Marla Parker's Weblog

I spend a few hours every two weeks doing some internal communications work for a volunteer group of Sun employees working with Engineers Without Borders here in the SF Bay area. I make an agenda and take copious minutes for our bi-weekly call, edit our wiki, and I talk with people internally about potential EWB projects that might dovetail nicely with actual work projects at Sun, such as engaging students in projects using Sun technology.

So far, we have exactly one official EWB project, which means we successfully submitted their sixteen page project proposal form (daunting at first, but worthwhile in the end) and won their approval. The project, Wifi4CREA, aims to bring cheaper, faster, and more reliable internet access to the CREA - Panama reseach station in the Cocobolo Nature Reserve. CREA = Conservation through Research Education and Action. The improved connection will serve the researchers, the school visits to the center and lastly the local village. One of the other volunteers, Marco, has pictures and information about his trip to Panama here on his blog.

Through our local EWB San Francisco Professional chapter, the wifi4crea project was selected to represent EWB on a really cool site I did not know about before: Global Giving, a million little earth-changing ideas. We have until November 21st to raise $2k via this site, so please contribute! No amount is too small nor too large. We will use the funds to purchase the hardware we will install on the next trip to Panama, possibly as soon as January.