want it and how it makes their lives easier.
• Conclusion: Understanding a region well enough to introduce a desirable water filter is the next challenge for NGOs working to provide safe and reliable water access

During the team’s conference call tonight, Adrien, Hannah, Shane, and I started off presenting where we are with the project proposals on India and Peru.  Although the original goal was to have these both done by the 10th of July, we’ve realised in the last three weeks it just isn’t possible to have a solid blueprint for what we are going to do at this point.  Largely in both cases, the constraint is that the specific issues haven’t been mapped out well enough for us to determine the game plan.  For Peru, a needs assessment is necessary before we outline the project, and we haven’t had reliable enough contact with our potential partners in India to determine what we might be able to contribute to the arsenic contamination issue.

At this point in time, we will shift our efforts more towards assessing the issues for a project in Peru, while maintaining email correspondence with those working in India.  If we have the man/women power when the time comes, we could potentially go forward with both projects, although at this time it is likely we will just do one.

We’re also planning a beach retreat, tentatively scheduled over next Friday and Saturday, the 18th and 19th of July.  The specific dates will depend on Adrien and Hannah’s collective work schedules.  Our goals for the retreat include getting to know each other better, talking about our mission statement and theory of change, and how we are planning on structuring the organization.  It looks to be a real wing-ding time!

This evening’s call also discussed what value there might be in advertising our presence at the moment.  Even though the consensus was on five to six core team members, up to two more than we have now, for the next few months, we all agreed there would be benefit to getting more people aware of what we’re trying to do, so that they could plug themselves in as they see fit.  This will largely consist of digital outreach, as opposed to paper flyers and such, until school begins again.

Agenda/Minutes - ODA - 10 July 2008 [Google Docs]

 

 ODA - 10 July 2008: Leaning towards Peru, beach retreat, and advertising [91:19m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (10)

MAPLE Microfinance, an initiative of the University’s International Business and Economics Club, is launching a microfinance project in Northern Uganda.  Currently, there are two students in-country with Professor Ron Severson to get the lending institution off its feet.

What I’m stoked about, however, is that those two students (whom I’ve never met) are blogging about their experiences, and the developments in the program:

• Real Far Away
• The African Times

According to a story in the Daily Emerald today, there have recently been $3.1 million in donations to support international study programs at the University of Oregon, including one by Richard and Gerri Leeds of over $1 million to “create an international travel fund in their names that will provide stipends for students interning and studying abroad. Seventy-five percent of the endowment will support interns in developing nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America.”

This is huge.  How do we connect with these potential sponsors?