A group of us volunteered to build some Personal Energy Transports at a workshop here in Austin. Personal Energy Transports, or PETs, are devices that enable people with mobility limitations to move around as quickly or more quickly than anyone in their village. You can read more about the project at the PET Texas website.

Their design is quite economical and does not waste raw materials. Our guide, Jim Scott, showed us that there are only four small pieces of wood left over after all cuts are made. The wood workshop is located in the back of a church here in Austin. They have bandsaws, routers, a paint shop, and storage for the pre-assembled parts and the fully assembled vehicles.

We assembled the wooden seats, tailgates, the storage area, and attached the metal structural support. Their workshop has excellent jigs already made, and an inventory of stored pre-cut pieces in labeled areas. So we set the parts into the various jigs, pre-drilled holes, tightened screws, and toe-nailed in boards according to their assembly instructions. By far the most difficult assembly step is attaching the welded metal structural support. By the end of a three-hour shift, we had assembled three of the wooden assemblies so they were ready for paint!

We're definitely planning for a return visit and another three-hour shift in July. Courtney and Estelle each got to try out one of the fully-assembled vehicles.

I enjoyed this post by Whitney Hess, a user experience designer, about Essentials to Designing a Conference. She includes photos of the badges with the designs she likes best. Some tips? - make sure they don't flip around annoyingly, maybe make sure they aren't one-sided, and leave room to write on the badge.

Here’s an interesting project to keep an eye on – a collection of case studies of "how nonprofits and social change makers are using social networks to get the word out and inspire action."

socialmedia4change.pbwiki.com

It's a wiki, so anyone can contribute their examples to the pages. The Frozen Pea Fund is there, as well as a Second Life scavenger hunt for the Multiple Sclerosis Society.

A group of Austin-based ASIers volunteered at the Special Olympics Texas offices to do data entry to ensure a quality and fair competition for the athletes, as well as to verify athlete medical information for safety purposes. Eight of us came for a four hour shift, and we started out at the computers, entering the names and birth dates for athletes in training. Greg found the oldest athlete at age 70, and age 6 was our youngest athlete. Kids are allowed to start training at age 6, even though they don’t compete until age 8. As a baby name buff, I enjoyed seeing the names – from Amiracle to Blaze.

A group of eight of us packed some bags of food for some elementary students first, and next we did some food drive reclamation which involves cleaning and inspecting the donated food.

Our quality assurance specialists Judy Rodriguez and Gary Hogan did a fine job of ensuring nothing got past them that wasn't supposed to!

My first five days at ASI in Austin, TX have been enlightening and not frightening. I'm enjoying the environment. So far this company feels a lot like the small company, Entek, that I worked for in Cincinnati, OH. I'm the new technical writer on the CRM team and I have a lot to learn before I can write much, but I'm happy to be here, and looking forward to being able to contribute. I won't write many blog entries here since my blogging energy goes to www.justwriteclick.com, but I wanted to try out the imiscommunity blog interface and introduce myself.