Saturday, July 31, 2010

Week Ten

Week Ten
This week was amazingly stressful, but very rewarding. I began finalizing my presentations for the Public Comment Analysis Toolkit this week. Wednesday was my first presentation hosted for the CIOs of the USDA who attended to get a taste of the new software platform soon to be released to the government and public. We had the creator and a liaison from Regulations dot Gov conference call in to offer their knowledge of how this toolkit could save the government time and resources analyzing the comments and complaints the receive. I was there to offer my testimonial of my experience implanting PCAT into the Dairy agency of the USDA. I also got to promote my video training tutorial I have created to train the government offices how to code PCAT without the need of humans to do the training. It was a major success which leads to a follow up hands on registration and demonstration of PCAT the following day with members interested in becoming users of the toolkit. Dr. Schulman (Developer of PCAT) showed the new features he has been incorporating into PCAT that soon will be available to the users. Next Friday was my opportunity to raise awareness for PCAT at the people’s garden in front of the farmers market. I Prepared chicken nachos to feed all who attended the presentation, and my supervisor purchased Kettle corn to share the attendees, I again explained my involvement in the PCAT collaboration team, gave testimonial of how PCAT has helped the USDA organize our comments to secretary of agriculture Vilsack, and offer my tutorial to the government agencies interested in becoming part of the collaboration team. Everyone LOVED the nachos and asked for the recipe  I was then invited to the Access Board to conduct a similar live demonstration with Dr. Schulman showing how PCAT could allow them to analyze their comments, complaints, and concern letters and gave a demonstration of the auto report generation feature that PCAT has programmed into it for creating Spread sheets, Rich Text Formatted documents, HTML web pages for posting on the web, and XML coding reports to incorporate between databases without the knowledge of writing code for the different files. Did I mention I was moonlighting with the director of a play to create a lighting scheme, special effects and audio timeline for the Black Play Festival at Bus Boys a local performance diner? Yes it was a busy week but very fun, once it was over. I also met with Damon Wandke to brainstorm a disability youth council to promote and educate the future disabled leaders of America with the little spare free time I had this week. I’m tired, but life is GREAT!!!
Justin Patterson

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