Training Log Archive: iansmithIn the 1 days ending Mar 21, 2017: |
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Tuesday Mar 21, 2017 #
Note
Busy with methylation data. For the first fifteen weeks of my programme, in addition to taking courses, I'm rotating through three labs. I just started my third rotation, and it's with the Hoffman lab, a machine learning-heavy epigenetics group.
In OUSA areas, I'm currently working on three projects:
1. 50th anniversary fund - very generous donors allocated a bit over $30k to support broad goals of publicity and technology, mapping, and land access. When the campaign was started, there were no proposals for exactly what projects to implement, so the Board of Directors has been discussing quite a few projects to fulfill these commitments. Boris, Cristina, and I have been working on a technology proposal to fund developer time to build a website template for clubs to get reasonably professional websites with a standardized backend but a custom front end. In the long term, this project could evolve into an even more complete technology solution - with OUSA supported registration, results databases (like Eventor), Content Management Systems, publicity, and web hosting. Rather than requiring 66 different implementations, clubs - especially smaller clubs - could implement a standard template. For the 50th anniversary generally, it is very important that this not be a one-time $30k effort, but that we take what we learn from these forays and followup with projects in 2018 and 2019. Technology, marketing, and mapping have great potential to be services OUSA provides to the clubs if we can figure out the right way to do them.
2. Finance Committee - while we have long since figured out our present circumstances, we still have an accounting system that is onerous and tedious. For example, I have a job of maintaining a spreadsheet that tracks how much money each of the teams has. I literally copy paste numbers into this sheet from extracts e-mailed to me, then e-mail team managers. This clunky system is the current method to answering "how much money does a team have?" Unacceptable.
3. Communications - several projects are waiting in the wings, chiefly internal OUSA communications and coordination among OUSA-membership channels. Publicity is the elephant in the room that we're starting to address with the 50th anniversary fund.
And mini-project:
Ken and Valerie recently sent me an extract from the OUSA rankings database, which I've migrated into mySQL. I can now slice the national event start data by any number of fields to try to figure out what is working and help shape our strategy going forward. We already know that national meet attendance is down and that the age of our population of competitors is increasing.
In OUSA areas, I'm currently working on three projects:
1. 50th anniversary fund - very generous donors allocated a bit over $30k to support broad goals of publicity and technology, mapping, and land access. When the campaign was started, there were no proposals for exactly what projects to implement, so the Board of Directors has been discussing quite a few projects to fulfill these commitments. Boris, Cristina, and I have been working on a technology proposal to fund developer time to build a website template for clubs to get reasonably professional websites with a standardized backend but a custom front end. In the long term, this project could evolve into an even more complete technology solution - with OUSA supported registration, results databases (like Eventor), Content Management Systems, publicity, and web hosting. Rather than requiring 66 different implementations, clubs - especially smaller clubs - could implement a standard template. For the 50th anniversary generally, it is very important that this not be a one-time $30k effort, but that we take what we learn from these forays and followup with projects in 2018 and 2019. Technology, marketing, and mapping have great potential to be services OUSA provides to the clubs if we can figure out the right way to do them.
2. Finance Committee - while we have long since figured out our present circumstances, we still have an accounting system that is onerous and tedious. For example, I have a job of maintaining a spreadsheet that tracks how much money each of the teams has. I literally copy paste numbers into this sheet from extracts e-mailed to me, then e-mail team managers. This clunky system is the current method to answering "how much money does a team have?" Unacceptable.
3. Communications - several projects are waiting in the wings, chiefly internal OUSA communications and coordination among OUSA-membership channels. Publicity is the elephant in the room that we're starting to address with the 50th anniversary fund.
And mini-project:
Ken and Valerie recently sent me an extract from the OUSA rankings database, which I've migrated into mySQL. I can now slice the national event start data by any number of fields to try to figure out what is working and help shape our strategy going forward. We already know that national meet attendance is down and that the age of our population of competitors is increasing.