A Day in the Life of an eRider

As an eRider, my job is to travel to nonprofits and provide technology assistance on specific, pre-determined projects. My first real mission as an eRider for the Mott Technical Assistance Project was to visit an NGO based in Bucharest, Romania's capital.

The project was sponsored by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation which provides technical assistance and training to organizations. The foundation asked CompuMentor and NPower Network to provide technical assistance to Mott grantees who use their grant money to fund other organizations. In particular, my job was to help the grantees comply with the list-checking requirements that are a part of the USA PATRIOT Act, an anti-terrorism law that prevents the distribution of funds to those that the U.S. government believes are involved in terrorist activities.

List-checking, according to this Mott Foundation FAQ on TechSoup, refers to the process of comparing your grantee lists -- those organizations to whom you are re-granting Mott monies -- with terrorist watch lists from the Unites States government, European Union, and the United Nations. Software applications have been developed to facilitate this process and there are several options available, but Mott recommends the Web-based version of Bridger Insight Software to their grantees.

Phase 1 of the project -- needs assessment -- helped the Mott Foundation better understand the type and range of assistance needed to meet the new list-checking requirements. Based on the results of this needs assessment, CompuMentor and NPower kicked off Phase 2: building the capacity of Mott-designated organizations to use the recommended software in accordance with the USA PATRIOT Act compliance guidelines prepared by the Mott Foundation.

This is where I came in.

After the organizations on my eRiding "beat" completed an online training session designed to teach them how to use Mott's preferred list-checking software, I e-mailed them to introduce myself and to make an appointment to visit their offices. The purpose of the visit, as I explained in my introductory message, was to provide the hands-on assistance most organizations need to reinforce what they learned in the training session.

Getting There

My first visit was to an NGO in Bucharest. To save money on travel and lodging costs, I purchased an inexpensive train ticket. My idea was to sleep on the train and to arrive in Bucharest early in the morning.

I arrived in the city early and, fortunately, there was no train delay or any problems with the border police. Romania looks very familiar, very much like Bulgaria, so it was not a problem for me to find my way into the city.

Ironically, my biggest problem was that the location of the NGO was relatively close to the train station. The taxi drivers don't want to drive me there because it's so close. But I predicted such a problem and had scheduled my appointment with the NGO for three hours after my arrival in the city. So I had three hours to find the NGO's office.

I started by searching for a place to purchase a city map in English. This was difficult because it's very rare when someone speaks English in Romania, and Romanian is very different from my native Bulgarian. The trick was to find a hotel and to ask the people there. At the hotel, they knew some English, so I asked about room prices and where I could purchase a map. I received some directions. (Of course, I didn't rent a room.)

Once I purchased the map, I started to look for the address. If it was too close for the taxi drivers, this meant that the address of the NGO would not be so far from my location. I spent about 10 minutes searching the map and I found it. It was really close.

So after spending about 30 minutes walking in the city, I arrived just in time. They were waiting for me.

My Visit

At the NGO, my visit started out with a cup of tea, offered by my contact. We were joined by one of his colleagues and we got down to business. I asked them all of the basic questions about their computers, data-care habits, and Internet connections -- and they answered all of them.

The NGO has six computers running Windows XP. All of their software is legal and, generally, they use Microsoft Office. They had completed the list-checking training and my contact said that he understood almost everything. So I asked about additional training and he told me that he probably would not need it, but that some of his colleagues might.

So we decided to give the organization about 10 days to test the list-checking processes and to decide if they needed training from me or not. Another thing on which we agreed was that I could visit them on the same low-cost basis every two months, just to check how they were doing and to find out if they were having any issues.

Then I proceeded to ask more questions to get a better understanding of their organization's IT setup. It turned out that they don't have an internal system administrator, but they have someone who comes in from time to time to solve problems. They complained that their computers have many viruses, which might be a problem.

We talked about the online training and they told me that generally the training was OK, but that there was some lag between the telephone and the computer presentation. (Microsoft Live Meeting was used for the video portion while the audio portion was done through a conference calling service.) I asked about their Internet connection and they told me they have a 64 KB Internet connection, which, from my point of view, is sufficient for the training. They asked me how fast a connection they would need to use the list-checking software and I told them that they don't need very fast Internet, that even dial-up would be enough.

When the conversation turned to their client database, they told me that they don't have a database. Rather, they have a spreadsheet with all of their clients and they understand how to convert it into CSV (comma-separated value) format -- but they were not so sure how to import the data into the list-checking application.

I then spent some time explaining the technical side of the list-checking application. It's actually hosted by an application service provider ( ASP) Web site and the NGO already has a subscription. They'll use the application in Windows and Internet Explorer.

They wanted to know if the connection with the list-checking ASP was encrypted. We didn't know at first, so we had to operate on the assumption that it was not encrypted and that the password for the Web site was sent via plain text. I later found out that the ASP is indeed encrypted and that organizations are encouraged to create their own password after using the e-mailed password to access the site for the first time.

The other very important question was the translation of names. In Romania, the official name of the organization is in Romanian and sometimes the translation of the name of the organization is not possible, or the name might be spelled different ways. I told him that they should check a database which contains names in English and they should translate the names.

I also explained to him that they should check the database before re-granting the Mott Foundation money. Princeton University has Transliteration Tables for Russian, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Belarusian, Serbian and Macedonian, as well as Ukrainian. We suggested that NGOs create an additional database field (or spreadsheet column) with the organization's name translated.

Free Software

During the meeting, I was using my laptop to take notes and my contact was curious about the software I was using. I told him that I'm using Linux, but that the list-checking application does not work under that operating system because it requires Microsoft's ActiveX.

Nonetheless, I showed him OpenOffice, a free package of desktop applications that provide many of the same features that Microsoft Office does. OpenOffice can export the existing database into CSV format, and the existing database can be imported, so this application might be useful for the type of work that the NGO is doing with their client database. It would be interested to find out whether there are NGOs that currently use OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office.

Thoughts for the Road

Generally my visit was very good and I'm happy with the results I achieved. I made contact with the client, checked their status, and began discussing additional training. They were very well prepared and I think that this NGO will not have any problems using the list-checking software.

I'm writing this from one very nice McDonald's in the center of Bucharest. After a few hours I'll leave the country on the night train.