With thanks to my colleague Stephen Downes for writing most of the following, and licensing it in such a way that I may repurpose it:
As you may know, the work I do is funded by the Government
of Canada through its support for the National Research
Council's Atlantic E-Business Initiative in the Institute
for Information Technology. The National Research Council
has given me a great deal of freedom to offer a wide range
of offerings for the Web community, including
Seb's Open Research, the Seb's OpenMind wiki, weblog deployments at educational institutions, the Internet Topic Exchange (in collaboration with Phil Pearson), various publications,
presentations, outreach and involvement in various innovation and knowledge sharing networks and more.
From time to time, funding for such initiatives is
reviewed, and our office is no exception. Quite reasonably,
the auditors would like to be able to show that some value
was received for the money spent, that the work performed
here had a positive impact on the wider community.
The impact of my work, and the work of our group as a
whole, is hard to measure. Sure, there are the usual things
- number of publications, number of talks, agreements
signed, and so on, but that doesn't tell the whole story.
Not even close. My weblog does not really
show up on the tally sheet, for example. TopicExchange.com flies below the radar for most established metrics.
So they have asked me, "Do you have recorded bits where
people say 'how great you are', 'you have had a great
impact ...', 'we couldn't have done this without you...',
either of a personal or NRC nature?" Such stories "have a
tendency to really impact write-ups for funding cases."
Well, I suppose I do, but I don't know what they are. So I
need your help.
If you could, please take a couple of minutes and send me
an email documenting the impact I've had and that the NRC
E-learning Group has had on your work and your projects.
You don't need to go into detail (though you can if you
want); just let us know what we did that helped you with
what you're doing. We want stories from across Canada and
from around the world.
Send it to me by email at Sebastien -dot- Paquet -at- nrc -dot- ca.
Your help here would really be appreciated. Even a couple
of sentences would give us information we did not have. So,
please take a couple of minutes, and let us know how we've
helped. This will allow us to continue providing our
research and services for free for a long time to come.
