Spirit Lake Consulting, Inc.
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Dr. DeMars' Blog -recent entries
08/17/07 This is a heck of a way to run a railroad
Why do we put up half-finished web pages? You can see a few here for the next couple of weeks. The reason we do this is that we are a different kind of technical company, with headquarters on the Spirit Lake Nation. Over a decade ago (I am SO old), my research was focusing on 'What is the disadvantage of disadvantaged children?'
Children of ministers and graduate students usually live in low-income homes, and yet they tend to do quite well in school and grow up, most of them, to do far better professionally and in their personal lives than do children from other low-income homes. Children who are disadvantaged are disadvantaged in more than money. They are lacking a whole host of experiences.
One experience a lot of children don't get on the reservation is the opportunity to see stockbrokers, scientists, web designers and software engineers at work. If you are from a more affluent community, you learn a larger vocabulary (words like 'affluent' because it is considered 'common' to refer to people as 'rich'). You also have more opportunities. If you think you might like to be a cardiologist or a diplomat or a trial lawyer, you probably have a relative or family friend who can advise you, who can give you some inside view of what the job is like.
We are trying to offer that on our website. We have always opened up our work in progress so youth (and adults) on the reservation can look over our shoulders as we work.
- The first step is to collect the information we want to include. This may be in our own files from articles we have written in the past, it may be articles we have gotten permission from others to include, or, as with the case of the self-advocacy pages I just uploaded, it may be written by one of our staff members particularly for this site.
- Next, I create the basic web pages, which are what I just uploaded today, editing the articles I get from the staff, or sometimes that I write myself, and adding relevant pictures and links. I don't always post these before they're done but I thought it would be good to let people see each step.
- After most of the web pages are done, I create the template. That is the menus you see on the side and across the top and the contact information on the bottom.
I apply the template to all of the pages. Upload the revised pages and there you have the first draft.- We use the pages in a workshop to teach, get feedback from our pilot group and staff and make changes. Sometimes these are really major changes.
- Although the first five steps are most of the work, maintaining the site is key. After we have what we consider our 'final' version, pages we linked to move or are taken down and we need to change the links. Sometimes there is a new law or a new program funded and we need to change the information on the page. This last step is often forgotten, but it is really important. There are millions of sites out there that someone put up and forgot about. I am sure you have come across some yourself. We use a program called Xenu to automatically check the links. When your site has thousands of pages, like ours does, it is a zillion times faster than doing it manually.
So, there you have it, a bird's eye view of how to create a new section of a website.
08/13/07 "Indianonish" and other recent lessons
We just finished our second report on the RUSH Project. Dr. Longie had this to say,
At the time of writing the RUSH proposal I mistakenly thought I could waltz into a reservation, conduct a presentation, collect surveys, conduct the interviews... all in one visit. Boy, was I mistaken.
You might think from that quote that our project is not having great success. You would be mistaken. It may turn out that a major accomplishment of RUSH, as much as the information we distribute to communities and the research results we publish, will be what we learn about effective processes.
Okay, I know that sounds like a line from one of those awful management training seminars and you expect it to be followed by one of those sentences that makes no sense but has a lot of important-sounding words. "With what we have learned about effective processes we will be organizing our steering committee to engage in world class service that will delight our customers."
It's not like that. We have actually learned a lot about how people on reservations use media, and I believe our findings will blow up a lot of stereotypes. For one thing, we have found that just as many people on the reservations surveyed surf the Internet daily (38%) as read a newspaper daily (39%). We have also greatly increased the speed with which we are collecting data by distributing surveys at pow-wows. We are comparing the people who attend pow-wows with our sample of people selected from a household survey on the reservation to see what significant differences there are. So far, we have found no differences in age or education, but we have found that more men were willing to complete the surveys at pow-wows than during the home surveys. Not sure why that is. Anyone with a suggestion, feel free to email me.
We have completed our module on Special Education Rights, designed to help parents learn what they can do to insure their children gets the best possible education. We have included our own personal opinions, such as,
"The three-year IEP is a stupid idea.
Your child can be assessed less often than every three years if you give permission. Pay close attention.. DO NOT GIVE PERMISSION!!"
We call them as we see them. These are stupid ideas, plain and simple. Talking around that fact so we don't offend anyone doesn't seem the best way to benefit the students with disabilities and their families we intend to serve.
As far as Dr. Longie's statement on not being able to waltz on to a reservation and have instant cooperation, that's true. People have been sold a bill of goods often enough that they are rightfully skeptical of anyone who claims to be there to help. They wonder how you can claim to know what they need when you don't even know them at all. Parents are busy. They have children to raise, errands to run, jobs to do and any training we offer is just the last thing on a long list of items they need to get done in a day.
If we really think our training is worthwhile (and we do), what are we going to do about that? Well, we are going to use the results of our research so far, advertise on the radio and our website, try to use those media to answer the questions parents have, and keep showing up on all those reservations. There is a story I have heard several times, sometimes about working on a reservation, sometimes about the story is set in Appalachia, but it goes like this.
"A young woman just out of college was assigned to the community by social services. Since many of the families lived far from the nearest town, she would drive down the gravel roads to their homes, knock on the door and explain to the family what her agency offered. One family had several children, no adult was employed, so she knew someone was bound to be home. Yet, each time she went to the house, even though she could hear people moving around inside, no one answered the door. The fourth time she went to visit, the father opened the door and invited her in. She worked with the family for a long time after that, and got to know them fairly well. One day she asked why they had not let her in the first three times she came to see them. The answer was,
We figured you were just like all those other people who said they wanted to help us and then went away without doing anything after they got their government numbers or whatever they wanted. But you, after you came back for the fourth time, we figured you was really serious."
So, that is why Dr. Longie will be going back again to the reservations where we offered training the last quarter. We are really serious.