{"id":1598,"date":"2010-05-09T22:58:30","date_gmt":"2010-05-09T21:58:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/TravelWithPaulie.com\/blog\/?p=201"},"modified":"2011-11-23T00:32:41","modified_gmt":"2011-11-23T00:32:41","slug":"volunteering-bali-what-done","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paulgoodchild.me\/blog\/volunteering-bali-what-done\/","title":{"rendered":"Volunteering in Bali and what I’ve done so far"},"content":{"rendered":"

Word count: ~1500.\u00a0 Approx. reading time: 10~15 minutes.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n

ngg_shortcode_0_placeholderI wrote a short time ago about my frustration with trying to find a volunteering opportunity in Bali<\/a>, Indonesia.\u00a0 I did eventually find a place that were hitting technical road blocks with regards their website and what they could achieve using their current tools.\u00a0 So in this article I’m just going to relate a bit of the work I’ve done here and hopefully illustrate the difference we can make to an organisation by helping out, if only for a few weeks.<\/p>\n

Making a difference<\/h2>\n

A few days ago I took a day trip into the Balinese countryside, approximately 2 hours from Denpasar to the slopes of Mt. Agung. Got up at 5am to make it to the office for 6am where there was a car waiting to take us up to ‘Desa Ban’ – the village within which the East Bali Poverty Project (EBPP) has been operating for the past decade.\u00a0 If you have 10 minutes, take a look at the video on the front page of the EBPP<\/a> to get an idea of the conditions under which villages in this isolated region have been living.\u00a0 They’re pretty dire.\u00a0 Before EBPP intervened they had been completely isolated from the rest of the rapidly developing Bali – no roads reached them, they were coping with the after-effects of the most recent volcanic eruption, and their staple diet consisted of a root vegetable (kasava) that inhibited the absorption of iodine by the body, causing endemic physical and mental retarded development in children.<\/p>\n

What I saw when I actually went there was amazing!\u00a0 I knew there were many projects being undertaken, but seeing the fresh faces of the 7 year old kids in their neat classrooms learning to read and write contrasted so much with what I was expecting.\u00a0 As I ‘hiked’ up to a particular village, Pengalusan, I walked along the dirt path that was the road currently being constructed by the Balinese government.\u00a0 Finally!\u00a0 Many of the houses were stone\/brick versus the previous bamboo shacks; there were heaps of fresh water reservoirs collecting spring water; and there was organic farming techniques being employed to vary and balance the diet for the residents.\u00a0 All of these changes were being implemented by the locals – the school teachers were locals, and the rocks being collected for the new road were done so by the locals.\u00a0 It truly was an impressive sight.<\/p>\n

Before this trip, the difference being made by the organisation was, to me, only stories and reports.\u00a0 I couldn’t see<\/em> it for myself and therefore couldn’t really appreciate it.\u00a0 I was honestly a little frustrated at the progress of my work up until this point and couldn’t really feel how I was assisting with it all.\u00a0 Rationally though, I knew the changes I was implementing were positive and would grease the cogs of the entire organisation, but before witnessing it all, I couldn’t truly appreciate it.<\/p>\n

So what have I done since I’ve arrived?\u00a0 Basically 2 main things have changed – the website and the email service.\u00a0 Below I take both and explain a little bit about each and show how a couple of weeks work can make a huge difference.\u00a0 It does get a little technical, so feel free to skip when it’s a bit heavy.\u00a0 Also, any comments and suggestions of course are welcome in the section at the bottom of the page.<\/p>\n

Building a new website<\/h2>\n

By no means am I a web-developer, but as you’ll discover when you’re volunteering with charitable organisations, expertise is all<\/em> <\/strong>relative.\u00a0 I don’t, and never have, produced websites in a professional capacity, but I have put together a few blog sites and I’m aware of related tools and technologies – and that now makes me an “expert”.<\/p>\n

The foundation, East Bali Poverty Project<\/em>, originally had a website that looked like this<\/a>.\u00a0 It was designed back in the 90s and the publishing interface also reflected its age, albeit with a WYSIWYG interface. It was slow, clunky, had browser-incompatibilities – just plain old.\u00a0 It served them well, but for the average Joe attempting to publish content it was difficult.\u00a0 So I decided, because it’s what I have heaps of experience with, to put up a WordPress<\/a> blog and just customize it as best I could.\u00a0 The site isn’t a blog, you say?\u00a0 Well that’s the great thing about WordPress – you can use it to create more “static” websites as well and customize the look using one of the hundreds of freely available themes.<\/p>\n

So the new East Bali Poverty Project website<\/a> is a WordPress blog with much of the content from the old site transposed to blog pages<\/em>, with certain content like Newsletters, News, and Updates, being put into blog posts<\/em>.\u00a0 It also allows them to more easily publish updates to their community and sponsors with news, progress, and events.\u00a0 For most of the pages I manually copied content over and reformatted it for the site, but for some, like the Vetiver network page I just copy-pasted the source since it was too cumbersome.\u00a0 It’s the 80\/20 rule<\/a> basically.<\/p>\n

With the blog, it’s possible now to very easily integrate website analysis to view traffic information on the site, such as sources (how they come to be there – Google, referring sites etc.), visitor behaviour (whether they stay, and for how long), from where in the world they are visiting, and much more.\u00a0 It’s impossible to effectively improve your website unless you can measure its current performance and then its performance after any changes are made.\u00a0 With that in mind and these analytics in-hand, the WordPress foundation makes for very<\/em> easy implementation of search engine optimization (SEO) – driving more highly targeted search-engine traffic to the site and increasing awareness of the projects.<\/p>\n

It’s easy, dead easy, to create yourself a website in the form a blog.\u00a0 It takes a bit of learning new tools, a few concepts about blogging and the interface to create it, but once you’ve been through it once, replicating the process is simple.\u00a0 Anyone with an inclination to setting up their own site should really check it out.<\/p>\n

Cloud Computing and Email<\/h2>\n

This is by-far one of the greatest areas for improving productivity.\u00a0 I’m always amazed at the way many organisations operate their email and the stresses and strains sustained by users of poorly implemented emailing solutions.\u00a0 The situation is often just accepted as part of the trials of email, with the view that there’s nothing really to be done about it.\u00a0 Wrong<\/em>!\u00a0 There are things that can be done to mitigate typical email connectivity problems and also to protect against failing hard disks where archived emails stretching back many years are lost in a single disaster.<\/p>\n

My solution of choice is simple: Google Apps.\u00a0 I’ve been using Google Apps to host email for my Paul Goodchild.net<\/a> domain for a couple of years now and I can’t see myself ever moving away from this platform.\u00a0 Unless something better comes along of course, but there’s nothing out there showing any signs of that.\u00a0 And what’s really neat – it’s free<\/strong>!\u00a0 Perfect for NGOs and other organisations running on a tight budget.\u00a0 If you’re working in an IT capacity for these types of organisations, I suggest taking a closer look at this – and if you’re not the tech guy, tell the tech guy about it.<\/p>\n

So what do you get with Google Apps?\u00a0 You get (for free)…<\/p>\n