Today, NiJeL is proud to announce the launch of the AzAfterschool Directory, a joint project with the Arizona Center for Afterschool Excellence. The AzAfterschool Directory is both a listing and a location-based search of all out-of-school time programs for children ages 5 to 18 across Arizona.

Parents that are looking for a quality afterschool program near their home, workplace or any other location can now easily log on to the Directory and search for programs by typing in an address, choosing a search radius (3, 5 or 15 miles) and clicking “search.” Parents will then see an alphabetical listing and a map showing all the programs within that search radius. Users can see a pop-up bubble with more information about each program by clicking on any link in the alphabetical listing or on any of the points on the map. Within the pop-up bubble the link “Click Here for More Program Information” will lead parents to a dedicated page for each program with information about the program activities, ages served, hours, contact information, and other information that might be useful for parents looking for a quality out-of-school time program. There is also an advanced search tool that allows parents to narrow their search for programs that fit their specific needs.

To get you started, we created a short 5 minute video demonstration of the AzAfterschool Directory. The Directory is very easy to use so feel free to jump right in, but if you would like to sit back and watch the test drive, click the video link below:

If you happen to run a quality afterschool program in Arizona, whether large or small, non-profit or for profit, licensed or licensed exempt, we would love to share your information with parents in the AzAfterschool Directory. Adding or editing your information on the map is simple and, best of all, FREE! It takes only a few minutes to enter your program details, and programs with multiple sites have the capability to enter each site individually. The AzAfterschool Directory also allows afterschool providers with summer programs to list the details of their summer programs separately.

To add or edit information about you program, click on “Add/Edit Program” on the right near the top of the Directory’s main page. You will be prompted to enter your login information or to sign up as a new user. Oce you are logged in, you can search for your program by address, and, if it’s in the Directory, you can edit the information by clicking on “Click Here to To Edit This Program” in the pop-up bubble. If you’re program is not listed, you can always add your program to the map with the “Add New Program” form.

Once added, you will receive an email confirming your submission, and after an administrator at the Arizona Center for Afterschool Excellence has had the opportunity to review your submission, you will receive another email approving or declining your sumbission.

We’re very excited about the release of this tool that we think could be extremely valuable for Arizona parents. We’d also be very interested in hearing from you about your experices using the AzAfterschool Directory – you can always use the comment field on our blog, or contact us in one of many ways from our website. Finally, if you have any questions about the AzAfterschool Directory or afterschool programs more generally, please call the Arizona Center for Afterschool Excellence at 602.279.7100.

As students head to their classes this week, I’m sure they have made sure they’ve ordered their books and paid for that overpriced parking pass only to walk through an endless ocean of cars to get to class. Some probably bought pens and notebooks, others bought electronic notebooks, with which I hope they refrain from spending the whole lecture instant messaging their friends with fashion critiques of their peers.

Every school year, I have to make sure that I have the latest and greatest software for getting what I want to do done without having paid a single penny. This means hunting down open source software.

For the definition of open source, I will allow Wikipedia, the open source encyclopedia to tell you much better than I can explain it, that “Open source is an approach to the design, development, and distribution of software, offering practical accessibility to a software’s source code.” As you can tell by my use of the phrase “Open Source,” to describe Wikipedia, the phrase is not just reserved for software anymore, there is a whole cultural movement to push for more sharing and openness when it comes to information, especially in the academic community. It is a backlash against the patent offices and RIAAs of the world, kind of a taking back of public knowledge from the market, and making it free and available to everyone.

VersionTracker.com is not strictly open source, but you can start there to see what is available. Their free software is categorized as Freeware, and only some of it is open source. If you want to search only for Open Source software, the best place to go, in my opinion, is Sourceforge.net which is the place where you can find only open source software, available for free download. They have a great menu located at the left side of their main web page, and they have a whole “Education” category that you can look through, especially if you are an engineering student, or are doing research.

Now, before you go on those websites and start downloading like crazy, make sure that you’re actually going to use the software. Make sure you install it and open it right away and try it out. If it does not do what you need it to do, uninstall it and save yourself the hard drive space. I know when I first discovered open source, I couldn’t stop downloading things I didn’t need, and before long, my computer was filled with programs that I didn’t use. Keep your computer clean (and back up often).

Recommended Software for back to school:

Open Office – spreadsheets, presentations, word processing.

GIMP – GNU Image Manipulation Program – almost exactly like Photoshop, without the $700 price tag.

Handbrake – DVD/Video ripper and converter. Simple, quick, easy.

Skype – IM, voice and video chat,  for when you have graduated from spammy, toolbaring, privacy hating Yahoo Messenger and/or AIM. The audio/video chat on it is clearer than most cell phones I’ve used.

Note: If you’re still in love with your AIM/YM, and aren’t really ready to let go of that HotGirl79 screen name yet, you can download Adium and log in as all of several  different selves all a the same time.

Mozilla Firefox – Because no one should have to use Internet Exploder, or get eaten by a lion while waiting for Safari to load. It is safer surfing, faster, and cleaner.

There are many more solutions for just about anything you need to do at school. Don’t forget to check with your school to see if they offer remote access to software you need, which many universities do these days. Also, always ask for a student discount when purchasing software and hardware for educational purposes.

Now if only they made open source textbooks…

Happy Downloading!

Here at NiJeL, we’ve been watching the health insurance reform debate carefully over the last several months. With the Congress being in recess now and some Congresspeople under siege form a very loud but small minority, we thought it might be a good time to speak up and show our support for insurance reform.

Our Congressperson, Harry E. Mitchell, is a moderate Democrat, and while he has voiced support for heath insurance reform, he’s by no means a solid yes vote when a final bill comes to the floor of the House. Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com gives Congressperson Mitchell a 15.4% chance of voting the House Commerce Committee’s markup based on his probit model that “attempted to predict the outcome of votes on the Energy and Commerce Committee’s markup based on two variables: a member’s DW-NOMINATE score (these scores run from -1 for extremely liberal to +1 for extremely conservative; Freshman members have their scores extrapolated from Progressive Punch data) and whether or not they are listed as a supporter for the public option on Howard Dean’s website.”

Bearing that in mind, we wrote Congressperson Mitchell a letter this morning, and I thought it would be instructive to post the same letter here. If you also support the current push for heath insurance reform, please feel free to use any text from this letter in your own correspondence with your representatives in Congress.

Dear Congressman Mitchell:

I am writing you today to show my support for the heath insurance reform initiatives currently working their way through the House and Senate. While no single bill or plan has emerged from either house before the August recess, I’m writing to express my general support for the ultimate goals of heath insurance reform and to specifically endorse provisions that I think would make a final bill much stronger.

As the founder and owner of NiJeL Incorporated, a Tempe-based small business, I believe it is imperative to control the escalating costs, now one sixth of U.S. GDP, of the health care system. These costs are making private health insurance one of the biggest ticket items our company deals with. There are a number of reasons costs continue to increase at four times the rate of wages:

• Being a volume business that pools risk, new private heath insurers face extremely high barriers to entry that in turn stifles market innovation in private insurance
• Untaxed health insurance benefits masks the true cost or heath insurance to employees and distorts the market allowing essentially federally subsidized expensive insurance policies and, in turn, expensive tests and treatments
• Large numbers of uninsured people with limited preventive care options leave ailments untreated until they become emergencies, costing far more to treat, and
• “Cherry-picking” private health insurers disqualify people with pre-existing conditions driving them to higher cost treatment alternatives.

Thinking beyond just the cost to the federal government, controlling system-wide heath care costs is the single most important step we can take to reduce the pressure on our economy and the federal budget coming from the unsustainable increases in heath care costs. To that end, I think it is important that we:

• Create an individual mandate such that all Americans are required to carry heath insurance
• Create an employer mandate such that every business in America is required to provide heath insurance for their employees
• Create a public health insurance option that can compete directly with private heath insurance, and
• Create a progressive taxing scheme such that more expensive heath insurance benefits, now currently an untaxed benefit, are taxed at a rate high enough to discourage their use.

An individual health insurance mandate coupled with a requirement that all health insurance providers may no longer “cherry-pick” who they insure will cut costs by pooling risk across more people and  improving access to preventive care for the currently uninsured. An employer mandate will help to ensure better access to heath insurance, like the individual mandate, but it will also, given a progressive health insurance benefits taxing scheme, provide a lower cost option for quality health insurance as employers will continue to pay part of their employees monthly premiums.

With the creation of a public health insurance option, the federal government will be more efficient and effective at pooling risk than all private insurers and thus better able to hedge that risk. With the largest risk pool, the federal government would also be able to have significant leverage to negotiate lower prices from its providers. For these two reasons the public health insurance option should be able to provide more coverage for less cost and give private insurers significant competition, which in turn should drive innovation in the marketplace. The public health insurance option is absolutely essential to controlling long term health care costs, and I urge you to support it.

Finally, taxing health insurance benefits on a progressive scale would remove market distortions to hold very expensive, tax-free health insurance benefits and use very expensive medical services – without a thought as to the cost of those services – as a result.

I ask, Congressman Mitchell, that you do all that is in your power to ensure these provisions are included in the final bill, and that you vote to include as many of these as possible both when a bill reaches the House floor and when the House votes on a final bill out of any Senate-House conference committee.

Sincerely,

JD Godchaux
Executive Director
NiJeL Incorporated
(602) 325-3445
jd@nijel.org

NiJeL officially turned two on July 26 and, as you can imagine, we’re pretty excited about that! All we can say here is that it would not have been possible to make it this far had we not had the good fortune to meet and work with some excellent groups and do some exciting projects! We’re looking forward to the next two years where we hope to build off our solid foundation and continue working to help social change organizaitons tell their stories through maps. Happy Birthday, NiJeL!

Late last month, NiJeL traveled to Kansas City to introduce the International Programs and Communication teams at Water.org to GIS and GPS concepts and techniques. Water.org works with partner organizations to deliver access to safe drinking water and sanitation projects in Africa, South Asia and Central America. Last month they reorganized to from Water.org after merging two organizations, Matt Damon’s H2O Africa Foundation and WaterPartners. Water.org is also on a the upside of a steep growth curve – they served three times as many people in 2008 than they did in 2007.

Our training covered a wide range of topics – from basic desktop GIS concepts to neogeography tools – but we focused mainly on open source solutions many of them from the open source geostack. We came prepared to use the OSGEO LiveDVD from FOSS4G 2008, but it became clear immediately that laptop wireless connectivity was going to be an issue, as we were going to use several web-based tools throughout the day. While each participant now has a lovely LiveDVD to share with their colleagues, they were not used during the training.  Instead, participants downloaded and installed QGIS and OpenOffice during our first break, and the also downloaded a ZIP file with data we had them use in several exercises.

During our desktop GIS exercises, we had our participants navigate, symbolize, identify and query some basic vector data, digitize some polygon data from a satellite image and create point layers by delimited text data to QGIS. We also had participants make a point layer by geocoding addresses using batchgeocode.com, OpenOffice and QGIS. Conceptually, we covered map projections and datums and how to gather, import and export GPS data using GPSBabel and QGIS, and we also did an exercise adding GPS data to QGIS. Finally, we did a brief overview of neogeography tools and participatory mapping, giving participants an introduction to our participatory maps, and the opportunity to create their own Google MyMap and export that data as KML.

For us here at NiJeL, it was an absolute pleasure delivering this training. Not only were all of the participants quick studies on GIS software and concepts, but they asked insightful questions and were fully engaged during the whole session. Many thanks to Water.org and especially Heather Arney for her work in getting us to Kansas City, and to Marcia Nation for connecting us with Heather. Thank you!!