Hardware Grants Summary

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Hardware Grants Summary

Hardware Grants: How A Grant Becomes A Reality

A hardware grant begins when an organization requests a grant using an online form. As soon as it is completed the coordinator and volunteers are alerted to its existence. Grants are usually processed within a week, though the outside limit is two weeks. The vast majority of hardware grants are approved. For a grant to be rejected there has to be a good reason: it was a for-profit organization or an individual, we don't have or don't grant the technology that they need, they are located abroad, or something seems really off. Grants are approved by an individual, either the coordinator or a volunteer, and not by committee as was done in the past. Any "fishy" incoming grants should be left for or picked up in consultation with the coordinator. If volunteers ever have questions about a grant, they should contact the coordinator. There are two main steps to our screening process: the first is to verify that the organization is legitimate and eligible and the second is to verify that the contact is associated with the organization. The second is a recent addition after a few problems with unauthorized people using an organization's name to acquire hardware.

Once a Hardware Grant is approved, it is tracked using RT. The grant shepherd is responsible for communicating with the grant recipient, informing them that they are approved, resolving unclear requests, and for gathering the necessary hardware. For some types of hardware, there are wait lists. Currently we have wait lists for laptops, printers, A/V items, and unicorn items. We used to have waitlist for Mac items, and LCDs and CRTs, but current supply means that we don't need them right now. The wait for a laptop is 3.5 to 4 months. Organizations can only receive up to 3 laptops every 3 months. Once all the items are ready, the grant shepherd contacts the representative from the organization to set up a pick up time. While we encourage grantees to come in when their shepherd is available, they can also come during any time that the coordinator is available. Sometimes grantees just show up, but this hasn't been a huge problem recently. After the items have been disbursed, the shepherd notes this in the database and in RT.

Three months after a ticket is closed, a grant recipient will receive a follow up survey. This survey is to alert us to any problems that they may be having, to help us improve our process, and to gather testimonials and contact information for PR purposes. We now have a question in the grant application that informs the recipient that the survey is required. It's a short survey and doesn't take very long.

Things You Will Need To Know How To Do

  • Build computers. Do the build program.
  • Use e-mail. Hopefully you already know how to do this.
  • Enter contacts and disbursements into the database.
  • Use Google Calendar to update the intern schedule and schedule pick ups.
  • Use Wordpress to make weekly blog posts about grants we disbursed.
  • Use Wordpress to update the grant application. www.freegeek.org/grants/apply
  • Use Wordpress to update the grant webpage. www.freegeek.org/grants
  • Use Email/Mailman to moderate grants and hardware grants tickets lists.
  • Use the wiki to update documentation about grants including the chart on what can and cannot grant out.
  • Access Grant and Hardware Grants Tickets moderator interface (ooh big word) to manage lists.

Logins And Accounts You Will Need

  • Free Geek e-mail
  • Gmail (to manage calendars, documents and I strongly advise you forward your e-mail to Gmail. The hardware grant tickets list is a high traffic list.)
  • RT
  • Database
  • Wiki account
  • Lime Survey (your username will be sophia as limeservice does not allow you to transfer surveys from one user to another).
  • Wordpress
  • Moderator position/subscription to grants and hardware grants tickets lists
  • Talon account and access to hardware grants file.

Using LimeSurvey to send out 3 month Check Up Survey and edit the survey

1. Create a spreadsheet with 3 columns: firstname, lastname, email, attribute_1.

2. Do a search on RT for all tickets resolved 3 months ago, e.g. if it is September, you are going to do a search for all the tickets resolved in June. Get someone experienced with RT to show you how to do this.

3. Go through each ticket. 3a. See if we granted them anything or if it was resolved for some other reason, e.g. not an eligible organization. 3b. If we granted them something, put the first name of the contact in the firstname column, last name in lastname, e-mail in email and organization name in attribute_1.

4. Save the spreadsheet as a CSV file.

5. Login in Limeservice. Select "3 month follow up survey". Select "token management" (icon looks like a bunch of people). Select "upload from CSV file". If this is successful, then select "generate tokens" (icon looks like a gear). Select "send an e-mail invite" (icon is one of a few that look like envelopes).

Maintaining the Three Month Check-In Survey spreadsheet

This should be done once a month. Preferably when you are compiling the new list of recipients to be sent the survey. (See above.)

1. Login in to talon. Ask someone who knows their way around the Free Geek wiki/server/maillist/RT forest to help you with this.

2. Go to usr/local/hardwaregrants

3. Open spreadsheet.

4. Login into Limeservice. Select "Hardware Grants Three Month Check-In Survey". Select "Browse Responses For This Survey" (icon looks like a piece of paper with a magnifying glass). Select "Display Responses" (sheet of paper icon).

5. Copy all of the new responses (ones that aren't already in the spreadsheet) and paste them into the bottom rows of the spreadsheet. Select a color to distinguish this month's responses from the other month's. Label this new section of the survey. Italicize any rows that represent a grant recipient that said we could not use their responses for PR purposes.

6. Follow up with an recipients who reported having issues with their computers.

The Volunteer Experience

The hardware grant department depends greatly on highly skilled volunteers to process the current volume of grants. I currently have about 40 grants, with the remaining 70 being split between the 4 members of the hardware grants team. Being a good hardware grants volunteer is not easy; it takes both a technical skill set, an ease with people, professional communication skills, and a lot of patience with processes that are necessary to keep things organized.

All hardware grants volunteers are required to go through the Build program. In addition to improving the volunteer's knowledge of hardware, having volunteers go through the Build program gives Free Geek and the volunteer a chance to get to know each other and a chance for staff to assess whether or not a particular volunteer would be an asset to the Grants team. Once a volunteer completes the Build program, they sit down with the Grants Coordinator for a short interview. This gives the Grants Coordinator a chance to see if the volunteer would be a good fit; it is also an important time to discuss what volunteering for Hardware Grants is like. While it is a fun and rewarding position, it requires volunteers to complete a lot of documentation, and keep track of many details, and a lot of time is spent working on a computer.

Three of the volunteers on our current team have been doing this for a long time, while one is a recent addition. The level of support each volunteer needs and in what capacity they need it varies significantly. As volunteering for Grants usually attracts people that want to help people, Grant volunteers tend to be very social. They enjoy chatting with each other and the Coordinator. They expect the Coordinator to get to know them and to take time to talk to them. This is very important. Volunteers (like most human beings) like it when their feedback on the grants program is solicited, listened to, and, if appropriate, acted on. Earlier this year, I conducted formal check-ins with all of my volunteers about their experience and the future they envisioned for Hardware Grants; one volunteer expressed that, while gift certificates and pizza are nice, this type of interaction made him feel most appreciated.

Current Issues

We are trying to work with PPS IT to take a sample of some of the common models donated by the City of Portland and test them with PPS's disk image. If the tests are successful, then we can grant PPS schools the models that we tested. The last time I e-mailed with Jed Gilchrist, Head of PPS IT, he said to get back in touch with them after September 20, when the IT staff will be done with the start-of-school chaos.

We are also working with Oxford Houses of Oregon to determine a legitimate process of verification for Oxford Houses. There is a ticket about this in RT.

Home bound grants--this is something that we were looking into several months ago, but it was panned as Free Geek was too busy to start a new program. There is a wiki page about what this might look like in the Hardware Grants Category.

Artist grants--we currently have one continuous artist grant for Brian Mock, who makes sculptures out of small pieces of metal. When he comes by, we generally take him around System Eval, the Build Room, and Recycling to gather any small pieces of metal (mostly screws) that he wants. Read the wiki page on Artists Grants for more information on why we have artist grants. N.B. Requests from Film and TV companies go through Bulk Sales

The Future

Outreach

At this time, our main channels of outreach are the Free Geek tour, tabling events, and word-of-mouth. I have not pursued an aggressive outreach strategy, because we haven't really had the necessary materials to meet the current demand. We definitely have more than enough systems, but it's only in the past few months that the available number of LCDs has come close to meeting demand. And demand, in this case, is still regulated as we are only giving away 5 LCDs every three months per organization. If we started giving away unlimited numbers, I don't know how long the supply would last. Laptops are an entirely different story: we know that the demand from the organizations that currently know about us is much, much higher than the number of laptops we are able to refurbish for the grants program.

Whether or not we should instate more active outreach activities depends greatly on the supply of available hardware. We are currently working on trying to up the number of laptops we receive, but this is going to take a while, and there is also a potential problem with generating the human capacity to refurbish all of the those laptops. So, having enough laptops to justify outreach seems like it will be a ways off. If, however, the number of LCDs available to grants continues to rise (and this could be affected if we up the Freekbox specs to include LCDs), it may make sense to start pursuing some outreach.

This is a really confusing section. I apologize.--Elizabethwt 18:00, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

More Ubuntu Education and Support

Free and open source software is a great asset for many non-profits and other organizations that get computers from our Grants program. These organizations tend to be small and have limited budgets.

Anti-Discrimination Criteria?

One thing that is noticeably absent from our screening process is that we don't judge organizations based on their political or social values. This allows us to serve a diverse population, but it also seems like somewhere we would have to draw the line. For example, would we grant to Exodus International, an organization that provides "help for leaving homosexuality"? This hasn't come up yet, but it's an interesting question.

Historically solved by shepherd selection

Differing opinions on this within Free Geek

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