Hey All!

This has been a great semester for EWB at UCF so far: Our membership has quintupled; we now have nine dedicated officers; the founder of Engineers Without Borders - USA, Dr. Bernard Amadei, lectured here at UCF; we competed in designing a refugee camp at Gerogia Tech; last week, we had guest speaker James Crawford of TetraTech talk about Bio-Sand Filtration as an appropriate technology; next week, we will have Krissy Martinez from Citizens for Clean Energy visiting; and seven people attended the regional conference in Jacksonville where we presented on our project in Haiti.

Our program in Haiti is also progressing. It’s not often mentioned, but every time we take a trip to Haiti, we have to report to Engineers Without Borders – USA in Denver, CO. It’s a part of their quality assurance and quality control. They – justifiably so – don’t want undergraduate engineering students installing a bridge that will fall apart or a water filtration system that doesn't filter. So, EWB-USA requires that chapters submit reports before they go into the field, and after they come back. Next week, we are going to write our Post-Implementation Report from our May trip where we installed 30 bio-sand filters and 6 ferro-cement cisterns.

Reports are generally anywhere from forty to 120 pages long. They cover topics like the background of the project, the community characteristcs, budget, logistics, technical drawings, lessons learned, differences between planned and actual implementation, etc. The writing of reports is usually time-demanding and difficult. So this time, we are going to try an experimental method to finish the report. 

We regularly have thirty-five or more people at any given general meeting. So, next week, after conference travelers finish presenting about what they learned at the recent regional conference in Jacksonville, all thirty-five people or so are going to go into the Harris Computer Lab in Engineering II and write the report as a group. This is an experiment in crowd-sourcing. What is crowd-sourcing? Think Wikipedia; a large crowd of people (often anonymously) contributing to a project. We will use google docs:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRqUE6IHTEA to complete it. All of our members will be able to view and modify their sections of the report at once. All of the organization's previous reports, interviews, receipts, blog entries and other relevent documents will be available for the entire club to view and analyze. The contributing writers will use these documents to write the post-implementation report. I imagine that it will be somewhat chaotic. One person might just go through making sure that everyone is using the same font type, another might translate raw data into bullet points, and another might take that information and start writing it in complete sentences. After an hour or so, I hope a usuable report will emerge. After it is complete, it will be edited by the officers.

Wish us luck!

Andrew

06 November 2011