Week 4

Monday - 8am-5pm - 9 hours
Thurs - 8am-4pm - 8 hours

Total - 41.5 hours

I came in to AP twice this week due to the fact that I will be out of town next week. I have the pleasure of traveling with a group of around 50 people to Tijuana, Mexico to collectively build three houses for those who have none in a community-building service project. I came in on Thursday to compensate the lost hours.

Monday was a quiet day. Henning was in Germany visiting family and Brandon was preparing for/giving a virtual seminar online. The vast majority of the day was heads-down work, learning how to accomplish things in Wordpress. I certainly vacillate between equally appreciating Wordpress for it's high level of customization and extendability and loathing it for not thinking like I do.

Thursday I jumped back into the nitty-gritty of building out the site. I spent the morning rifling through the Wordpress codex learning how to use various tags for the custom content-pulling templates.

By lunch, I decided it was time for a little pow-wow with Henning and Brandon. My primary frustration was that so far into the project, I still felt like I (we) didn't fully understand what the speakers and attendees want/need to do with the site, essentially missing the entire point at a place in the timeline where the project should be wrapping up. Another frustration was the fact that due to the technology limits we basically had to choose login/content restriction at the expense of commenting or any sort of individual accounts/communication.

We didn't come up with any profound conclusions/solutions but it was good for me to talk out-loud and attempt to articulate my ideas, mostly for my sake. I concluded by saying that the remaining questions to answer were: What exactly will the speakers want to post and where? and, How do the conference attendees want to communicate/interact with the site/community?

That essentially ended the workday. I was feeling the afternoon slump and took off a little early.