Informally, I'd say the most important part of my job was giving people advice and encouragement. Another thing I did was help people make connections with each other.

I'm comfortable on the technical side. However, the consortium's biggest inital, unmet need was finding people who could learn to administer small networks and fit well with the organizations they were working with.

The most helpful preperation I had for this task was spending a couple years looking for full time work in the late 80s. As a recent college dropout, without a driver's license, in a rural area flooded with highly skilled ex-defense workers, I did not have it easy.

When I was supporting myself with part time construction and restaurant work, there were a few potential employers who took the time to treat me with great courtesy. I tried to treat repay this courtesy when I interviewed people who couldn't copy a file from a floppy disc. One way I tried to be respectful was to provide people with a copy of the interview questions in advance. We were looking for careful well prepared people, not people who were good guessers.

My focus shifted, after we up and staffed the first 9 labs. (It was great to work with Eduardo Czarnobai and Felicia Sullivan on this.) I spent a lot of time visiting sites and helping them with various problems. I'd expected most of these problems to be technical in nature. I wound up spending about half my time on non technical stuff. For example I helped a person moving from part time to full time research elementary school pay scales. I think this helped both sides in her negociations get a realistic perspective. Right now, my primary focus is teaching network administration classes. The market rate for certified network administrators with between 0 and 2 years of experience is relatively high. It is useful to provide incentives for people to stay at low paying non profit jobs. In the next year I hope have 30 people pass at least one exam and 5 people get completely MCSE certified

I'm also spending a lot of time building a web server infra structure. Commercial Web hosting is either inexpensive or reliable. I'm hoping to provide both to Lowell area non profits decent web hosting with the ability to run useful databases like class registration for close to free. (UMass Lowell computer science department is generously allowing us to use their very nice network for free)

Working on the web server is teaching me a lot about LINUX. While Microsoft is quite generous with non-profits, LINUX's price tag is even more attractive. I'd like to learn LINUX well enough to teach some classes by the end of my current VISTA year.