rjm72

Rachael Moxley

Fall 2008 Contributions

This semester, as a leader on the Outreach Team, I had to decide if we would focus on pursuing microfinance or grants as a means of fundraising. The way I interpret the path forward for AguaClara it would take far more time and resources to set up microfinance as a means to accomplish our ends, where as pursuing grants will help us sustain the employees at APP who are dedicated to building our plants. While in the future our plants will be bought out-right, and perhaps microfinance will prove beneficial after all, grants would help our immediate goals. Additionally the informational packet developed by the Spring 2008 team was very complete, I felt it was lacking in terms of expected topics covered and went too in-depth in some areas for what was needed. Thus, our focus this semester has largely been about finding and applying for grants.

For the first part of the semester I worked to create a flier to recruit someone to work with LabVIEW, submitted blurbs for the same recruitment to the Sundial and SWEmail, created a technical brochure, submitted an abstract for the ESW conference (which was postponed until fall), wrote a grant proposal, helped organize presentations for freshmen engineering 1050 classes, helped a middle school student find the best water treatment process for his future city, wrote up wiki minutes after weekly meetings, and worked with my team to create the submission for the google 10 to the 100 competition. I have also worked to lead team meetings and improve wiki organization for the outreach pages. In the second half of the semester, I have reorganized the attachments on the wiki pages, put up fliers for recruitment (including LabVIEW), helped set up an info session during pre-enroll, ordered t-shirts for the team, created a newsletter for alumni, supporters, and contacts, and edited the draft of the demo plant instruction manualand participated in the final presentations.

Spring 2008 Contributions

To start off the semester I have laid out the structure for the Automated Design Program. I did this by indicating important programs, subprograms, inputs and outputs, and the means by which each program is connected as sort of a starting point for creating code. Since then many of these have changed, and I suspect more will be revised as we create more of the code and figure out what is most efficient.

Early on it became apparent that a better way to manage our files was needed. I set up a data repository on SourceForge using SubVersion. To communicate with the repository another program is needed. I chose TortoiseSVN and had it installed on most of the lab computers.

In the midst of the semester I went to the Ithaca Youth Bureau to teach kids about water treatment.

By the end of the semester I had worked to integrate the design variables between hydraulic design, unit processes, and autocad with labview.