Amy and I learned from the Port minutes published in the Union Bulletin on Sunday 7/01 that the Commissioners had approved True North and EWU working on the Community Indicators Project the prior Thursday. A later note from Executive Director Jim Kuntz confirmed that notice and asked for time Thursday 7/05 to talk about the details. (He's traveling, working on a HUGE deal...)I'm anxious to get moving, so I started calling some of the likely community.
No right place to start except where you start.
Amy and I visited with Port Commissioner Schneidmiller this morning (7/02) on another subject, but the Community Indicators Project crept into the conversation. I spoke on the phone with Blue Mountain Community Foundation Executive Director Lawson Knight and organizing committee member with the Ride The Wave group, Mary Campbell. All were effusively supportive of the opportunity this project provides.
Mary invited us to attend the Riding the Wave meeting Tuesday the tenth at the Chamber of Commerce. We accepted.
I left several other messages, but it's a big vacation week with Independence Day in the middle.
Later in the week, we visited with Kevin Scribner, who works with the Watershed Alliance, and Dr. Steve VanAsdle, President of Walla Walla Community College. Friday morning, we visited with Jim Kuntz and left that meeting clear that we have not yet reached agreement on the scope of this project. There are some complications to consider. Jim gave us the go-ahead to visit with Dr. Jones at EWU, and we're scheduled to meet with him on Monday in Spokane. Also scheduling a visit to the Computer Science group in Cheney who are responsible for maintaining (and also designed) the Spokane Community Indicators site.
I connected with a technical guru in Spokane to get his take on the EWU-designed Spokane site. We'll take him along with us when we visit Cheney.
Also spoke with Ben Warner at the Jacksonville Community Indicators Initiative. He had sent a link to this blog to Mary Campbell on Monday. He has some background with the Spokane group and the Walla Walla Ride the Wave folks. JCCI hosted Dr. Jones on a visit to Jacksonville. JCCI was impressed with the architecture of the SCCI site, since Ben says that a lot of communities are building their own sites without coordinating that effort with other communities, which will use essentially the same data. Displaying similar data in various ways creates a kluge knot.
Ben also counsels that the Port should not get deeply involved in defining what data will appear on the WWCI site, but focus instead upon providing the architecture for display. The Ride the Wave folks are making progress on identifying meaningful indicators and their efforts can be leveraged.
Also spoke with Kim Zentz, now the Executive Director of SIRTI in Spokane. She was the Executive Director of the Spokane Transit Authority when the Spokane Community Indicator Initiative started, and participated in early focus groups. Her comment was that Dr. Jones was very proud of his operation, and should be. Community interest is high. Ditto with satisfaction.
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What are we doing here, visiting with people before we even have our thirty second elevator-ride blurb about this project? We're checking in: To confirm that we're on the case. To listen to what others think, feel, and believe about this opportunity. Every conversation informs us and helps us craft a more responsive effort. We're also checking out: looking for where the edges might be. We're clear that we're not clear yet, but out of this initial uncertainty something remarkable might well hatch.
Those projects confident and certain at the beginning have more to defend and much more to unlearn before their real project can ever occur.
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