Third Street Alliance-Scanning of all plans Complete!

A BIG THANK YOU goes out to Sean Dooley, Ryan Walters, Charlie Myers and Rick Thomas for all their assistance in digitizing all of 3SA’s available building, HVAC and Electrical plans on a Saturday morning.

These digital files will be a great resource both for EWB-LVP’s 3SA project team, as well as to 3SA as permanent digital archive of their existing plans. We successfully completed scanning all 77 plans.

Special thanks to Sean for bagels and donuts and also to his company, Keystone Consulting Engineers, Inc. who graciously allowed us to use its facilities and scanning equipment. Another special thanks to Charlie Myers who has offered to plot paper plan sets using resources at his company, Rettew Associates, Inc.

I will make extra copies of the CD’s containing the digitized plans as well as 11x17 copies of the plans as needed. 3SA adn EWB-LVP will each end up with one electronic set and a full hard copy set of all plans.

Note: Several have offered to volunteer for mapping work dates-THANK YOU!. As soon as I get a chance to review the plans and work with the Technical Assessment team, we will make plans for Mapping out the systems and will I contact you then! Coming Soon!

Int'l project selection process moving forward

The project selection team is making good headway, having decided to focus on open projects as posted on the EWB-national site. We are currently actively considering four projects, one in each of the following countries: Kenya, Sierra Leone, Zambia, Ghana. We will be contacting the NGOs or sponsoring organizations over the next two weeks to gather additional information about those projects.

A book to read...

I'd just like to recommend "Three Cups of Tea" by Mortenson and Relin for those interested in a little extra reading. In addition to being an intriguing story about the creation of schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan, it relates many of the challenges involved with international development projects.

Sean, Herb, Lauren and Sara Page met today at lunch to discuss current status of the 3SA project and the international project search. The 3SA project is moving along with current focus on the scanning of the HVAC drawings. Sara Page expects that there will be multiple projects started in the next few months. The international search team has narrowed their focus to about four projects on the EWB site, all in Africa. The are meeting biweekly to evaluate and further narrow the options. We may call a chapter meeting before the end of the summer, depending on progress of the search team.

Herb