Filling in the Matrix

Heather and I have been researching agencies and asking them to fill in our questionnaire so that we can have answers to all of the questions that we decided to answer on our website. We decided to take out some of the questions that we no longer thought were really necessary, and we moved some of the agency specific information into our general description category for a different page on the website.

Heather and I have not heard back from the agencies we emailed our questionnaires to, so we will be calling them this week in hopes of being able to speak with someone who can answer all of our questions. We have decided to include the responses we do receive, and to leave certain areas of our website blank if we were unable to find out the information by our deadline.

*Observation/Learning Point: It is difficult to work with a deadline when you are depending on other people's responses to you. I also feel like communicating with the agencies has been like selling...you have to show them a benefit to helping you with your project. This is a project that could continue on for years as a senior project, with different teams picking it up and growing and changing it along the way. There is so much information out there, and plenty could still be added to our website in the future.

We've brainstormed an idea for the layout of the website yesterday, and will be meeting tomorrow to start creating our website.

Evaluating Agencies

Today Heather and I met to create a list of questions to send agencies according to the percentage criteria we placed on the responses from our questionnaire and interviews. We plan on making a chart that will show what each US agency with Thai adoption programs offers with the answers to these questions. We plan on this being our main page on the website, but not being the home page.

We revised our GANTT chart today because we realized we have more research to do and that this has to happen before we can create a layout for the website and begin to work on that.

So, we are off to research more!...We have divided the agencies (Koura has A-F and Heather has G-Z) up. We will each research our agencies to find information to answer the questions we made today for the agencies before we send the agencies our list of questions. We hope to receive responses from our assigned agencies within 1-1.5 weeks.