Media Coordination Proposal *Revised*

I really like the idea and the proposal. Firstly I tottaly agree with the necessity of Media coordination. Secondly the amount of the money that will be adressed to the Coordinator is logical as communication and coordination demands full time work.
However I want to focus on the following:
I really can understand the content of the activities and I would like more details. The description is too general, f.e. What specific tools are going to be used? What are the other resources ( people, time)? How will sustain and maintain these practises after the 9 months? What exactly will be the outputs?
In my opinion coordination needs cooporation of many people worldwide and is essential to have a project managment team consisted of people from the e-Nable Chapters being more active and experienced.
I repeat that I really like the idea and I am 100% in to it, but I would like more details. I really don't want to be misunderstood and as others said maybe I missing sth. That's why I believe a well planed and organized description will clarify shady points.

@christiand1 -
Feel free to add in any technology suggestions via the comments section here. We currently use several services (Benchmark, Humhub, etc). The proposal aims to utilize them and bring more community members into the mix. What seems most important is to have tools that everyone can use.

@danceupon -
If the proposal is approved, we start with the first quarter, followed by the funding of the two later quarters only if the progress looks promising. As I wrote in the proposal: "After the first quarter, a progress report will allow the community to review achievements and decide whether or not to continue the funding."

The requested funds are intended to create a temporary part-time position, although I expect the initial weeks to incur more than a part-time schedule. I will be doing other research and likely working on projects outside of this proposal to make ends meet. The project will be managed by me and guided by input from all the chapters and local leaders. There is currently no funding for additional staffing. The aim of the project is to develop resources and create a system that is self-supporting. All materials created for the project would follow the same open source license as other e-NABLE projects.

@adamarmfield & @thanosmitzifiris
I gave an abbreviated project overview on Loomio but more detail for the plan and deliverables is in the attached proposal - the file on Drive is significantly longer and includes links to a timeline guide for evaluation. There are several examples of projects from earlier this year. Yes, the projects completed with chapters will help them to share their work within the community and with their individual donors.

The long-term outputs would be a system to maintain communications within the community of volunteers, a community kitchen model vs. an executive chef model. Together we will prototype a process through this project to design a regular menu - something that satisfies our needs and isn't overly complicated to prepare. I've detailed some examples in the attachment, like the newsletter, and included an example on Loomio (project detailed on Hub: https://hub.e-nable.org/s/e-nable-newsletter-project/). There are others I've proposed as well, like a chapter spotlight series which is at the bottom of the document in the 'e-NABLE PORTFOLIO SAMPLES' section (project detailed on Hub: https://hub.e-nable.org/s/chapter-spotlight/). The activities fit together to support reporting and campaigns. The components to the project will be detailed online, and the Hub allows for open feedback on the process. In the end, the output is the process and a group of experienced community members who know how to contribute to keep it going. We currently have a wonderful group of folks from chapters around the world collaborating on their research, so we'll aim to pull the comms ingredients together and try out some new recipes that could be replicated by volunteers.

Let me know if I have adequately answered your questions. Thanks for taking the time to ask!

Thank you for posting this and making a request for this Ben.

For years and years, I have asked for help in sharing the stories of our community for the blog. It grew so fast that there was no way for me to keep up with blogging on top of the numerous other things I was doing.

As @jonschull stated earlier, the $1500 a month was not just for keeping up with blogging. It also included the time I spent daily answering emails, communicating with news media, managing the social media channels, helping connect recipients and makers, helping scouts find resources or connect to volunteers who could guide them, helping volunteers who have my personal social media or email addresses, trying to blog, investigavive reporting, putting together design challenges and running them, reaching out to schools, etc. :)

I guess I would challenge this proposal on the amount being asked for as I feel like if we had some dedicated volunteers who would commit to writing at least one blog post a week or bi-weekly and we had 2-3 people who were willing to do the reporting - we could have myself and those volunteers tasked with committing to donating our time to sharing a story every 10-14 days and continue to grow the blog and get those chapter stories out there.

Volunteers who do the blogging with me or for newsletter stories that can also be included on the blog for more reach - would be committing to about 8 hours a week or less for volunteer work.

I can make whoever would like to try writing stories for the website - into editors for the blog and they can upload their content directly to the website to be reviewed by Jeremy and I as admins before posting, knowing it may be edited here and there as needed.

I can make and official "About our authors" page to give those writers proper credit on the website as well.

I feel like a lot of these tasks can be and would be picked up by volunteers who for years have been eager to help but just didn't know what was available. As we discussed at the conference this weekend, putting our "asks" out there and having people sign up to fill those roles and give them a sense of helping may be exactly what we need more than to try to find people to pay for these roles.

I think we should really try asking for help from the global community in a blog post on ETF where anyone outside of the Loomio or HUB can see our asks and step up.

There are a lot of retired teachers and various others who would love to be able to use their skills and donate some time to help. I think we should give them a chance to volunteer before we ask for money to pay a select few to do this work.

:)

@Jen Owen I agree we should again try asking for help from the global community in a blog post on ETF and elsewhere.   But that's complementary to this proposal.

I think we have learned over the years that dedicated volunteers who can/will commit to doing anything week after week is not something we can count on. (Bob Rieger and Jeremy Simon are exceptional exceptions).

Besides, this proposal is not primarily about writing stories. It's about coordinating and integrating a whole array of resources. It could bring new content to ETF but also create cross-movement processes and tools that can outlive Ben's (or any specific individual's) involvement.

We clearly need something like this, and although it might not work, Ben's proposal includes means and the opportunity for evaluating whether the results warrant continuing the cost.

I hope we give this a go. We have the money, the need, and a uniquely qualified individual whose skills complement those of the usual suspects.

Can we try a soft approachfor now and maybe roll out full in Q2 2020-Q3 2020. I think we need to talk more about roles and facilitators. At some point there needs to be a few "keyholders" to guide the groups and to moderate if needed.

@jenowen - Thanks for taking the time for such a thoughtful response. :)
The proposal is aimed to develop common resources that would help with blogging but also in other ways, like reporting and campaigns. It will consider design systems too, like icons and visual language that can be used by any chapter. Most importanty, it will only by successful if it can continue without me, so creating clear documentation on the processes that work will be as important as finding solutions. You've done a wonderful job with the storytelling on ETF, and hopefully this project will help you and your ETF volunteers as well as others sharing their stories on chapter sites and in the Hub. I totally agree that putting our "asks" out there is the best way to encourage communities to become involved. It supports decentralized contributions, and by leaning in that direction we can open the door for more voices within e-NABLE. I'm not sure that will happen without scaffolding, so I designed a process based on the experiences I had working for an NGO these last 2 years building common materials and activities between sites across 3 continents. With the vast community and talent pool within e-NABLE organizations, a system of resources seems even more valuable to help align our shared activities. Once we have a simple communications menu for the community kitchen, it's easier to pitch in, to be creative, and to find something for everyone.

@richardvandermey & @adamarmfield - There will be a quarterly report to cover the activities. It's an open process - i'll share my thoughts in the report and it will be up to the community to evaluate the results. The financial take-away is limited if you crunch the numbers, i'll need to be working alongside this project to make enough to sustain myself. I'm not retired and have no parallel business model. I've been volunteering with e-NABLE since February on communications projects and have been inspired by several of the distributed systems in place. I was encouraged to look at ways to grow more sustainable communications so I put this proposal together for something that can live on through our changing cast of characters.

@chadcoarsey1 - I sent an email. It would be great to develop media collaborations in the same way that hands are developed and shared, as a federation.

@rodrigosavage - I'll definitely take you up on your offer for the tech collabs!

@shashi - The attached proposal has details that were trimmed out of the summary on Loomio, detailing deliverables. You'll find it at the bottom as a link to Google Drive. The project spans 3 quarters with quarterly reviews and is not intended to be recurring. The purpose of the project is not to rely on one person for communications or a traditional paid position but see if we can develop the resources to maintain our audience with a stream of authors that could be moderated easily, but also pool into reporting and campaigns. Good point on the press. While most of my focus is on cultivating internal development from the e-NABLE community, the 6th step 'Marketing Models' looks at membership, donor relationships, and campaigns. Individual chapters are usually on the frontlines with the press, and since we don't have a central 'official' chapter ruling the others, I was more interested in exploring supporting materials for chapters to leverage their public press appearances from the background. Let me know if this and the attached proposal details answer your questions, and thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts and vote!

Ahoy e-NABLE community,
With the approval of the Media Coordination proposal, this week begins the first quarter of activities (continuing into January 2020 before the 1st review). For project updates, please follow the space in the Hub. I’ll be adding weekly updates, so stay tuned!
https://hub.e-nable.org/s/media-coordination-project/
Please send all related ideas, suggestions, and friendly criticisms to [email protected]

yay!

[email protected] cell: 585-738-6696 skype:jonschull

Founder,
e-NABLE ( http://e-NABLE.org ): volunteers worldwide making free, 3D printed prosthetics
Innovation Fellow, JMK Innovation Fund ( http://www.jmkfund.org/awardee/jon-schull/ )

Hello Community!

I am proud to share the progress report on the Media Coordination Project which was approved on Loomio in October. It documents my activities since mid-October. If any links are protected, please email me directly for access.

This is an effort guided by feedback. I look forward to learning from you! Please take a look and let me know if you have any questions or ideas.