Once I land in the Philippines (after a 30+ hour series of flights from Atlanta), I have 29 days to fit in as much as I can. So I have to hit the ground running.
Luckily we managed to assemble an awesome team before I left!
Loushan (Yatta): Logistics Lead
Loushan has volunteered as the lead secretary administrator of the whole Waterspace program. This will be particularly useful for me when I am gone. She has been checking in on each of the project groups. She, herself, is from the youth performance group in town, YATTA.
Zorich (FU): Construction Lead
Zorich is leading the Estudio Damgo crew as they assemble the initial pilot raft project that will be used to test out laboratory gear. His target was to have an approximately 4m x 4m raft ready by the time I got back in April, and he totally nailed it! He got together the construction crew and using recycled old parts they put together the first module! We hope to get it on the open ocean any day now.
Zorich and Loushan are also leading the way in constructing the submarine. They are rocking it so hard!
Murray, Juliet, Fry and Greyhound Studios (FU): Documentation Lead
Greyhound studios is Foundation University’s in-house video production group. They are amazing, motivated, and quick. Having created lots of videos about all sorts of topics around the University and Dumaguete they already are on top of how to handle many logistical problems, so they are super helpful in the general production of the program as well. They have a rotating schedule with three helpers documenting each day of the program. I brought some of my own documentation equipment for them to utilize as well.
Carl-Mat (FU): Technical Lead
Carl and I have been diving into the world of programming arduinos and sensors. He already got an ocean wave detecting sensor hooked up to some nice waterproof lights.
He’s agreed to lead some workshops training some of the (pro-active and dedicated) Yatta crew-members in weekly workshops until i come back!
Zing (Yatta): Graphic Design
Zing put together amazing logos to help the community organize around the big ideas of this program. There are two different logos. There is the BOAT lab (Building Open Art and Technology Lab) logo, which we can use for the physical space and the floating hackerspace we make. It looks like this:
And the other logo is for the entire American Arts Incubator program in Dumaguete:
These logos are a terrific way to share complex ideas with simple graphics that the participants can all rally around. T-shirts are on their way!
This awesome crew made excellent use of the interim time between my scouting trip and the upcoming workshop. Things are just going to keep getting more exciting as we add and expand upon these initial teams.
And last but not least, we have our incredible production assistant, Geline. She’s ready to tackle any problem, and is a vital resource to keeping our whole operation going at full speed!