Here it is:

As you are aware, there are serious concerns about the presence and spreading of the H1N1 (Swine Flu). As a school district, we are just as concerned and are looking to help mitigate the impact as much as possible. There have been multiple confirmed cases in our schools, and with a student population of almost 10,000 students and 1,800 employees, undoubtedly we will see more.

As you have seen in the media, a lot of the focus is now on ILI or “influenza-like illness” since it is still deemed to be too early in the flu season for symptoms to show. Consequently, many cases of “ILI” are being classified as H1N1. Most people infected with the novel H1N1 flu virus have experienced mild to moderate illness, similar to seasonal flu. Treatment for the novel H1N1 flu is the same as for the seasonal flu for most of the cases.
The district has been and remains in communication with New York State and Saratoga County Health officials, as well as with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in an effort to provide the most current information regarding H1N1 to our school community. I want to reassure you that we are closely monitoring the H1N1 situation in coordination with the aforementioned agencies.

So, with that said, I am asking for your assistance in two areas: 1) Keep a sick child at home and 2) encourage proper hygiene, especially frequent hand washing.

Protocols for those who are sick:
· Contact your physician if your child is showing signs of the flu (fever, vomiting, cough, runny nose, sneezing)
· People with flu-like symptoms are encouraged to stay home and not spread illness whether their illness has been diagnosed as a specific type of flu or not.
· Students with a fever must stay home until they are fever-free without medication for at least 24 hours.
· Avoid close contact with people who are sick, and avoid others if you are sick.

Protocols for Proper Hygiene
· Prevention remains the best strategy to continue to address the threat of H1N1.
· Wash your hands frequently and thoroughly.
· Cough or sneeze into the inside of your elbow.

Resources:
Please see the school website for the documents: “Flu Guide for Parents,” “Talking to Children About the Flu (Novel H1N1): A Parent Resource” and the “What To Do if You Get Sick.”

District Efforts:
· Hand sanitizers are readily available in multiple areas throughout school buildings and students are encouraged to used them in addition to washing hands frequently
· Custodial staff has stepped up efforts to continuously wipe down commonly touched areas (door knobs, key boards, etc.)
· Buildings and buses are being cleaned on a much more diligent scale and frequency.
· Nursing staff stands ready to see kids who may be experiencing symptoms.

School Closure
· Because H1N1 flu has spread widely throughout the U.S. and people may be contagious prior to showing symptoms, closing individual schools is a less effective way to stop the spread of H1N1 flu.
· The local health department (LHD) and the New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) or New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYCDOHMH) provide up-to-date guidance and information to help schools make sound decisions.
· Schools may decide to close temporarily if so many students, faculty, or staff are out sick that the school cannot operate properly.

More information can also be found on the district website at www.shenet.org. It is vital that we work together and remain vigilant as a school and community.

Kelly DeFeciani
Public Information Officer
Shenendehowa Central Schools

Context: A new STC Community extended an invitation to join to several STC mailing lists, and the discussion quickly turned to “Oh jeez, another tool? (Google Groups) How many is STC going to employ? What about consolidation?”

My post:

Stepping on my soapbox for a minute.

Stepping off my soapbox now.

The skinny:

Great idea, poor execution.

The fat:

When I heard about this initiative I was totally on board. A complete directory of consultants and vendors? Bring it on! Now that it’s released, I’m a bit disappointed, mainly because…

It’s a PDF.

Why oh why oh why is the STC so hung up on PDFs? Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good medium… for distributing print-ready content online. It is NOT an ideal online (primary delivery) format, which is what the guide was intended to be.

So what’s wrong with PDF? Well…

1. You need Acrobat (full or Reader) to really navigate it well. I initially pulled it up on my iPhone and all I was able to do was scroll pages. The Find and other browse features weren’t available. It was pretty much useless to me as a mobile user.
2. It’s big. It weighs in at over 3MB, which is a lot to load at once when using it online.
3. It’s laid out like a printed document. If it’s supposed to be an online guide, why is it laid out for print? I just don’t get it.
4. Search is literal. If you are relying on search to find you a good consultant in, say, Albany NY, good luck. A search for Albany will bring up every Albany listed (more than just NY) and it will omit anyone from Troy, Schenectady, and oh, I don’t know, maybe Clifton Park.
5. Magazine-style advertizing breaks up continuity of content. I know it’s a revenue generator, but given it’s supposed to be an online guide, the choice of layout and delivery coupled with full page color advertising is just flat out distracting.

I really hope the STC reconsiders the delivery format for this guide and puts it online in the form of a searchable database with a slick front end and with proper online advertising design. As of now, the guide is cumbersome and difficult to easily use, especially for mobile users.

Update

After some back and forth today I think we may be making some progress.

Apparently not all STC members knew this guide was being put together and therefore missed out on being included. The deadline to opt-in will be extended to September 23. Contact Tom Gorski to be included. Listing is free for STC members, enhanced listings come at a small premium, and there are advertising options also available. Expect to receive a formal announcement about the extension soon.

The posted PDF, as it turns out, was never search engine optimized. The new version, to be posted after the extension deadline, will be optimized so search engines can indeed find it, making it accessible to the world at large.

Unfortunately the STC currently cannot produce the directory in any format other than PDF right now (due to available money and resources) , but they do plan on a web interface for it in 2010.

That’s all for now. I’ll keep the updates rolling as I learn more.

Why double? Because not only is it time and effort to perform the workaround, but it’s also time and effort that you still need to spend doing what it was you originally planned to do. In my working history, more times than not the workaround was planned for but the impact to the overall project was not, which resulted in extreme overtime toward the end of a project or the target date getting pushed out toward the end of the project (which snowballed into the next project, then the next, and so on).

Sometimes workarounds are inevitable and must be done, but other times they tend to be used as a path of least resistance. For example, if you need tools A, B, and C to do your job and you have A, B, and D, sometimes the path of least resistance is to “bend” your work to fit A, B and D instead of just asking for and procuring product C. This is often due to cost, yet more times than not the workaround is more costly than just buying the needed tools.

Let’s say your time is worth a very modest $25/hr (for easy math purposes). You have a project to complete, but lack one of the tools you need to do your job. This tool costs $1,000. You could work around the lack of the tool, but it might take you close to a week to get it working right. In conversation a week of time seems more reasonable than a $1,000 expense, especially in these lean times, so you go for the workaround, postpone your “real work” for a week, and carry on.

Let’s look at those costs. Spending 40 hours on your workaround at your pay rate puts the cost of the workaround itself at $1,000. Well, it was a wash, right? Not quite. Yes, the workaround cost you $1,000 worth of time and effort, but now you are also $1,000 worth of time and effort behind in your project. The cost of your least-resistance workaround is now $2,000! And that’s just your cost!

I think it’s safe to assume that most of us do not work in a vacuum, so what we do usually impacts someone else along the way. More times than not it’s our project team, who may be relying on us to deliver a piece on time. In the case of writers, it could be an editor who has budgeted time based on your original schedule to edit your work for you, or it could be a build engineer who is awaiting your end-product (draft or final) to include in a software build. So what happens when they need to wait? The cost keeps rolling! I like to call this “churn”, though I’ve heard it referred to as the “corporate butterfly effect” as well. The impact of one can affect many, in which case the cost of one workaround can now grow exponentially.

Back to the example, there is no way to easily regain that lost week. If all you need to worry about is a final deliverable, you might be able to get by with working a few extra hours a week until the lost week is regained. But, if you have milestones to meet, you could be in for some very late nights immediately following your workaround period, else you risk a negative impact to others’ schedules. This means they need to change their plans, which comes with its own costs. If you are taking the full load of the workaround on your own shoulders, you sacrifice your own free time to overtime. What’s the value of your free time? And if in a long-term relationship, what’s the cost of your sanity and happiness at home?

Yes, sometimes workarounds are inevitable and the cost must be eaten. More times than not, though, the substantial cost of a workaround can be easily avoided with a lower one-time cost up front. Consider that the next time you are looking to save the company a few bucks by rolling up your sleeves. The savings could be much more than fiscal in nature.

Members are stepping up to offer hosting for the content. I sincerely hope the STC takes them up on this. It would be a shame to lose the content within these resources.

I am honestly struggling with STC’s reasoning and process for killing off these resources. This is not how you go about change. This is how you kill community and piss people off. Granted I am not a frequent user of the Forum or the wiki, but I know there are frequent users out there. My opposition and frustration stems from my belief in community building and information exchange.

In my humble, honest, and blunt opinion, STC is shooting itself in the leg. They are angering and alienating the very members they need most – the adopters of online communication and collaboration technologies. Lose them and I will bet that the STC flops about like a fish out of water for a few more years until all funding dries up, and then folds.

Rather than make decisions in a vacuum, STC needs to make better use of the knowledge and capabilities of its membership. The reason STC is in such a financial bind and losing members is likely mainly due to how it’s handled society/member relations and services.

My advice: Build communities, don’t tear them down.

Before I begin, I must thank Lou Quillio, Destry Wion, and Tony Chung for the excellent work they’ve done on this forum. They have helped me troubleshoot some past issues and given me plenty of advice over the years on topics other than the forums. A great bunch!

The sudden retirement of the Forum bothers me for several reasons.

First, it was decided in May but we’re only hearing about it now when there is nothing we can really do about it. Sounds like a power play there by the Board, and I for one don’t like it. Why wait to announce it? And why announce it so close to the shut-down date? I honestly want to know the reasoning behind this.

Second, the Forum is being shut down with no immediate replacement being offered. This seems very short-sighted, and speaks volumes that the Board found no value in having a public forum, despite the many members who have used it over the years.

Third, to shut the forum down and not capture the content herein for use in the replacement service if/when it’s available is short-sighted. The Board has decided to leave it to chance that any useful information in the Forum will be found and captured by a concerned member before taken offline.

Fourth, as Tony noted earlier in this thread, the reason given for taking the forum down is “relatively small participation”. Well, looking at the member roster I can see that there are over 600 people registered with the Forum. Not exactly a tiny member sampling there. Also noted by Tony, it’s the nature of communities – online or physical – that a fraction of the population participates, and a very small minority of participants voice themselves. Well, if participation in the solid hundreds range with a vocal minority among those participating is the reasoning for shutting down the forums, then by the same logic nearly every STC chapter and SIG should also be shut down!

Do you disagree? Great! As do I! This is why I’m so bothered by this decision to destroy the Forums!!!

Now, I know that there are changes coming to get STC out of this financial funk/crisis, but this doesn’t sound like a financially-founded decision here. How much did it cost STC to keep the Forum running? And once they are ready to get around to putting something else up, how much will that cost? And who will do it? Will Tony, Lou and Destry step up yet again to offer their knowledge, experience, time, and service? Doesn’t sound like it, but I’d like to be wrong there.

So given the announcement of the death of the STC Forum and the announcement that “several options for the next generation of a hosted service are being considered by the Board of Directors”, I will ask this:

What is being considered, what is the timeline, and who is involved?

I think all STC members have the right to know these details since this benefit is being shut down on such short notice. I’ll bet that the STC has members far more well-versed in Forum and Social Media technologies, methodologies, and implementation than the Board collectively is. Are they being sought out for advice and involvement? Hell if I know!

C’mon, STC… Wake up and smell the cinders. Yes, your house is indeed burning. Time to call upon the willing volunteers to help! Step 1 is openness. The ball’s in your court. I hope you pay fair.

Imagine you’re at a large social gathering. You float from conversation to conversation, greeting old friends and acquaintances and meeting new ones. You have some interesting conversations with some of the new people you meet, so you hand them your card to keep in touch. At the close of the evening you return home, and your answering machine and email inbox are filled with business opportunities, marketing messages, and random hellos. As you go through them you realize these are all from the people you handed your cards to. What bothers you more than the messages is the context; there is no context, and the messages are not even remotely related to what you were conversing with these people about at the gathering. They are cold-contact messages devoid of any direct meaning to you.

Read my entire article posted on SocMedia101.com where I share my take on the practice of automatically direct-messaging new Twitter followers.

So what do we do in the absence of good conferences? I posted a few questions on Twitter earlier today and received some fairly consistent feedback indicating that self-paced learning is preferred for educational growth, with a nod to local classroom events as well.

This response then sparked another question: But what about the conference feel/experience? Surely you don’t attend just to sit in a huge classroom environment hoping to learn something. I certainly don’t! I love attending conferences to meet people, to make new connections, to catch up face to face with others who I mostly converse with in text form. I go to spot trends, to pick up some sparks to hopefully kindle a new idea, to find business leads, possible candidates for hire or contract, and of course to keep my eyes open for job opportunities. Hey, anyone who says they don’t keep an eye or ear open for job leads is either lying or perhaps a little loony. But I digress…

So given the huge social melting pots that conferences are, what can possibly stand in their place during these tough economic times? We have social media at our fingertips, but how to blend that with knowledge sharing, classroom learning, presentations, vendor floors, and yes, the boozing and schmoozing that many of us look forward to in the evenings…

I welcome your thoughts. I have a few ideas brewing myself, but nothing concrete at the moment that I can articulate. I will be following up, and I am sure I’m not the only one brainstorming on this.

One argument against listservs is that they don’t provide people with control over their involvement, claiming the only options a member has are to accept list mail or unsubscribe. Of course most listservs have multiple subscription options, and email clients have filters that allow people to block mail from certain addresses or domains if they don’t want to hear from certain people. Not ideal, but not as binary as receive everything or nothing.

What are your thoughts? Do listservs still play a big role in your networking and information exchange? Do you prefer social networks like Twitter and Facebook over email for sharing information? Do you see advantages of one medium over another? Please share your thoughts!

Let’s face it, evaluating the quantitative aspects of an employee’s job performance is relatively easy for anyone to do with a bit of training, especially if you have solid project managers and team leaders in place to track progress throughout the project. Qualitative evaluation is more difficult for two main reasons. First, what exactly do you measure, and how do you go about it? Second, and perhaps most important, you really need someone who “gets it”, who has solid “soft skill” training and performance, to measure it.

What soft skills am I talking about? Very fundamental skills that are taken for granted most of the time, yet are vital for successful teamwork:

• collaboration
• teamwork
• communication
• attitude
• availability

There are others, and these can (and must) be broken down into specific inspection points, but for the most part they are taken for granted or given a superficial inspection. “Fred works well with others, is a team player, communicates appropriately, has a good attitude and can be found working at his desk most of the time.” On the surface it sounds like Fred’s on the ball, but the following fits right into that “on the ball” appraisal.

• Fred works with others when asked but seldom looks for opportunities to collaborate.
• Fred attends team meetings and brainstorming sessions when he’s not at his desk working.
• Fred uses email and phone appropriately.
• Fred shows up ready to work every day.
• Fred answers emails, the phone, IMs, and in-person questions when approached.

Fred sounds a bit average once you start digging into HOW he works, doesn’t he?

This is a very simple example. Anyone can perform that level of inspection provided they think about it. It’s the deep soft-skill inspection that really counts, and that inspection needs to happen regularly, not just at yearly performance appraisal time.

So why is any of this important? Shouldn’t it only matter how effectively they do their work and meet their deadlines? One word: morale.

Morale is an often abused buzzword in corporate culture. It’s a talking point in many management meetings and company addresses, but often is never given proper attention at the level that counts: the worker level. If you’re talking to employees about improving their morale, it’s already too late. The effects of poor qualitative performance have taken their toll, and it’s extremely hard to turn these effects around once you hit that level (though not impossible).

By conducting regular qualitative performance inspection and addressing issues as they are identified, you can ensure that your employees from ground level to the C-level are working at their most effective level possible. Further, people working at their optimal performance levels are generally happier about being at work, happier people socialize and collaborate more effectively, and a healthy social and collaborative environment is extremely conducive to a business’s success.

Want to learn more about qualitative performance measurement, or perhaps need assistance at your company? Drop me a line.