Today we had our first core team meeting at the new office. Derek did a great
presentation on cobranding and advertising and Jen went through the big picture
objectives for TIG. We received some really great feedback from a number of
people. If I had to boil down a few hours of discussion to three issues that I think are really important, they'd be:

• The need to support our partners through offering value added
  services, possibly through a partners section.


• Preparing the social and technical structure of our organization so that
  it scales well as we go through a heavy expansion period (including
  internationalization of content).


• Catering our presentation and promotional material to the people we will
  be approaching, as well as providing them with a key set of metrics to help
  them measure who they reach and how far they reach.

A few points that I found interesting were

• The breadth and scope of TIG's mission may be making what we do unclear to
  some partners. "We are focused- just focused broadly " - Derek
  Martin


• TIG is unique in that it has become successful in the wake of a failing
  dot-com economy ("TIG is a winner arising out of the ashes of a
  devastated  market" )


•  TIG addresses an overlooked market of young people who want to get
  involved with technology yet their needs are overlooked by both schools and
  clubs, and this makes it a hotspot for highly motivated youth.

Today I created an admin section for the up-and-coming volunteers section. An administrator can now add volunteer opportunitites, required qualifications, and questions to ask prospective volunteers. Tomorrow I will create a users section that will allow users to apply to volunteer. The interface is pretty crude as of yet, but I am designing from the backend forward (Database Schema, SQL statements, XML content layer, then XSL presentation layer) so it can be made pretty later.

On another note, we went out to a great restaurant for lunch today and I we had a chance to discuss where TIG is going strategically. Derek recently got in contact with one of the top executives at Bell - He's always surprising us with something, go Derek! Nordine and I were discussing ways to better connect users with events and organizations. We will be reviewing some of our strategies tomorrow evening at the core members meeting.

It was my first full day in the office and it was great! I bladed in with Mike in the morning, got setup with an admin account & FTP access, started adapting a few PHP files I wrote for the backend, went out to lunch with Derek & Mike, and spoke with Jenn about some of the next steps for TIG. It is so exciting to be around people who are so enthusiastic. Tomorrow we will setup the networking on my laptop so that I can get down to some real work - there's lots to be done to optimize the database as well as creating a volunteers database. I wish that everyday could be as exciting as this one.

Today I came in to TIG to see what all of the excitement is about. This place is AMAZING! I spoke to Mike and Derek a bit about ways to expose some of TIG's database records to partners using XML / XSL. I hope to get a chance to attack this problem on Monday when I'll be coming in.