What We're Doing - 30 May 2008

This entire last week, we've been working on a website for the last week. We started thinking about how our website would look and function with a team of three people. Now, we have a team of 9 people working on the website! Our team is divided into three groups: content, code, design. The specific tasks of each group will be detailed below:

a) Designers - these are the people who will be making stuff on the website look nice. This includes but is not limited to making backgrounds, buttons, and other graphics for use in our website. Oh, while we're on this thread of thought, I should mention that we've decided as a team to build our website in Flash. This is not optimal in terms of remotely editing our webpage easily, but it has a great potential for looking really nice. Anyways, the design group will basically be taking care of aesthetics.

b) Coders - this group will be coding the website. Since the website is built in Flash, the main task is making objects move as desired with Action Script. This group doesn't have much to do with how the website looks as much as how the website works. I think the first task the coders will tackle is just making a basic layout with a menu bar and a box to display content.

c) Content group (no -er here) - this group decides what to put and where to put it. They'll be doing things like writing the mission statement of the Strength of We, or project descriptions and deciding where to put it on the website. While the designers decide how the website looks in terms of graphics and the coders make it work, the content group really decides what message our website will convey, thus making it a very important group.

We really can't progress in the direction of raising corporate sponsorship or anything else because we don't have the specifics of the trip yet. As far as I know, we don't know where the team is planning on going and when. This is a real hindrance because we can't just ask people for money without knowing what's going on. Oh well, the strength of we is much greater than the strength of me. We can still do this!

What We're Up To

Hey! This week, we are focusing primarily on the website layout. We had something positively beautiful from a team member, but someone from another class, who is, admittedly, the God of HTML, suggested something else, which I think that we can all live with. The idea is a "searchable database" (I'm still a little hazy on this bit) where we can have all of the Strength of We projects and have the opportunity for future Strength of We-ers to add their own projects, looking for help. I've been told it will be a Wikipedia/Creg's List combination. Right now, we don't have NEARLY enough information for a whole database, but I think that we will soon, if we can get this off the ground. 

I (Kit) am still waiting for the information that I will hopefully be receiving here soon about what exactly I should tell airlines. I'm prepared to make that call, but it seems that difficulties with the contact have arisen. Therefore, I provide help as the un-internet-savvy person of group, giving whatever I can to make it more user (and un-technologically-savvy person) friend as I can. 

Stephen is working hard and has put together an (awesome) slideshow in Flash that tells a bit about the Strength of We. I think that we're going to use it as a sort of "home" page. Or at least that was the plan this morning. By now, everything may have changed. 

David is still working to get us an estimate on what it's going to cost to send all those kids and if $150,000 is really enough. Sure, labor is great, but we need to be about to fund this clinic as well. Or at the very least, that would be incredibly cool. 

Lynn is working on some research to see if there are any past companies that have funded this kind of thing. So far, we know that Oprah has supported it with her "O Ambassadors". She is also working on things a little closer to home, fundraisers and whatnot that we can do right here, right now. 

Thanks to the team!

Accomplishments and Goals 23 May 2008

I think that we've accomplished a lot as a group this week. Since we were unable to call up the airlines that Kit had researched, Kit and I (Stephen) began working on a website for The Strength of We with the help of Cameron (Special thanks to Cameron, who's not even in our group). Cameron worked on a graphic for the website, and he made a really nice looking background image. He left an area blank that we could use to insert our content. The first piece of content that I created was a slideshow of pictures taken during intersession. So currently, all we have is a webpage with a Flash slideshow nested within a picture of trees. However, it is a start.

What we have also began doing is getting the word out to people who aren't in our class or even the people that don't go to our school. Lynn already has posted a blog on her Myspace page to show all her Myspace friends what we're doing in class. This is a really useful way to get the word out, as giving the link to a webpage to one of your friends is really easy to do. I've been spreading the word about our project to people I don't even see more than once a week, but a lot of them have given me some advice as to how we should raise the money.

There's a lot we should get done within the next week or couple of weeks. Obviously, there's the issue about contacting airline companies to see if we can get any kind of special deal or discount for a round trip to Peru. I think Darrell has finally found a contact he can reach in Peru. This is good, because it enables us to do a lot of stuff, because we didn't know when the trip would take place, exactly where it would take place, and other stuff that we should probably know before going around asking for sponsoring and funding from people. Imagine asking for donations without knowing exactly what you're doing.

Another thing that we should get done is the website. That's probably one of the most important aspects of this project; without that website, it's really hard to point potential sponsors or donor to a source of information about our projects. Also, this website would be able to function as a platform to showcase other projects that the Strength of We is doing. Something that goes along with this website is a PayPal donation box, as clicking a couple things on your computer screen is much easier than manually writing a check, sticking it in an envelope, and hoping it reaches the recipient.

I really want to add some content to the website, except we haven't really bothered with that kind of stuff yet; it's too much of a hassle. So far, we've only been focusing on "does it work?" and "how does it look?" Since that's basically thought out already, we can just move on and write the actual content.

It's not time to start looking pessimistic yet, we're still in this and we can still do it!

May 21st, 2008

Ever since we we're given this question, my group has been working very hard to do whatever we can to get sponsors and donations. We've each been tackling different tasks to reach our goal of earning $150,000. The things that we've been doing are: looking for discounts on airline tickets for the flight next year, looking for the contact information of different celebrities, looking for corporate sponsors to help with our funding, thinking of fund-raising ideas to start actually planning them and putting together the Strength of We website. To help with the advertisement and try to give people more knowledge about what we're doing, I [Lynn] have recently posted a blog on my Myspace page to inform fellow Myspace friends of what is going on and to get the word out to help raise money. What I plan on doing within the next week is contacting all the celebrities that i got contact information for and informing them about our plan [hopefully gaining some sort of donation]. We've definitely got a lot of work on our hands to accomplish our goal by April 1st of next year, but I believe if we all work together we can do it!

First Post

Just because I didn't like that there was no content on the blog, I'm going to add a post now. Besides, this can function as a test of our blog and stuff. So our group is: Kit, Lynn, David R., and Stephen.