I talked to Kathleen and Greg about this on Friday, and the consensus was that this might
make a good CIC project for this semester-it has varying levels of participation, doesn't
take incredibly specialized skills, and would serve as a  nice outlet for people's
election anxiety.  I'd like to set up an election-night rideshare to the polls.

I was just posting a comment about the student group meeting at ABC and I decided to also blog it. So here it is:

Via Peter Miller:

Folks, below is a follow-up announcement
about the CTC VISTA Project which has posted updated guidelines and is
accepting applications now, with "community organizing and development" as
a special priority area.  The program is open to any nonprofit that
wants to use and develop technology resources for their organization and
the people they serve. 

Harms Elementary School Service Project
http://schools.detroit.k12.mi.us/jsp/index.jsp?Harms

Students: Kathryn Stine, Renata Ewing, Mellanye Lackey, Eva Reffell, Matt Dull, David Choi, Diane Crang, Vijay Dakshinamoorthy

Summary: On a Saturday in November 2004, eight ambitious students visited Harms Elementary School in Detroit to help configure 60 donated iBook laptops for the school’s brand new wireless network. After several hours of tinkering and trying, it became apparent that the wireless system would not assign IP addresses to the iBooks. The students valiantly called the vendor support and worked through several solutions, to no avail. Unavailable to make necessary server adjustments, the students were resigned to give up on the project. They did manage to clean up spyware and adware from several of the school’s PC laptops, but the main goal of the day could not be achieved, leaving them, and wonderful Principal Diaz, disappointed.

Students: Mark Bard, Sylvie Kahujuria, Maria Cervone, Olga Khroustaleva, Eva Reffell, Andrea Wiggins

Timeline: Fall 2004 and Winter 2005 and ongoing

Students:
Matt Dull, Matt Raw, Michael Beasley, Cari Rottenburg, Chris Petersen

Timeline: Fall 2004 and Winter 2005

Summary:

Grameen Foundation USA and World Links
http://www.gfusa.org/ and http://www.world-links.org/

Student participants: Vijay Dakshinamoorthy, Tanuka Roy, Aaron Dombrowski, Noor Ali-Hasan, Erika Doyle, Maurice Solomon, Rasika Ramesh (F04 and W05 terms)

Also, Amy Anderson (F04), Jason Rodriguez (F04) and Stephen Suryo (W05).

Technology Opportunities Program of the Department of Commerce

Here are tentative descriptions of CIC student projects that would be connected to our community informatics data archive project in partnership with TOP and others.

1. Make a mirror of the website of the largest community technology funder in the US. Site contains a db of 600+ projects which would be part of mirror. This project is part of archiving this unique community informatics history. Work on your own, but liaise with Kate Williams, Joan Durrance, and website staff at Department of Commerce. (http://www.ntia.doc.gov/top/)

2. Make a collection (electronic e.g. pdfs) of documents regarding the Technology Opportunities Program: any mentions in congressional records; testimony by TOP staff to Congress or in hearings; NY Times articles.
Index that by TOP staff. Use docs to produce a table indicating annual funding of TOP 1994-2005. Work on your own, but liaise with Kate Williams and Joan Durrance.

Each of these projects could certainly be DFEs, probably one credit (60 hours).

CICweb Development Project

CICweb Project Plan
During Jan.-April 2005, the CICweb project intends to involve 6-10 SI students in the fundamental design and development of the new CICweb site (www.si.umich.edu/cic). The immediate goal is to make the site useful to its primary audience – SI students, faculty and staff. Gearing the site to a broader public audience is the medium-term goal, something that will be planned but not necessarily implemented during this semester.