Update on Project Activities
We had our weekly conference call with Diane where we updated her on our progress. We wrote up survey and interview questions for students and teachers as well as a blurb for the Challenge’s newsletter. We sent our questions to Diane so she could look over them and give us feedback. She thought the questions were great overall and gave us a few corrections to make as well. The team has been in contact with Ms. Thwaite from La Entrada Middle School for our teacher interview, and we are very close to locking a date for our meeting. Contacting Mr. Powell from Menlo Atherton High School has been a challenge, but we hope he’ll respond to us soon. What We Observed and Learned This week, we began to research social media strategies related to Instagram in hopes of revitalizing the Menlo Spark Instagram page. Creating and maintaining a recognizable color theme is important to drive traffic onto an Instagram account. Brands with a huge follower base tend to cultivate some sort of color scheme with their posts to create a mood and/or a sense of visual cohesiveness. For the Menlo Spark page, since the organization is concerned with the environment and sustainability, maybe using colors commonly associated with those topics, such as green (“going green”) and blue, could act as a starting point. When using hashtags, it is recommended to use a mixture of popular and non-popular hashtags; a single post will get lost very quickly on a popular hashtag page, whereas a post will get no exposure with a non-popular hashtag because few individuals will actually be checking the page itself. Additionally, researching banned hashtags is extremely important to prevent one’s account from being accidentally banned or marked as a spam account. Some common hashtags, including #tgif, and other random ones, such as #brain and #publicrelations, have been banned due to the nature of content posted on these hashtag pages (usually inappropriate or flagged). If an account accidentally uses a banned hashtag in conjunction with other hashtags, their post will not appear on any of the other hashtag pages, which drastically reduces engagement. When creating hashtag clusters for posting, changing up the hashtags used between each post is key to distinguish yourself from a potential bot or spam account. The first posts could use about 10-15 hashtags, for example, and in the future be increased to about 20-25 (never going over 30, which is the maximum allowed). It is also useful to post hashtags in your caption rather than in a separate comment, which can be perceived as bot-like behavior. The teacher interview questions are focused on how the teacher felt running the Challenge in their classes, how to increase student engagement in sustainable behavior, finding what motivates students to participate, and what areas of the Challenge need improvement. Diane felt that asking teachers to see if they could get us in contact with a family for our success story would be asking them to overstep their boundaries. Therefore, we won’t ask Ms. Thwaite or Mr. Powell to do that. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward Moving forward into next week, we plan on having at least one teacher interview. We are planning on meeting Ms. Thwaite on Monday afternoon, and we’ll know if the meeting time and date are definitive once she gets back to us on her availability. We also hope to hear back from Mr. Powell. By now, we’ve sent three emails asking to see if he’ll meet us, but we have received no response from him yet. During our conference call on Wednesday, Diane said she could help in arranging that meeting. We also plan on using the what we have learned from literature on fostering sustainable behavior when we go out on the field in the coming weeks to survey students and families in Menlo Park. Update on Project Activities
On Tuesday Jonathan sent us the draft HTMA along with some comments from one of the Housing staff members. Each of us individually read through the HTMA and made annotations. Our schedules haven’t lined up very well this week due to midterms but we will meet Saturday morning to discuss our notes. Jonathan also sent us the scanned copies of the raw data collected at the visioning session from last week. The visioning session incorporated residential voices by having residents brainstorm solutions on giant sheets of paper. These documents were collected by Jonathan’s team, and copies of those documents were shared with us. We are concurrently reviewing those suggestions and the HTMA to determine the language necessary to to communicate the findings in the HTMA to the general Alisal community. Our updated version is due November 16th. We will also meet to discuss this data, review the notes, and make some general comparisons, then create an action plan to make more specific comparisons to see where discrepancies lie within the HTMA document. We were unable to contact Jonathan this week due to our busy schedules, but when we decide upon a convenient time we will contact him so that we understand which specific parts of the HTMA document, if any, the organization wants us to translate. Until then we will pick parts we feel are the most significant areas in the HTMA, based on what we observed at the visioning session, and Jackelyn will start translating them after we make our preliminary review of the document. We decided to split up the work in this way: First we will all work together to summarize the HTMA document. Once we have the summary in English, Jackelyn will translate the HTMA summary. Celine and Jennah will check over the translation and make any edits or suggestions for technical things like grammar and more important things like language use, then we will ask another student to check it as well for added perspective. We were unable to speak with Carol McKibben this week because of conflicting schedules but will attempt to reschedule again the week after the next. We are also going to schedule to meet with Andrea Jany. What We Observed and Learned This week we spent time reviewing the HTMA document. It’s a technical document but we were tasked with making it accessible to the Alisal community. We are deciding how to best split up the document so that we can all contribute equally. The three of us have varying degrees of expertise in language, writing, editing, and graphic design skills, and we want each person to contribute depending on their strengths. Something else that we are grappling with is how to make the HTMA as accessible as possible. Our original task was to translate the document into Spanish, but is that the accommodation that needs to be made? Alisal is a predominately low-income community, but a lot of technical jargon is being thrown around in this doc. We are discussing how we can best convey the ideas presented in the document, with terms such as “rent control” commonly discussed in academia and community organizations but not necessarily a word easily translatable in Spanish by colloquial terms. For example, we recall that at the workgroup session we attended in Salinas, these types of terms were usually triggers of “code-switching,” where bilingual residents slip in English words like “rent control” but monolingual Spanish speakers may not fully understand this idea. Likewise, gentrification and displacement are also big concepts casually discussed in academic settings, but these ideas are not very accessible in Spanish-speaking communities. The direct translation is gentrificación, however conveying the actual meaning and connotation behind that word is not as easy as a simple translation. For these reasons, we realize we have to be critical with the language we use when translating this document. We have decided upon first reviewing the document, annotating the information and synthesizing the information in English, then translating into Spanish. Since we all have the background and vocabulary that allows us to understand and analyze this kind of policy information, we would be used to using vocabulary like “gentrification,” and we most likely will when making annotations because that is how we understand these ideas. However, we need to keep in mind that for our process of translation, we need to come up with ways to simplifying the language so that the community can understand, while keeping the full meaning and context of the ideas conveyed. These dynamics can not be lost in translation because simplifying and minimizing the weight of these ideas does not serve this community justly. We will provide definitions to terms in order to empower residents by giving them the words they need to express their ideas, needs and desires. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward Moving forward we will meet to discuss our annotations and create a summary of the HTMA in English. Jackelyn will translate the HTMA summary and Celine and Jennah will check over this. This was decided because Jackelyn does not have experience creating infographics while Celine and Jennah do. We want to divide our work evenly while making the best use of our respective skills and knowledge. In the weeks coming up Jennah and Celine will be discussing layout designs and ways to design an infographic that will best be interesting, relevant, and accessible to the community we are presenting to. We are inspired in part by the presentations by Mei Lum and Diane Wong on the ways they presented information to their community, and presentations by Deland Chan on community meetings about transportation and infrastructure. We remember specific comments about text being too small for elders and information being too technical for the general community. These are all concepts we are going to take into account. We will talk to Jonathan this upcoming Tuesday to get a clearer idea of what parts of the HTMA he wants us to translate, and what kind of infographic he expects or what other types of media we are able to create and present. Another question we have is whether our team budget is going towards printing the infographic, because we also need to know how many copies we would need to make or if the City of Salinas will produce print copies for their workgroup meeting. We will also discuss with him the summary we made thus far and get his recommendations. We will try to meet with Carol for more background on Alisal so we know more about the sensitivities the community may have. We will meet with Andrea Jany to get more guidance on the interviewing process. We got some contacts to interview at the visioning session that we will contact once we have a solid plan for the interviews. We will interview on November 16th and we will have to do more planning to develop strategies. Update on Project Activities
The team did not meet this week outside of class, but we came into this week with a lot of insight and direction as to what information and data we need to acquire in order to move our project forward. Janice suggested that we use specific streets in District 6 and analyze whether the LTS biking metric can help improve these streets and make them safer for bikers as well as pedestrians. As a group, we have been researching the applications of LTS to intersections to get an idea of what would be considered a safe intersection versus an unsafe intersection. We have also been gathering information from other bikeability metrics, such as Long Beach and Copenhagen, in order to get an idea of what actually works and what is actually a reachable improvement for intersections in San Francisco specifically, since San Francisco has many physical features that make applying LTS fairly difficult. Since our meeting with David from the Stanford Geospatial Center on Friday, we have been searching for mapping data that would be useful for the creation of our GIS map. Stanley and Derek have put together a rough dataset with all pertinent street and intersection information critical for completing our map. Hopefully, SFMTA gets back to us with mapping data on intersection activity that would be applicable to evaluating whether an intersection has suitable characteristics for the amount of traffic fluctuating through it. David also shared a few links with us that use Carto and AGO as a guide for web mapping our data that we find. Plus a tutorial on how to get the street intersections from the street line data. What We Learned and Observed I think that the most important thing we learned and observed this week was that making our GIS map is the easy portion of the project. The most challenging component is finding legitimate data that we can actually apply to our project. There are many different sets of data about biking routes and improvement of overall biking comfortability, so it is challenging to find the exact data we need to mold our GIS map. Now that we have some specific direction from Janice regarding what information we need to acquire, gathering information and data have become a lot more feasible for the group. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward At this point, we have successfully divided up the research that each group member will do regarding the pitfalls of LTS and are currently filling out our final PowerPoint and final scope of work. Since we have a draft of a GIS map, we can now try to incorporate other interactive features within our map and make it more user friendly and understandable for audiences. Getting all of the information and data together now will make forming our final draft of the project a lot easier. Considering our pace on completing the project was slow at first because of how broad our topic is, finally narrowing down the things we need to research will allow for faster understanding and direction for finalizing our project deliverables. Update on Project Activities
This week, we are moving forward on the survey portions that we can complete without being able to actually survey the community. During our last trip in Salinas, our meeting with the stakeholders (Building Healthy Communities and Code Enforcement) led us to realize that our survey previously was insufficient to capture the nuances of the housing state. Therefore, we spent the rest of the trip reassessing the neighborhoods with this new information in mind, but we were not able to collect any data. However, this was still useful because now we know how to better cater to the needs of the community. Although the process to build the best survey possible is very long, we want this project result to be as valuable as possible to the city and to be more than just a thought experiment. Therefore, we will take the time needed to adjust our survey. Jonathan from the City of Salinas has also sent us some GIS data from the city’s databases on physical property characteristics for each parcel, which has structural elements such as the number of bedrooms, age of the house, and more that could be useful for an initial analysis of whether the Alisal could qualify for some of the grants they are interested in. This file also has the parcel boundaries for the Alisal area, so our data from the survey will need to fit within these boundaries for it to be integrated back into the database. Additionally, Jonathan mentioned that he has been thinking about best practices around sustainability and would like us to consider more deeply issues like parking, transportation, affordability and their intersection with housing. If we were to build more high density, which is very sustainable, would this still be comfortable? With the lack of public transportation and parking in Alisal, how could the city respond with regard to these public services if they were to build more housing? How would this affect sustainability? What We Learned and Observed Because we did not have a site visit this week, there isn’t as much new information for us to absorb. However, we have learned that we need to consider all the factors at play when it comes to housing such as the issues of transportation mentioned above and also the overcrowding that can occur in public spaces if more housing is built. The trip to the Stanford educational farm was also informative as it helped us learn more about ways to make urban areas more sustainable through city gardens and the self-sufficiency that comes with planting your own food. We observed that because of the historical inequities of the Alisal area, as Carol discussed with us during our trip to Carmel last week, we need to be sensitive of what the community really wants and understand the difficulties surrounding a very comprehensive survey of all the neighborhoods. Since volunteers will be surveying their own communities, and possibly their own neighbors, and given the current political climate on issues of immigration and deportation, there may be some nervousness on the residents' part to let other people assess their housing. If building codes aren't met, we want to make sure that residents who may be forced out still have resources to support them in finding another home. This will be a tremendously long process, since the City is limited in its capacity currently to help these residents, so we do not want to shake things up too much. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward In the next week, we need to fully process the new GIS data we’ve been given by Jonathan and decide if there are additional variables that we would like from the GIS team at Salinas. Looking over the data will also tell us what information they are missing and should be added to the housing survey. We might also make some summary statistics on what is in the GIS data since they will give us and the City more context on the overall state of housing. Because we did not collect survey data last time, we may need to schedule another field visit if possible. However, the requirements noted by the community groups (having Spanish speakers and community members accompanying us during surveying, and really having the community do the survey instead of an outside group) might make this more difficult. We would like to respect the community’s wishes, so we will do our best to provide some analysis to the City even if we cannot collect data now. We will also be meeting to begin working on the final presentation and completing the portions that we can do now. Jonathan will also be giving us feedback on our first survey, so we will have to further make some changes on the survey before we hand it over to the community groups. Lastly, we will start incorporating the issues of sustainability and transportation into our final analysis and report, using the GIS data that we were given and also through our own research of the literature that already exists. Update on Project Activities
Though this week started a little bit slow, after we conducted our first field day last Friday, Adina and Chris with one group member discussed how the first field day went and how to continue moving forward. First, we went over the field day itself and the survey so far. We presented the digital version of the survey to Adina and Chris, and they offered feedback throughout the week so we could finalize the survey. Adina shared the online survey with a semi-public organization, Commute.org, that may help with distribution. Unfortunately, they will not be able to do so until March 9th, which means the responses gathered would be too late to influence our pilot study. We then went on to discuss how to gather more responses and fine tune our administration process. Chris and Adina suggested first standardizing the way in which we choose businesses to survey, to make sure it is consistent and we don’t bias our results in any way. They also suggested that we survey next at Redwood City, which we intended to do on Thursday. Though we were not able to do it this past week, two group members surveyed at the University Avenue area, and were able to gather two physical responses from retail businesses in about two hours, which is slower than our rate last Friday. However, they found that people were generally very receptive to the project and handed out many information cards to workers in about half of the businesses on University Ave. Tomorrow, more group members are planning to make the trip to Redwood City to continue expanding the survey catchment area. What We Observed and Learned Surprisingly enough, we generally noticed that people were easy to approach and talk about their commute. Over the two survey days, we noticed a variety of different responses though we approached folks at work. Some people were quick to express their opinions and were able to take about 10 minutes to answer the paper version of the survey. A greater number of people expressed a lot of interest in answering the survey, but because they were at work, they said that they would be happy to take the online survey on their own time. After we realized that the majority of people had this response, especially in the food and beverage sector, we printed out smaller, less ink-intensive cards with the link and our contact information so we could disseminate the link to more people. However we did realize that we had more luck surveying people in person in the retail sector, simply because they were able to step away from their work. Though we tried asking workers in busy businesses if there were folks on their breaks that were able to take the in-person survey, people were more open to receiving the link information. We crossed our fingers hoping that they would eventually take the survey after we left the business. Other options for “closing the loop” is re-scheduling a time to come back and survey workers in that particular business or incentivizing folks with random Amazon gift card drawings. We will continue to test our survey methods these next 2 weeks, but we have had some successes in getting both physical and online responses in these past two survey outings. As a whole, folks seemed pretty despondent about the likelihood of the 101 ever having better traffic conditions, and some focused on the deteriorating condition of the road in their commute such as the presence of potholes on the road. In terms of the survey format, we made many shifts according to Chris and Adina’s suggestions and to folks responses during the survey times. For example, we changed a lot of the questions to not being required on the online form since there were a bunch of places that folks preferred not to fill out. When we gave our 101 Express Lanes pitch, we realized that the trifold handout that we made was invaluable with its visuals in explaining the concept of express lanes to workers. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward During field days, we have not been able to get as many in-person responses as we would have liked in the past two outings. Considering we only have 8 responses so far and are aiming for a minimum of 30 to analyze in our final report, our number of survey days and our survey methodology could use improvement. However, with some contacts that Adina and Chris can provide with extra volunteers to help us collect more surveys and potential help from business organizations find a way to speed up surveying, we will be able to adequately present a concise presentation on survey results and methodology. Regardless, what we have tested thus far and our literature review will remain a large bulk of our final report to our community partners as we pass our this project to them. In the coming weeks as we continue to survey, we will simultaneously work on the final report and will analyze survey responses nearer the end of these ten weeks. Another major factor to consider is the diversity of respondents. In these past two weeks, we only had the opportunity to survey folks in the Palo Alto area which is not representative of the population we want to hear from. Therefore looking forward towards these next two weeks, we will focus our efforts on expanding our survey area. While our survey will be scaled up on, we still want our results to be somewhat representative of the San Mateo worker population. In this back half of the quarter communication within the group has lapsed as the quarter as become busier, but this has been brought to our attention as we have begun to operationalize our surveying. We’re excited that our community partners are optimistic for our efforts in this project, however our capacity in these final weeks will solely be focused on creating a scalable survey model to continue getting worker responses in San Mateo County. |
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