Operation Historic Moment has come and gone. The big news, now that the cat is out of the bag and rubbing up against your leg is that WMU received the biggest cash gift in our state, ever. The total is $100 Million dollars. This unthinkably large gift is a godsend, but alas is just the start of what is needed to start training real Doctors. I was centrally involved with a group of coworkers to design this project and bring it off successfully. My role was to address the technology we’d need to make all of this work properly. There were ups and downs and I learned a surprising amount from the experience that I will detail here.

The project had quite a number of technical components to it. Technology served a role at nearly each step of the process and many of the tools that were used made everything faster, better, and easier. The old aphorism that “proper organization will set you free” couldn’t ring any louder for us all than it did for all of our meetings to arrange this entire project. For me it started with tools that before this event I could have only dreamed for in Sci-fi. Specifically I speak of my iPad. My iPad was the perfect device. It was a communications hub, everything from email, my blog, to Twitter and Facebook were available to me whenever I needed them. The single app on the iPad that really helped the most was iThoughts HD. For each meeting we had, and there were many, I used this app to take dynamic notes and record the minutes of the meetings in a beautiful and straightforward fashion that I could then email to our management and show them our progress on the project. All they had to do was sit back and watch as we progressed. It was a delight to use and by suppressing an endless trail of scribbled and crossed out paperwork made what we accomplished in our meetings very easy on the eyes to read.
We had laid out our design from the very start. The first was a series of mystery QR codes that were distributed throughout town. Supermarkets, Delis, and popular hotspots throughout Kalamazoo were dressed up in these QR coded pages. The QR codes loaded a series of photos that lead to hints for anyone together enough to know what a QR was and to scan it. If I could do this part over I would have encoded all the URL’s for the photos using bit.ly so I could track their clickthrough rates and measure if anyone actually scanned any of these codes or if they are, as I feared, a flash in the pan. Thankfully the QR part of the project was free to implement and the only expense were the staff running around town posting these up all over.

The next big thing was the “Livestream” on the Internet. We had contacted a company and the original design was utterly fantastic. They would haul their own data over satellite service to their home office in Detroit and all we would have to do is cope with our network struggling under the strain of all the consumers pulling the live feed down from our vendor. For weeks we had this planned to the last item and then an unforeseen change of venue forced us to scrap the use of a satellite for data transmission. Suddenly we had to rely on our own network for both the upstream and downstream service. Several things from that point exploded in our faces, specifically a product from Cisco Services called CleanAccess was a problem. With the help of the venues IT manager we were able to get both the dry run and the main production signal off the ground and working properly. As some people have noticed, at showtime we suffered a rather embarrassing network failure at Western. Right now all we have are several competing theories, but they all describe the same problem – our event was so popular that our own network couldn’t cope. Personally I was beyond dismay, beyond embarrassment. I was logged into the Bernhard Center countdown clock hardware trying to display the livestream to everyone assembled there and the melted-down network wasn’t going to have any of it. As I sat there, thinking about all the upset people assembled for nothing in the Bernhard Center my mind raced with ways that I could have possibly addressed the situation. Some things did come immediately to mind and most of them involved not using any indigenous technology and relying instead on other Internet providers to ensure that things worked as designed. Like all other instances where something bad happens and you wish you could go backwards in time to fix it, there is no rescuing that mistake – only learning from it. I can’t say that I have much faith in our indigenous network provider, as it collapsed like a house of cards when our event started. I was afraid of network saturation and whatever the real cause was, I’d bet some real money that link saturation was at least a player in the drama. It stings when I have to admit that our successes are more dependent on non-indigenous resources than indigenous ones. It’s not that we actively selected against the indigenous systems, it’s just they never really even came up in our thoughts. I’m happy that much of what we attempted did work and upset that the one singular thing that we allowed to be handled indigenously was so embarrassingly fumbled. The only saving grace at the end is the notion that our message was so popular that it disabled a system designed to resist such things. The Internet really was never designed to resist popularity, only nuclear attack.

We also were responsible for the “Mystery Box” in Bernhard Center. This was a tease for the Countdown Clock Display that later on was constructed in the Mystery Boxes place. Our intent wasn’t to anger people by it’s placement, only to engage them and get them wondering what Western was up to. The clocks themselves were quite impressive and even still I’m amazed that we pulled it off as easily as we did. The clocks, all the guts, and the entire design came together so wonderfully that I still sit back and marvel at how it all played out. This build was rather involved for me and because of that fact, it was the place where most of my “little lessons” cluster. The displays themselves were investments, they cost a bit of money but we’re going to use the tarnation out of them and get every red cents worth out of them. The guts were repurposed technology from our own department and didn’t cost anything. Amongst the lessons I learned, when trying to force Firefox into a Kiosk you have to turn off updates, make sure screensavers and energy-saving features never get activated and to turn off Bluetooth. Because of the design we had to use two independent systems for the two displays, and this in itself created a rather embarrassing and inexplicable oddity to pop up. The two displays were almost perpetually out of time sync with one another. I really can’t explain it, both machines were in the same general space, there is nothing wrong with where they are, yet one machine counted time differently than the other. I have some theories that have to do with processor load and video processing issues and that is the only way I can explain it. The only other solution is that we had a temporal anomaly in the Bernhard Center. I’d expect a gaggle of dead students if we had a spatial anomaly, so it almost has to be my first theory that’s right. Anyhow, each night I would remote into the clocks and resync them. At worst they were about a minute off of each other but sync’ed well at night. The other lesson I learned was that WiFi is useful for many things, but you should never depend upon it. Drawing a network to the location was impossible but I do know what I would do differently next time. Next time I would acquire two free nearby wired network ports and I would set two 802.11N wifi access points on those lines and one machine per access point would be the rule, and the access points would have nothing at all to do with Tsunami, the default Western wifi SSID. Of course this would be a gross violation of network design and probably upset the indigenous service providers, but in some ways I can defend that approach because it would have likely not failed me. Alternatively I was considering acquiring two Verizon EVDO USB Network cards and using those as a wholly independent network sources for my display equipment.

Beyond the livestream and the clocks, the other bits of technology that we used were more bent towards helping us keep coordinated and organized. We made rather good use, even though it’s development was very late in the game, of WordPress.com itself. About 80% of the way through our project I started investigating WordPress.com’s P2 theme. The minute I started to play around with it I fell in love. P2 was perfect for so many things that were on my mind, a way to solve many workplace problems and the fact that WordPress.com was free, easy, so wonderfully supported, and quite robust was all just sauce for this goose. I created a private blog, added the P2 theme to it and rolled it out to everyone on our team. Of course since the blog came online about 80% too late, only a small amount of real work ended up being done with it, however even still, it served as a proof of concept and both P2 and WordPress.com have continuously proven to me just how good they are as a collaboration and communications platform, absolutely worthy of a “Bravo!”. The other system we used was more for coordination and that was GroupMe. I created a GroupMe account and group and populated it with my teammates who had SMS-capable cellular telephones, which was nearly all of them. GroupMe worked very well, and the only hesitation I have for really raving about them comes down to a misfired politeness feature in their core product. If you add a group of people to your GroupMe group and start using the product and some people don’t respond or actively join GroupMe declares that they aren’t in the group any longer out of politeness. Well, you can’t add them back in afterwards no matter how hard you try and some people aren’t supposed to reply, they are just supposed to witness and obtain an survey of the action, especially some in management. The GroupMe service would be better if there was a way to defeat the “politeness” feature and establish a hard-and-fast fixed group to receive text messages irrespective of whether they do or do not reply to any of those messages.
Now that the entire project is over, we are riding high on a wave of a job well done and looking at what failed and what we could have done to address those failures. Every mistake carries within it the seeds needed to avoid them in the future. We pulled off a massive and multifaceted campaign with six primary sectors and each one had fantastic leadership and an utterly delightful minimum of process-clogging bullshit. What lead to our successes? Empowerment, a lack of micromanagement, and utterly shocking levels of interdepartmental cooperation. Almost at every turn when we were afraid we would run into an intractable opponent we discovered to our dazzled chagrin that at each step we could find no enemies laying in wait for us with bear-traps, all we had were instant converts and cheerleaders. I’ve thanked our team many times in the past and once in a previous metablog post about the Western Express engagement platform, but there are some  other people who bear thanking now that I have a place to publicly do so:

• Our own “Sensational Seven,” which I was a part. If people work this well together for other projects, beware. 🙂
• Our Gold People. They remain anonymous but they know who they are and one or two may read this. Nothing like the magic of a mystery figure to goose a campaign right where it counts.
• John Stanford at the College of Health and Human Services at WMU. Thank you for on-the-spot help and use of your Category 6 cabling.
• Bernhard Center Management were stellar for this entire campaign. Kept what secrets you had to, asked no awkward questions, and went above and beyond with material and resource support. Knowing we had the staff of the Bernhard Center was absolutely instrumental in our Countdown Clocks working as well as they did.
• All the Building Coordinators, especially CHHS and Fetzer Center, for being so wonderfully understanding and willing to facilitate our project.
• Everyone else, I’m sure I’ve left someone out of this list, but if you were ‘in on it’ even if only a little bit, I thank you here and now.

What’s next? Well, it’s a great start for the Medical School, but in no way are we finished. The need is still very strong and this incredible gift is such a great start. There are more surprises yet to come and more engaging things that the University will see from us here in Development and Alumni Relations. We’ve only scratched the surface of what we can accomplish. As I told the powers that be when they took the reins back in October 2010, “All you need to do is press the Big Red Button.”

Zoom Zoom. 🙂