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More on Letters of Support: Documentation

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In the Department of Amplification:

After submitting my grant application to the USDA, they bounced back a couple of items related to letters of support. Letter writers who were offering in-kind matches did not provide enough detail in their letter to effectively document the monetary value of what were offering.

1. In the first case, a professor was offering in-kind consulting services that were valued at $100 per hour. The grantor pushed back saying…how is the $100 an hour calculated? There are a couple ways this could be wired up, but the most honest is probably to take the professors yearly salary, plus the fringe benefit rate which is applied to the salary, and then divide that by the number or working hours that represents. So, let’s say the professor is on a nine-month contract (i.e. she gets the summer off, but also isn’t paid for summer), and she earns $125,000. The “fringe rate” is calculated at 42%. This is a typical percentage. Do the math on your own salary, and you may find that you end up in similar situation. Fringe includes vacation, sick days, social security (both the employer and the employee’s portion), and federal and state taxes and medicare, and any other fringe benefits that normally go into the calculation. 42% of $125,000 is $52,500 meaning that the full cost of the employee, salary plus benefits is calculated at $177,500. ( I know, we should all be so lucky, right?).

Divide $177,500 by the number of hours (9 months at 35 hours per week = 1260 hours)….which gives us an hourly rate of $141.

From the funder’s viewpoint, the professor is actually contributing their time at a rate of $141 / hour. From the college’s viewpoint, the $100 was really just a figure pulled out of the air, they may or may not actually expect that the professor is going to use a portion of their 1260 working hours as an in-kind contribution to our organization. My guess is the above kind of calculation would be sufficient to document this contribution to a federal agency and it is certainly more precise than the $100 figure.

Another way to quote this is by percentage of FTE (full-time-equivalency). Perhaps the college allows the professor to contribute up to 5% of the FTE to non-college activities and that the professor is planning to contribute 4% to your organization. 4% of $177,500 is $7100 which could be used for the value.

2. In the second case, a member organization is giving our non-profit office space, use of a copier, wi-fi access, etc. They valued this at $1250 a month or $15,000 per year. The funder asked how they came up with that figure… and so additional details were supplied including the square footage of the office space, the percentage of the donated space versus the full square footage of their building, the cost of wi-fi, prorated, etc.

Netbooks or Laptops for Classroom Computers

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When asked about Netbooks as opposed to Laptops for equipping a classroom, I replied:

re: Netbooks:

Con:
1. At $650 each, a full-fledged laptop with CD ROM is going to be only marginally more expensive than a NetBook with external peripherals
2. A Netbook will probably be close to $400.00, less expensive by itself, but when adding CD-ROMS, and maybe memory, etc, the price will rise.
3. Both Rosetta Stone (English language software) and several other programs, lilke Mavis Beacon, (a typing tutor program) require the external CD Drive. It is also a pain to install other software without one.
4. If you are working collaboratively, it will be difficult for two people to see what is on a netbook screen at the same time.
5. The netbooks are smaller and “cuter”, and perhaps easier to conceal and therefore more attractive to “borrow”. They are tiny!
6. NB keyboards tend to be quite small…. considerably smaller than a regular laptop. They also often have weird keystroke combinations to substitute for the lack of extra keys.
7. Many are limited to 1Meg of RAM, and therefore end up running a pretty limited version of Windows, either XP or Win 7 “home”, and will be slower.
8. A conventional laptop is more likely to be closer to the kind of machine that most students will have contact with, in the workplace, at home, or at school. The NetBooks, are great supplementary machines; good for eMailing and web surfing with a wireless connection in Starbucks….less satisfactory for things like word- processing a paper.
Pros:
Small and lightweight. Easy to carry around in bulk, if you’re going to the library, for example and need to schlep all six machines.
Now, what *would* be very cool….would be a dedicated computer literacy project using NetBooks for, say, at-risk teenagers or young adults, where they actually get to keep the Netbook if they complete the program, and where the emphasis wouldn’t be on Microsoft Office, or R.S., but simply on becoming a “connected person”… This would allow for less conventional software, and even really inexpensive computers, in the $299 range.
Wireless router and printer shouldn’t be an issue. Routers are about $75.00. Printers: the usual caveats apply, laser is better than ink jet.. and Cannon and HP are recommended printer brands. (you can get parts for them as opposed to say, Brother.)
In short: Absent really convincing evidence to the contrary, I would recommend, “boring and conventional” for the classroom and keep the netbook idea in reserve for a fully-funded foundation project.

Twitter Resources

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Because they have published an open API, Twitter has spawned a slewof applications. Here is a list of applications that appear in The Twitter Book by O’Reilly.

Twitter Shrinkers

140it will trim down your post to conform to the 140 character limit.

Bit.ly will shrink a long URL, and will also allow you track the clickthroughs

is.gd shrinks down a URL really tightly, but does not allow tracking

Twi.bz shrinks down a URL, but preserves the underlying domain.

So, let’s see what these services would produce. Let’s say I’m posting a tweet that points to a blog entry at http://www.techfornonprofits.com…. Here is the original URL:

http://www.techfornonprofits.com/blogger/2010/01/sample-grant-policies-and-procedures.html

Bit.ly shrinks this to: http://bit.ly/4DKNhb

is.gd shrinks this to: http://is.gd/72s3T As they say, 72 characters shorter!

Twi.bz shrinks this to: http://techfornonprofits.twi.bz/a Indeed it preserves the domain name.

Searches and Trends

http://search.twitter.com

http://hashtags.org

http://tagal.us

http://whatthetrend.com

http://monitter.com allows you to monitor multiple topics in realtime.

http://tweetmeme.com
monitors links posted in Twitter, and ranks them by popularity in real time.

Clients

http://www.twhirl.org/

http://tweetdeck.com/

Combination of Client + Search + Stats

http://www.twitscoop.com
Still trying to figure this out. Check out the interactive topic cloud.

http://twopular.com/ shows trending topics over various time spans

Organize a Tweetup
http://twtvite.com/

Europe’s Promise

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In the concluding chapter of Europe’s Promise by Stephen Hill the author describes a conversation that he has with a native Austrian in a Salzburg cafe.

“As an American, I wonder if you can even imagine what it must be like to live in a country where every person has health care. And a decent retirement. And day care, parental leave, sick leave, education, vacation, job retraining. for every plumber, carpenter, taxi driver, waitress, executive, sales clerk, scientist, musician, poet, nurse, of all ages, income, race, sex, whatever, not worrying about those basic arrangements. Can you imagine what that is like?”

At first I didn’t see where he was going with this. He spoke with such passion to point out the obvious. But then suddenly the lightbulb went on. I had never really thought about it before: what impact does it have on an individual’s psyche–and by extension on all of society and our feeling of extended family, which is after all the “sticky glue” that holds us all together–to know that certain basics will always be taken care of because you are a stakeholding member of that society, entitled to certain benefits? Certainly it is hard for an American, raised as an atomized individual in the “ownership” (i.e., “on your own”) society to step into the shoes of a European and imagine what that sense of security and support must feel like and how it affects your overall outlook.
“In America you are so rich” he said. “Why don’t you have these things for your people?”

We are watching yet another slipping away of health care reform, for the simple reason that a single Republican has replaced the former Senator of Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy’s Democratic seat in the U.S. Senate. This lowers the Democratic majority from 60% to 59% and yet the Democrats refuse to override arcane rules of their own chamber to push through a health care reform bill. Europe is so far ahead of us in health care and other basic life support, that we are beginning to look more like a third-rate country. With the current state of health care we really are a third-rate country; paying double for health outcomes that put us somewhere below Slovenia.

Hill’s book describes several differences in European outlook and institutions:
1. Health care, shorter work-weeks, double vacation times, paid day-care, paid maternity leave, paid paternity leave, national retirement plans that pay double or triple what our social-security system pays … , no-cost or very low cost university education.
2. Mandatory worker representation on corporate boards. (Europe has 170 Fortune 500 companies compared with 140 in the U.S.)
3. Publicly financed election campaigns. Proportional representation in their legislatures with multiple parties combining in coalitions. There are no “safe seats”, or gerrymandered districts. Senators cannot hold entire political agendas hostage while they lobby for perks that enrich their own state, or more likely their corporate contributors. And of course our congress and many government officials already have a government health-care plan.
4. A ten year or more advance on energy policy. (20% of Germany’s energy production will be renewable by 2015).
5. An order-of-magnitude narrower gap between the lowest wage earner and the highest salary earner.
The book gives voice to the uneasy notion that after the disaster of the Bush/Cheney years, the Obama revival is petering out. Maybe it never got started after Obama backed down on virtually every campaign promise and every opportunity for real reform.
I’m asking myself, how bad does it have to get?
After Hurricane Katrina, I thought we will definitely fix the bureaucratic policies and bungling so that New Orleans will be rebuilt.
After the bank bailouts, I thought we would definitely re-regulate the banks, re-separating investment banking from retail banking. A reasonable person might have expected that the notion of multi-million dollar bonuses for staff of bailed out banks would be considered an obscenity, and that banks would be required to restructure predatory mortgage loans.
After the collapse of the auto industry, you might think we’d start to re-think the stupid tax incentives that created the SUV, that we’d begin taxing gasoline at a reasonable rate to incentivize people to buy more efficient vehicles and to subsidize new technology, and that we’d install new management in the Detroit Big Three, (or, frankly, retool the idle factories to create mass-transit vehicles, solar cells, and windmills). After all the taxpayer “bought” those factories.
I thought maybe we’d throw in the towel in Afghanistan and Iraq and begin to re-think our failed military strategy and the whole purpose of spending ever-increasing billions each year on a military, where we can’t even field more than a couple hundred thousand soldiers, at a million dollars per year at a pop.
I thought we’d close the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay. Surely this is one of the most medieval legacies of the Bush/Cheney years, and it is a disgrace.
The very good news, however, is that Europe’s Promise points out, with dozens of examples, how a very complex multi-cultural society can achieve consensus and create a better life for ordinary citizens. Having lived in both Europe in Canada in years past, and with regular contact with family in the “old country”, I agree that life there seems much as described in the book, and that there are many elements that should be included in a 21st century version of the American Dream.

Backing Up in 2010 Part I

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I’m coming into an organization with fresh eyes, and wondering about the whole issue of backup. Currently they have a massive Dell server with RAID 5 drives at the headquarters. There are about five administrative staff, and four teaching staff at headquarters.
Each of five field offices has 1-2 staff. Each staff person has their own desktop machine. Some have personal laptops which they use when away from the office. Data is stored on thumb drives when transferred between the laptops and the desktops.
Headquarters has an HP DAT backup system with DAT tapes that back up the data directories on the storage. Assuming each headquarters staff uses their designated storage folder on the server, they can be assured that their data is being backed up. Backups occur at the end of each day. There are two Friday tapes. One of these is stored offsite at the end of the week. The staff is trained and comfortable with this arrangement.
In the field offices, a previous regime installed little USB hard drives which are attached to each staffer’s PC. An automatic backup program periodically copies the data directory to the hard drive.
The current arrangement has several issues:
  • Field office data never gets formally transferred to headquarters. Although there is much back and forth via eMail attachments, the contents of the field office hard drives never get transferred.
  • Backup is not offsite. If a fire occurs in the field office, it is probable that all the data will be destroyed and unrecoverable. Guess what just happened a month ago with one of the field offices?
  • EMail is not backed up.
    • So, the question is, how can we protect ourselves from ourselves?, or in other words, automatically secure all of our data in a somewhat undisciplined organization with a comprehensive yet unobtrusive backup system?