July 13, 2009

From Extension Collaborative Wiki

MiTT Core Team Meeting

Submitted by Mary Hightower

• Present: Bo Beaulieu, Bob Cravens, Nancy Porter, Nick Broady, Rich Poling, Jane Schuchardt, Lyla Houglum, Mary Hightower, Terry Meisenbach
• Training by Nick Broad: Nick walked the group through people.extension.org during a 30-minute online training. Nick will return July 20 in the sequel: training on collaborate.extension.org. The recorded program may be accessed at: http://connect.extension.iastate.edu/p83057460/.

Deliverables: None

• Audience target MiTTNet progress reports (Nancy, Bob, Bo, Claudia): Jane noted that Claudia, Karen and Tom were involved elsewhere and were not on the call.

Bo, Community Development, reported there were 318 entries divided among team members. The members were reviewing for viability. Team member decisions were due on Friday. The members would then contact the authors of the viable resources and hoped to have that process turned around in a few days. The goal was to have a sufficient number of resources available for the July 30 launch.

Jane reported for Claudia, saying there were five resources entered in the Youth area with another 15 in the works. Ryan Schmiesing would be sending out an additional e-mail reminder to solicit additional items.

Nancy reported there are 54 resources listed in the Individuals/Families area in MiTTNet. She has sent weekly reminder messages out to the Family-Econ and Family Development listservs to motivate specialists and Program Leaders to enter resources. Some of the areas have not been well populated including: bankruptcy, consumer protection, credit, health, home, and taxes.

Bob, Farm/Ranch, said emails were sent to 48 states and 11 had responded with 150 documents identified. Additional reminder e-mails were being sent. His group has until next Wednesday to ID the first batch of resources, with another download to the directory by end of next week. The question came up about where forestry fits into the category, and whether those involved in forestry issues would even think of looking in farm/ranch for relevant materials, per a discussion with Lyla.

Deliverables: Bob would have his IT person speak with Ray about potential rewording to include forestry issues. Jane asked Bob to come up with recommended wording. Jane was also going to check on an e-mail list to reach all the Ag/Natural Resources leaders.

• Communications/Marketing (Mary/Terry): Mary and Terry offered a communications plan outline including message points for the ECOP meeting and materials that could be repurposed for other communications uses. The two also said they were working on an end-user communication strategy.

Deliverables: Terry and Mary would visit about Jane’s query on whether communications had considered a plan including post-launch educational webinars.

• MittNet and eXtension: Dan Cotton was unable to attend. Terry noted that one of the taking points for eXtension is the MiTTNet partnership, which has been published in the monthly eXtension update.
• Evaluation (Rich): Rich reported that Karen and he had created message points and charts from the Dallas workshop evaluation data for inclusion in the PowerPoint to be presented July 30 at the ECOP meeting.

1. Lyla asked what the plans were for the next round of MiTTNet evaluation. Rich indicated that Karen and he are in the process of setting up a meeting with the project evaluation team members and will discuss this issue at that time. He also noted that Karen would not be returning to the office until July 27. Lyla stressed the importance of being able to discuss MiTTNet’s impact to CSREES, ECOP and the national Extension system.
2. Terry noted that eXtension would be able to collect page visit and page view information and would also be able to check back with people downloading from the site about their experiences with the resources, since eXtension would have their IDs.
3. Deliverables: Evaluation team would come together to plot next steps and is tentatively scheduled to report at our August 3rd meeting.

• Funding (Rich, Mary): The Arkansas team is still in the process of sorting out expenses from the original CSREES grant. The initial grant as requested by the University of Arkansas team was for the planning meeting only, not for implementation. If any money is left, it would be helpful to transfer it to the eXtension Foundation to cover MiTTNet development. Rich noted that permission would have to be obtained from CSREES to move any grant funds to cover implementation costs.

Deliverables: Updated report on status of grant from Arkansas team.

• Next meeting: Jane asked whether the team should continue its weekly meetings past the July 30 launch. Decision was made to have a regular meeting on July 27 as one last chance to fine tune materials for July 30 meeting. Another meeting would be held Aug. 3 at the regular time for a launch post-mortem. Using Doodle to poll for next meeting is on hold.