Planning - for announcement and launch

We spent two full days last week working the details of our schedules in order to go live in January. There is a LOT to do from every aspect of the business. But we are making excellent progress and I believe we have narrowed things down sufficiently so that we can be successful.

We also have a couple of interns coming on to help us. We found two engineers that will help with the platform and website development. They should be on board in the next week or so. We have also identified a marketing intern that should be on in maybe two weeks. Together these folks increase our capacity and hopefully add some new ideas and creativity!

Todd has said that I am pretty into bullet lists - so in sticking with that theme, here are some of the big things that we decided in putting together our plans.

• We made (mostly) our decision on platform technology. There are two important pieces of this. First, we will use Drupal. Lots of reasons why. Biggest are that it is open source, has a large community around it, it has content management at its core, and it is based on PHP. We do have a bit more discussion around user interface technology and should have that nailed next week.

• We determined the scope of what we are calling V1.0 of the site. There will be at least three technology areas represented: Gaming; Video; and Graphics. Within each of these - we will have projects and activities supported by technology and training. The details of all of this are still to be worked!

• We have a pretty solid initial donor plan. We are not going for a large number prior to go live. We are hoping to sign up a couple to strengthen our announcement and to better prepare us for the students when they arrive.

• We have a pretty solid plan for marketing. We will be doing some experimenting, but we have a good idea of what we need to do and how we have to balance getting students to visit the site and do something with the volunteers that we need to support them.

• We have a good idea where to assign our first set of volunteers. This seems pretty trivial, but it takes real effort to first define a volunteer role and then to spend the time with them to insure that they can be successful. It is a balance that will take some time to "perfect."

This week (less some of Monday as it is a holiday) will be all about finalizing the detailed plan as well as the high level plan that we will use to insure that the different areas stay in sync, getting the volunteers on board and up to speed and to get moving on the donors.