BUSINESS MANAGER - 2010 Summary

Name: Matthew Fong
Title: Business Manager

Responsibilities:

Provide payroll support for other FACTS employees, act as communicante between FACTS and Service Canada for all summer employment correspondence, help develop contacts with other organizations and groups in constituencies of interest to FACTS, develop web-based framework for Internet communications and presence.

Commentary:

Besides the official responsibilities listed above, I was involved heavily in the technical and technological framework for FACTSnet, the online network for FACTS' operations. I took the groundwork from 2009's summer students (in the form of disorganized blogs with no consistent, centralized design) and developed what we called internally "FACTSnet Beta". I worked for most of May on a default template for FACTSnet that incorporated design choices and knowledge that I have from years of designing other such interfaces (as outlined in my portfolio here). During this time I also designed a number of draft images, one of which would eventually become the society logo (see the FACTSnet home page for the logo). I also started a manual/FAQ document that I updated regularly throughout the summer (see below). In June I reorganized the large number of blogs created by last year's students and updated links between them to facilitate hierarchical navigation. During this month I also provided training services to other student employees who required extra help with technological aspects of their jobs, including those employed by le Société de Tourisme Centralta (STC) as part of FACTS' partnership with STC. Towards the end of June I researched domain registrar services. Eventually I procured the domain name factsnet.org through Google's own registration services, as Google's support met FACTS' needs very well with the provision of free services ("Google Apps") such as a private email server, site tools, document repository, etc.). At the end of June I trained the high school students that were hired on at the beginning of July. In July I continued to provide training and support for the high school students and administrative work with the domain. The latter of July was spent implementing, upgrading, and tweaking the FACTSnet blog template, which I had developed myself earlier in the summer. August was mostly spent providing support for other summer employees and finishing small administrative tasks for FACTS, such as compiling lists of blogs, employees, and corresponding with auditors from Service Canada.

Throughout the summer I provided constant support for students. To deal with the large volume of inquiries I received regularly, I started a manual hosted on our internal working blog. For access to this manual, please email David Ibsen at factsc@gmail.com, citing the manual in the subject line. This manual was updated regularly to reflect new research, solutions, and descriptions I came up with during my work.

Future recommendations:

Next year's students will need to operate somewhat differently. Because the blog network has been developed substantially since last summer, they will need to do much more reading on the transition manuals than they did this summer. Technical prowess with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript would probably be prerequisites for at least one hire. Communication using email and Google Wave (providing Google does not deprecate the Wave service by then) must be employed in order to facilitate efficiency. We also employed Skype to this end. Contact information (each blog has a page for contact information) will need to be updated to redirect towards a central page hosted on the main FACTSnet webpage. Grammatical and spelling errors in posts will need to be corrected regularly. I have left all my work and resources on file in digital form with David Ibsen for future use.