Week 2: January 23-27
Jan 26th, 2012 by Calvin
After our initial meeting with Marty, he sent us an email with the contact information of the three agencies we will be assisting. They are:
- Silver Harbour Seniors’ Activity Centre
- Capilano Community Services Society
- West Vancouver’s Seniors’ Activity Centre
Linus, as our Client Liaison, contacted each agency. He successfully reached the first two agencies on our list, but had some issues with West Vancouver due to some conflicts in time; he is currently working on that situation while we focus on the other two groups first. After talking with their representatives, it became clear that the needs of each agency were unique; for example, it seems that Capilano is willing to just provide us with maps and statistics of their bus routes for our team to put in the report, whereas Silver Harbour would like us to actually ride on their buses.
This week, we were only able to schedule a meeting with Annwen Loverin, the Executive Director of Silver Harbour. On Thursday, Calvin and Michael met with her in North Vancouver to discuss her expectations for this project. At the bottom is a picture of the inside of the Silver Harbour Seniors’ Centre. Their current system, the “Go Bus,” runs on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. Although the agency will provide records of routes and ridership, Ms. Loverin feels that the report would be more complete if our group spent time riding the buses and recording our own data as well. The findings will then be compared with the given records to make a more complete report. She also noted that it would be ideal for us to come at least two of the days, as the Tuesday route is quite different from the other two. This poses a challenge to our group, because our schedules make it hard to take time off during weekdays. Also, it takes over an hour by transit to travel from UBC to the Silver Harbour Seniors’ Centre.
On Friday, we will meet up to discuss which days to go and ride on the Silver Harbour buses. For next week, our main objectives are:
- Contact and arrange a meeting with the West Vancouver agency
- Go ride the buses at Silver Harbour
- Meet with the Capilano Agency (Linus has scheduled a meeting on Jan. 31)
Fantastic guys, it looks like the ball is really rolling!
A couple quick thoughts that came to mind:
– I found it somewhat odd that Capilano was satisfied in simply providing stats for your report. I suppose their position on the matter right now is to share info with BEST in order collaborate with the other agencies for the project? When you meet them on Tuesday, perhaps you could talk about any other refinements or thoughts that they have. Maybe their original intentions or expectation with this project have evolved? Maybe they have a specific standpoint that they would like to have represented for this project?
– It’ll sure be a challenge to find some solid time for those north shore trips. For all my community meetings, we (my CSL team) would explicitly plan to do something fun along the way or after our outings – grab some good food or something else to make the trip even better!
– Silver Harbour looks to be a great study! I’m curious to see if/how you guys form a plan-of-action or perspective on hearing from the users of these services. Seems like a good idea to go beyond simply observing/recording numbers and rather see the intricacies of the system from the senior’s point of view.
– Great call with allocating roles for the team. Seems to be working well, no? At the same time, always feel free to be expansive and allow your roles to evolve. For my project, we would always cycle through team-members for writing blog posts. At the time we may have been a little defensive regarding the content and quality of everything, but it turns out everyone had something impacting to say that was truly unique to their own observations. Maybe not so necessary for “documenting the project”, but soon enough you may find yourself deviating towards other thoughts that you’d like to share.
– I hope I’m getting Cc’d in the emails?? 😀
Great, and happy weekend!
You’ve made a lot of progress this week. Keep up the good work!
Very helpful comment Roein!
Have you put together a tentative schedule for the weeks?
I’m looking forward to reading how your work progresses.
Regards,
Susan Nesbit
Thanks for looking over my post, just to clarify a few things for both of you:
Roein, we aren’t sure about Capilano in terms of if we are just getting data or if we are riding the buses, but Linus and Ava will be having a meeting with them tomorrow to clarify a few things.
Dr. Nesbit, we have a rough schedule of our project, but it is very tentative because the timeline of our work largely depends on how our clients respond to each thing we do.
Thanks for explaining the situation about the project timeline Calvin.
The team is encountering an interesting situation. You have a hard deadline for the project – yet your actions are evolving due to the responses you get form clients. This is an interesting planning challenge.
Regards,
SN