SCI Long Term Projects Database. Extensive Manual

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Extensive Manual

http://longterm.lteg.info

Provided by: Long Term Exchange Group (LTEG) Editors: Sarah Gerster & Philippe Marti Last update: May 10, 2011

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks to all people involved in testing the new system, especially to Nick Stanton (SCI-IVS USA), Val´erie Mouton (SCI B, MIDIWG) and Christophe Joset (SCI CH) for the suggested improvements.

Special thanks also to Mauro Carta (SCI Italy, LTEG) for the cartoons.

Any resemblance to real people or incidents in the given examples is of course purely coincidental ;-).

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1 Introduction

The long term database (LTDB) of SCI is a tool for SCI organizations to publish their open long term volunteering (LTV)1 positions. The interface is available at http://longterm.lteg.info.

The new system especially allows:

• LTV coordinators to enter and/or update their projects easily with the support of the online help and this manual

• SCI’s international (regional) working groups to monitor the quality of the published long term projects

• interested volunteers to look for LTV positions online and to get in-structions on how to proceed for the application process

• LTV coordinators to quickly get an overview of all open LTV positions (in all regions!)

• LTV coordinators to quickly see if a report and/or infosheet is available for a specific LTV project

• LTV coordinators to get the contact information of the person in charge of a project in the hosting organization

• LTV coordinators (or mentors) to enter information for the statistics and quality monitoring of LTV projects online

• SCI (regional) working groups to get a basic feedback (throughout the year) about projects, and have the opportunity to take immediate action in case of bad project evaluations

• LTEG (Long Term Exchange Group of SCI) to automatically generate nice and complete vacancies lists

• LTEG to prepare useful data analyzes of the LTV exchanges once a year

• LTV coordinators to generate a personalized vacancies list to send out to their volunteers [yet to be implemented, foreseen for summer 2011]

1_{Throughout the manual the term LTV stands for all types long term volunteers or} long term volunteering projects. Especially it includes the European Voluntary Service. The duration of a project has to be at least one month to be considered as an LTV position

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1.1 Who can use the long term projects database?

Many actors are involved in this system, all having slightly different rights and duties:

• Interested volunteers:

– have access to the public interface

– can see the list of published LTV positions

– can use a simple search engine to look for specific projects – can see some basic information for each (published) project online – get a short instruction of how to proceed to apply for a project • LTV coordinators:

Each SCI organization can request a user name and password to get an account. It is up to the organization to decide who gets this access information, usually it will be the LTV coordinator. This account allows to:

– see the list of all projects (published, awaiting publication or inactive) in the database

– enter new projects – update existing projects

– request the publication of projects (such that they appear in the public interface and on the vacancies lists)

– register incoming and outgoing volunteers for the statistics about LTVing and for the project quality assessment

– generate a personalized vacancies list to send out to their volun-teers [yet to be implemented, foreseen for summer 2011]

– access important documents related to LTVing (Practical Proce-dures, Handbook for volunteers, Manual for LTDB,...)

– have a quick access to the contact addresses of the persons in charge of LTVing in the hosting organizations and in the different (regional) working groups.

• Administrators of each (regional) working group:

Each SCI international working group can request a user name and password to get an account. It is up to the WG to decide who gets this access information. Typically, one or two activists of the WG should commit to take responsibility for the related work. The account allows to:

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– enter new projects for SCI organizations in their region – update existing projects of SCI organizations in their region – decide whether projects in their region should be published (such

that they appear on the public interface and on the vacancies lists)

Furthermore, it is up to the regional working groups to decide how their projects are to be entered in the database (what information is mandatory?), and what conditions apply to volunteers (age?, prepa-ration?, experience?).

• Mentors:

Some organizations might want to ask volunteers to help with the registration of statistical and quality assessment data about the LTV exchanges. For this purpose, additional accounts with restricted rights can be requested. These accounts allow to:

– register incoming and outgoing volunteers for the statistics about LTVing and for the project quality assessment

• Quality checkers:

During the annual meeting of LTEG in 2010 it was decided (i) to col-lect data about LTV exchanges for the statistics independently form the workcamps and (ii) to get some information about the projects (from the hosting and the sending side) to ensure quality of projects and agreement with the practical procedures. This feedback proce-dure about quality will be tested until fall 2011 by LTEG activists. Depending on the outcome, this service will be continued/enhanced, and also offered to other working groups. For the moment a couple of LTEG activists volunteered to evaluate the feedback about projects that is entered in the database. They get an account allowing to:

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– see all evaluations that have been entered in the system – assess the outcome of the project according to fixed criteria – decide whether the LTEG steering group should be alarmed to

take direct action, or whether the data is simply stored and then put together in an overview for an analysis/discussion during the next LTEG annual meeting.

1.2 Typical workflows

To illustrate the roles and interactions of the different users, some flow charts are provided in the figures below. The typical workflow to publish a new project is depicted in Figure 1. In Figure 2 a similar workflow is shown to illustrate the actors involved in collecting statistical data and in assessing the quality of the LTV projects.

Figure 1: Typical workflow showing all the involved actors when publishing a project.

1.3 What to expect from this document

All the tasks briefly described in this introduction are depicted in more details in the remainder of this document. It is an extensive tutorial and

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Figure 2: Typical workflow showing all the involved actors when registering volunteers and assessing the quality of the LTV projects.

you can use it as step by step guidance when working on the database. However, you probably do not want to read the whole document. We suggest the following:

• Read Section 2 which provides some basic information that applies to all users of the system (except to the public access).

• Get an overview of the section(s) concerning the tasks you will have to perform.

• Use the manual as step by step guidance when needed. However, you will figure out pretty soon that the system is quite intuitive and well documented (online), and hence the manual will only be necessary in very specific cases.

LTEG, as developer and maintainer of the system, hopes that all actors will take advantage of this new interface. Feedback from all users – especially from LTV coordinators and regional working groups – is highly appreci-ated. Send your questions, requests for changes or further developments to [email protected].

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2 General information

2.1 Technical information

Please note that the LTDB2 interface has been developed to respect the open standards. If you access the website with a browser respecting these standards (like Firefox) everything will be fine. If you use Internet Explorer you might encounter some “funny” things.

However, the system has been tested under various operating systems and various internet browsers. Flawless behavior could be observed under:

• GNU Linux (tested on Fedora and Gentoo) with Firefox version 3.6. • Mac OS X with Firefox 3.6 and Safari.

• Windows 7 with Firefox 3.6 and Internet Explorer 8.

If JavaScript is disabled in your browser, you will miss a lot of useful tools (character counts, sorting projects, automatic activation of mandatory fields,...). Also, the layout of the forms might look a bit “messed up”. Al-though the whole system runs perfectly well and safely without JavaScript, we suggest you to activate it (or add an exception to your blockade) to benefit fully of the user friendly interface.

2.2 Online help

There are several ways to get help online when working on the LTDB inter-face:

• The menu bar holds a tab Help. There you will be able to: – download available practical procedures

– download various handbooks related to LTVing – download this manual

– find the contact addresses for technical questions and bug reports – access the list of frequently asked questions (FAQ) and their

an-swers

• The menu holds a tab Contacts. There you will find useful contact data to address/discuss your various questions about LTVing.

• Navigating in the system, you will notice blue icons with a question mark. Clicking on these symbols will open a window with additional information about the related field/topic3.

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Long Term projects DataBase

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2.3 Bug reports

If you found a bug, please report it as soon as possible, such that we can fix it! To make your bug report useful and our work easier, please proceed as follows:

1. Give a general description of the bug.

2. On which operating system are you working? And with which browser? 3. Did you encounter this bug for the first time?

4. Is the bug reproducible? If so, describe step by step what you have to do to reproduce it

Please send this information to [email protected] with the men-tion “bug report” in the subject.

2.4 Manage your profile

You can change your password anytime when you are logged in. Click on Profile in the menu bar. Enter the current password. Choose a new password and type it twice, then click on Change password. If you do not get an error message, the change was successful.

If you forgot your password, a new random one can be generated by the system administrator. If you need a new password, please send an email to [email protected]. Please change the random password that you will get as soon as possible (by following the procedure described above) for security reasons.

2.5 Backup

A backup of the database is made at least once a week. Copies of the backup are stored at two different (physical) places.

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3 Public interface

Part of the long term projects database interface is open to the public. However, the displayed information is quite restricted.

3.1 Background information

Good preparation and mentoring of the volunteers as well as good and close contact to the hosting projects are the keys to successful LTV projects. SCI is lucky to have a strong network, and it is good to use it, but also important to take care of it. Regarding long term volunteering, this especially means: • Volunteers have to apply to projects through their respective sending

branch.

• During the application process, the communication follows this pat-tern:

Direct communication between the hosting organization (or the host-ing project) and the volunteer only starts once the volunteer is ac-cepted in the project.

• Sending organizations are in charge to select participants (only forward application forms of “good”4 _{volunteers to the hosting branch) and}

to prepare the volunteers for their LTV. In return they can ask the volunteers for a (membership) fee.

• Hosting organizations should maintain a good contact to their hosting projects, such that they get informed when volunteers contact the host directly (“bypassing” the SCI structure).

Although these rules and procedures are simple, straight forward and neces-sary to ensure high quality of our exchanges, they are not always followed. Some branches fear that granting a public access to open long term positions to volunteers will make matters worse, having more volunteers bypassing the sending and/or hosting organization.

On the other hand, it is not disputable that most volunteers nowadays prefer to look for projects on the internet, rather than having to subscribe to newsletters or mailing lists to get a list of open LTV positions. Hence, in

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the interest of promoting LTVing within the SCI network, it was decided to grant the public with an online access to the open LTV positions. However, the amount of displayed information is kept very low. If a volunteer is interested in a project he/she is redirected to his/her sending organization to ask for the full project description and to get details about the application process.

3.2 Overview of the public interface

When accessing the long term database (http://longterm.lteg.info), one automatically gets to a page listing all published long term positions (see Figure 3). The projects in the listing can be sorted by country, name and type by clicking on the header of the corresponding column. Further-more, the “drop-down” list above the Country column allows to look for projects in a specific country.5

Figure 3: Index page of SCI’s long term database interface.

If a volunteer is interested in one of the projects, he/she can click on details to get some basic information including the hosting country, type, theme, languages and a brief description of the project.

The blue symbols with the question marks can be used to get further infor-mation, here for example about the different project type abbreviations.

3.2.1 Search engine

A very basic search engine is provided in the menu item Search project.

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If you cannot use all of these facilities, you probably do not have a running JavaScript. Refer to Section 2.1 for more information.

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The number of search criteria is limited to avoid frustrating researches yield-ing no results. Over the last two years the database contained around 40 projects on average. Now, including more and more LTV positions in the Global South, we hope to increase this number to about 70 open positions on average. However, this is still not enough to use a sophisticated search engine combining many criteria.

3.2.2 Applying for a project

In contrast to the Online Placement System (OPS) for workcamps, the long term interface does not allow volunteers to apply online. The personal con-tact between LTV coordinators and volunteers is crucial to decide if a vol-unteer is fit to be sent to an LTV project. Hence, instead of an interface to directly subscribe, the volunteer can get directions and help on how to apply (finding his/her local SCI organization,...) by clicking on Application in the menu bar.

3.2.3 Disclaimer about the availability of projects

Not all organizations are willing to send volunteers to all projects. Some filter depending on the region (lacking the expertise to prepare the volun-teers). Others refuse to send volunteers to specific projects because of their content or conditions. It is up to each organization to decide where to send long term volunteers (and if needed to justify their choice to other organi-zations and volunteers). Volunteers cannot expect that they are entitled to participate in all projects published on the long term projects interface. To make this clear, a disclaimer – Please note that some organizations do not send volunteers to all projects listed on this web page. Contact your local organization to get a list of the volunteering positions for which you may apply. – is displayed on all public pages.

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4 Access for LTV coordinators

Type http://longterm.lteg.info in your browser. The listing of projects you see is the (filtered) information for volunteers. To access to the heart of the system, click on Login in the menu bar. Enter your username and password and click on Login6.

Once you successfully logged in, you will have to choose whether you want to work on the projects database (see Section 4.1) or rather on the LTV statistics/quality assessment (see Section 4.2).

Furthermore, note that the menu bar changed. As an LTV coordinator, you have access to:

• Projects: Listing of all stored LTV projects. It provides the possibil-ity to edit and to create new projects corresponding to your login. It also grants access to the detailed information for all projects.

• Statistics: This is the place to register your incoming and outgoing volunteers.

• VLEditor: This is still “work in progress”. Eventually (hopefully in summer 2011) it will allow you to prepare customized vacancies lists to send out to your volunteers. For the moment you can use this menu item to download a copy of the current vacancies lists.

• Profile: The tool allowing you to reset your password.

• Help: A collection of useful documents, links and email addresses if you need help for your work with the long term database interface. • Contacts: A collection of important email addresses if you have

ques-tions related to specific projects, LTVing in general or technical issues with the interface.

• TechNews: Latest news about the LTDB. Improvements that are planned and their progress.

• Logout: The tab to click once you are done with your work on the long term projects database.

From time to time, you will notice an additional menu bar on the right side of the screen. It provides some additional tools related to the page you are working on. For example, it offers to:

• Create Project while you are on the page with the listing of the projects.

6_{If you do not yet have the login information (or if you forgot your password), send an} email with the corresponding request to [email protected].

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• go back to the listing of All Projects while you are looking at the details of a specific project

• download the current vacancies list by clicking on Get Vacancies List

• and much more...

4.1 LTV projects database

This part7 of the interface allows you to:

• manage your LTV projects (create, edit, request publication)

• see the complete list of projects in the database (active and inactive, from all organizations)

• find relevant information about projects for your volunteers (infosheet, reports, contact address if you need to ask for details,...)

The first page provides the complete listing of all long term volunteering positions stored in the database. Please note that when talking about an LTV project we mean all long term volunteering positions (including EVS). Figure 4 shows the first few lines of the project listing.

Figure 4: Screen shot of the top rows of the listing of all projects in the database. You can modify the projects from your organization (projects where “edit” is written in the last column). You can browse all other projects (by clicking on “details”). Projects with a yellow smiley are active and published. Projects with a blue smiley have recently been activated, but were not yet confirmed by the corresponding working group. Projects with a sad red face are not active.

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The “drop-down” list above the column Organization allows to search for all projects from a given organization. The “drop-down” list above the column Type allows to search for LTV projects from a specific type.

Most column headers can be used to sort the projects:

• Organization displays the name of the hosting organization. The first click sorts the projects by alphabetical order of the organizations. A second click sorts them in the reverse order.8

• Name of the project: The first click will order the projects in al-phabetical order. Second click will order them in reverse alal-phabetical order.

• Active – A project is active (you can send applications of interested volunteers) if there is a yellow smiling icon. Projects with a blue smiley have recently been activated, but were not yet confirmed by the corresponding working group. Do not yet send applications to such projects! If the icon is red and looking sad, the project does not accept applications for the moment. A click on “Active” sorts the project in the order “yellow, blue, red”. A second click displays them in the order “red, blue, yellow”.

• Type of a project tells you (i) which working group is in charge and (ii) what conditions volunteers must fulfill to participate. A click on this header will sort the projects in alphabetical order of their type. A second click on the heading will sort the projects the other way around. Note the blue question mark next to the header. If you click on it, you will see a short description about each project type. • Deadline to send in volunteers’ application forms. Projects with the

mention “ongoing” don’t have a specific application deadline. If the project is active, applications can be sent at any time.

• Info – This column shows which rights you have on the listed projects.

4.1.1 Entering new projects and updating old ones

To enter a new project, click on “Create Project” on the menu in the right part of the screen. To modify a project that is already in the database, click on “edit” at the end of the corresponding line in the projects listing. Please note that you can only modify projects corresponding to your login. Figure 5 shows an example of the form to edit the content of a project. Entering new projects, or updating old ones, is pretty intuitive if you are used to working with web forms. This section will tell you the basic rules

8_{If you cannot use all of the described functionalities, you probably do not have a} running JavaScript. Refer to Section 2.1 for more information.

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Figure 5: This figure displays the first few fields of the form describing a project. You can find explanations about the different fields in Appendix A.

to successfully publish your projects. If you need support for specific fields, please refer to Appendix A.

There are a few rules to respect to be able to store projects in the database: • Each field has a maximum number of allowed characters. If you enter more characters than allowed you will get an error message and your project will not be stored.

• Attached documents (infosheet and report from previous volunteers) must be in PDF format.

• You must provide a project type (in the field Long term type). For a project to be eligible for publication (in the online interface and and on the vacancies lists), it has to be “active” (check the corresponding box in the form). However, to be able to store a project as being “active”, it must fulfill additional conditions. These are:

• All mandatory fields must be completed (fields with a bold black head-ing in the form).

• The time span of the project must make sense (see details in Ap-pendix A).

• The application deadline must be in the future.

Short and precise project descriptions: Volunteers should get a good picture of a project in a reasonable amount of time. Hence, we ask you to

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be concise in your descriptions. Also, the maximum number of characters permitted per field is limited. If you want to provide more information about your project for interested volunteers, write an infosheet and attach this document to your project description.

Character counts: Each field can hold a limited amount of characters. If you have JavaScript installed and enabled, you will see how many characters are left while typing. If you do not have JavaScript enabled, you will just get an error message when trying to save a text with too many characters. In Figure 5, indications such as “34/50” are displayed below the fields. This means that you are allowed to type another 34 characters9 before reaching the maximal (50) number for this field. Fields holding too many characters show a negative count, for example “−11/100” (you typed 111 characters, while only 100 were allowed, you need to delete 11 characters in order to be able to store the project in the database).

Emails and web links: None of the fields appearing in the vacancies lists or online may include an email or internet address. Volunteers have to apply to the projects through their local SCI branch, group or partner. They should not directly apply to the project partner. Projects including websites or email addresses in their descriptions will not be published.

Connection timeout: Please note that for security reasons there is a time-out on your connection. If you have not been active (clicking on some-thing) for more than 60 minutes, you will automatically be disconnected. Completing some parts of the form requires quite some time. Therefore, to avoid any loss of data, a button “Save & Continue” is provided several times in the form. A click on this button will store the project as it is (still going through all the checks for consistency), and let you continue with the completion of the remainder of the form. We strongly encourage you to use this button!

Find the errors: If there are errors in the form, the project is not stored. A big red heading is displayed with some hints where the error(s) occurred. Scrolling down the form will show you where the error is exactly located (fields and headings highlighted in red).

Buttons and links: A short description of the links in the menu on the right and the buttons in the form is given below.

All Projects – Link to return to the projects listing. All unsaved changes will be lost! Note: clicking on any of the items in the top menu has

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the same effect – you are redirected to the new target page without saving any changes.

Create Project – Link to access an empty form to enter a project. All unsaved changes will be lost!

View Project – Link to visualize your project as the other LTV coordina-tors will see it. All unsaved changes will be lost!

Save & Continue – Click on this button from time to time to avoid losing any data in case of a timeout, crash,...

Save & View – Button to store the project and display it as the other LTV coordinators will see it.

Save – This button at the bottom of the page will store your project in the database (maybe display some error messages if it is not happy about the way you completed some of the fields) and then lead you back to the listing of all projects.

Request Publish – Button to store the project in the database and send an automatic email (see Figure 6) to the corresponding working group administrator to request publication. An automatic email will be sent to the contact person of the project as soon as the administrator ac-cepted/rejected the project (see Figures 9 and 10 respectively). Please refer to Figure 1 for a detailed workflow of project publication.

Removing projects from the database: You cannot delete projects. If you want to remove a project definitely from the database, please send an email to [email protected] with:

Subject “Project to be deleted from LTEG Database”

Content The name of the project that you want to be removed.

You will find that most projects can simply be deactivated until the next opening occurs.

Detailed field descriptions: To get detailed information about each field on the form to enter/update the projects, please refer to Appendix A.

Project check by working group administrators: To ensure high quality of LTV exchanges, the regional working groups are in charge of keep-ing an eye on the open LTV positions. Please refer to Figure 1 for a detailed workflow of this process. The work of the administrators is different depend-ing who submits a project. (i) For LTV projects from branches and groups: the administrator will proofread the project, check that the descriptions are

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clear and that the corresponding practical procedures are respected. If ev-erything is fine he/she will publish the project. The contact person(s) of the project an automatically generated email similar to the one shown in Figure 9. Otherwise the contact person(s) of the project will get an email with explicit requests for changes before the project can be published (refer to Figure 10 for an example). Usually projects from branches and groups are not definitely rejected. (ii) For projects from partners and contacts: the administrator does the same work as described previously. Furthermore, he/she has to decide whether the organization is fit (capacity, organization skills,...) to host an LTV. If the project is good and the working group trusts the organization to host an LTV, the admin publishes the project. If not, he/she either refuses unless some changes/provision/guarantees can be given, or he/she rejects it definitely.

If you activated your project and want to be sure that the working group administrator checks it as soon as possible, you can click on the Request Publish button. This will send an automatically generated email to the WG administrator. See example in Figure 6.

Figure 6: Example of the automatically sent email to request the publica-tion of a project. The red parts are automatically completed based on the information stored in the database.

Note that if you change anything in your project (even simply correcting a typo) it will be set back to “unpublished” (blue smiley). You have to, again, request publication such that the project is available online and on the vacancies lists.

Deactivating projects with passed deadlines: To keep the database up to date, projects with an application deadline in the past are deactivated automatically. The contact person of the project gets an (automatically generated) email when this happens (see Figure 7).

4.2 LTV statistics and quality

LTEG (and SCI) would like to know what is done in LTVing. How many vol-unteers are exchanged? What are the trends? How many LTV projects are successful? Who does what in terms of preparation of outgoing volunteers?

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Figure 7: Example of the automatically sent email to inform the contact person of a project that his/her project was deactivated. The red parts are automatically completed based on the information stored in the database.

To answer these questions we need complete data from the organizations involved in LTV exchanges. The collected data will serve several purposes:

• Regular (at least on an annual basis) analysis of the collected data by LTEG to provide trends in LTVing to the SCI network.

• Ongoing rough quality check on the projects.

• Provided to the International Secretariat for annual reports and fur-ther analysis.

Please help us to collect all the data, such that we can get a good picture of LTVing in the SCI network. Do not be afraid of the “quality check” aspect of the survey. LTEG’s aim is to improve LTVing within the SCI network. We need your feedback for this! Positive feedback is of course very nice, but negative feedback is important as well. There are many reasons for problems in LTV projects, and it is very important for LTEG to learn about your experiences and needs. LTEG’s aim is not to punish anyone because of a project that turned out badly. The idea is rather to be able to offer concrete help in order to avoid similar problems arising again with other volunteers.

Please note that the online assessment is only a minimal feedback for LTEG in order to allow the working group to better support LTVing in the fu-ture. It does not replace a complete and personalized final evaluation as each sending/hosting organization is supposed to perform (refer to the LTV practical procedures for details).

4.2.1 How does it work?

Since LTV projects are not bound to follow the calender (and even less the statistical) year, a rule is needed for which year/period an LTV should count. It is finally just a matter of definition in order to make sure that no volunteer

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is left out or counted twice. Since the form for the statistics is combined with some questions about the outcome of the LTV project, organizations are asked to register their incoming and outgoing LTV volunteers after their final evaluation. Hence, all LTVs finishing their project in a given period count as LTV exchanges for this spread of time. For illustration:

• Amy was an LTV from April 2010 until August 2010. She is included in the statistics for 2010.

• Daniel was an EVS from May 2009 until April 2010. He is included in the statistics for 2010 (and not in the ones for 2009).

• Sonja was an LTV from August 2010 until January 2011. She is not counted in the statistics for 2010, but will count towards the number of LTV exchanges in 2011.

The flow-chart in Figure 8 illustrates the process of registering incoming and outgoing LTV volunteers. You might wonder about the redundancy in the collected data (since we get the “same” data twice, once from the hosting and once from the sending organization). This is a desired effect to check for consistency. Do not skip entering your LTVs in the system, thinking that your sending/hosting partner will do it anyway. In case of volunteers that were entered a single time, non-responding organizations will get reminders10.

Figure 8: Typical workflow showing the needed steps to register LTV vol-unteers for the statistics.

4.2.2 How to register volunteers?

Click on the menu item Statistics. If you want to register a volunteer who just finished an LTV project for which you acted as hosting organization, click on Register incoming. If you want to register an LTV who just returned from his/her project abroad (you were the sending organization), click on Register outgoing.

10_{exceptions to this: LTV sent and hosted by the same organization, or LTVs sent (or} coming from) outside of the SCI network

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In both cases you will be asked to complete the same form. Questions are organized in blocks. The first two blocks are used for the statistics. The remaining three blocks relate to the project quality. If you have all information ready, completing the form will not take more than 5 minutes per volunteer. Please note that

• The form has to be completed in one go. You cannot store partially completed forms. Hence, we suggest you make sure to have all the data ready before starting the registration process. A checklist is provided in Appendix D. You might want to print it out and use it during the evaluation with the volunteers.

• In order to get useful feedback for LTEG to figure out what else our WG could do to support you with LTV projects, we do need a minimal feedback. We tried to keep the form as short as possible. However, we know that having to spend 5 minutes per volunteer on statistics and quality feedback is a lot for some LTV coordinators with many incoming/outgoing volunteers. To circumvent this issue, it is possible to request11 further logins to the Long Term Database interface with restricted rights. These users can only enter the statistics and quality data as well as look at (but not edit) the projects in the listing. All other functionalities are blocked. This user is described in Section 6. Completing the form is very intuitive. The questions are explicit. You either have a field to enter plain text, or you can choose your answer from a “drop down list” (sometimes multiple selections are allowed). If you need further explanations for some of the questions, you can click on the corresponding blue question mark (if JavaScript is enabled), or refer to the detailed field description in Appendix C.

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5 Access for working group administrators

The menu bar changed according to your rights. As a WG administrator13, you have access to:

• Projects: Listing of all stored LTV projects. It provides the possibil-ity to edit the projects corresponding to your working group and to cre-ate new projects (for organizations belonging to your working group). It also grants access to the detailed information for all projects. • Publisher: This is the place to publish projects if they fulfill all

requirements.

• Help: A collection of useful documents, links and email addresses if you need help for your work with the long term database interface. • Communication: A collection of important email addresses if you

have questions related to specific projects, LTVing in general or tech-nical issues with the interface.

• Logout: The tab to click once you are done with your work on the long term database interface.

From time to time, you will notice an additional menu bar on the right side of the screen. It provides some additional tools related to the page you are working on. For example, it offers to:

• Create Project while you are on the page with the listing of the projects.

• go back to the listing of All Projects while you are looking at the details of a specific project

• and much more...

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If you do not yet have the login information (or if you forgot your password), send an email with the corresponding request to the contact person of your working group.

13_{It is up to each working group to decide who has the honor to take over this role and} the related tasks.

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5.1 LTV projects database

By clicking on the menu item Projects, you reach the interface to:

• manage LTV projects belonging to organizations monitored by your working group (create, edit, request publication)

• see the complete list of projects in the database (active and inactive, from all organizations)

The first page provides the complete listing of all long term volunteering positions stored in the database. Please note that when talking about an LTV project we mean all long term volunteering positions (including EVS). Figure 4 shows the first few lines of the project listing.

The “drop-down” list above the column Organization allows to search for all projects from a given organization. To see all projects, choose the first entry of the list (blank line). The “drop-down” list above the column Type allows to search for LTV projects from a specific type.

Most column headers can be used to sort the projects:

• Organization displays the name of the hosting organization. The first click sorts the projects by alphabetical order of the organizations. A second click sorts them in the reverse order.14

• Name of the project: The first click will order the projects in al-phabetical order. Second click will order them in reverse alal-phabetical order.

• Active – A project is active (you can send applications of interested volunteers) if there is a yellow smiling icon. Projects with a blue smiley have recently been activated, but were not yet confirmed by the corresponding working group. Do not yet send applications to such projects! If the icon is red and looking sad, the project does not accept applications for the moment. A click on “Active” sorts the project in the order “yellow, blue, red”. A second click displays them in the order “red, blue, yellow”.

• Type of a project tells you (i) which working group is in charge and (ii) what conditions volunteers must fulfill to participate. A click on this header will sort the projects in alphabetical order of their type. A second click on the heading will sort the projects the other way around. Note the blue question mark next to the header. If you click on it, you will see a short description about each project type.

14

If you cannot use all of the described functionalities, you probably do not have a running JavaScript. Refer to Section 2.1 for more information.

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• Deadline to send in volunteers’ application forms. Projects with the mention “ongoing” don’t have a specific application deadline. If the project is active, applications can be sent at any time.

• Info – This column shows which rights you have on the listed projects.

5.1.1 Entering new projects and updating old ones

To enter a new project, click on “Create Project” on the menu in the right part of the screen. To modify a project that is already in the database, click on “edit” at the end of the corresponding line in the projects listing. Please note that you can only modify projects corresponding to your login. Figure 5 shows an example of the form to edit the content of a project. Entering new projects, or updating old ones, is pretty intuitive if you are used to working with web forms. This section will tell you the basic rules to successfully publish your projects. If you need support for specific fields, please refer to Appendix A.

There are a few rules to respect to be able to store projects in the database: • Each field has a maximum number of allowed characters. If you enter more characters than allowed you will get an error message and your project will not be stored.

• Attached documents (infosheet and report from previous volunteers) must be in PDF format.

• You must provide a project type (in the field Long term type). For a project to be eligible for publication (in the online interface and and on the vacancies lists), it has to be “active” (check the corresponding box in the form). However, to be able to store a project as being “active”, it must fulfill additional conditions. These are:

• All mandatory fields must be completed (fields with a bold black head-ing in the form).

• The time span of the project must make sense (see details in Ap-pendix A).

• The application deadline must be in the future.

Short and precise project descriptions: Volunteers should get a good picture of a project in a reasonable amount of time. Hence, we ask you to be concise in your descriptions. Also, the maximum number of characters permitted per field is limited. If you want to provide more information about your project for interested volunteers, write an infosheet and attach this document to your project description.

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Character counts: Each field can hold a limited amount of characters. If you have JavaScript installed and enabled, you will see how many characters are left while typing. If you do not have JavaScript enabled, you will just get an error message when trying to save a text with too many characters. In Figure 5, indications such as “34/50” are displayed below the fields. This means that you are allowed to type another 34 characters15before reaching the maximal (50) number for this field. Fields holding too many characters show a negative count, for example “−11/100” (you typed 111 characters, while only 100 were allowed, you need to delete 11 characters in order to be able to store the project in the database).

Emails and web links: None of the fields appearing in the vacancies lists or online may include an email or internet address. Volunteers have to apply to the projects through their local SCI branch, group or partner. They should not directly apply to the project partner. Projects including websites or email addresses in their descriptions will not be published.

Connection timeout: Please note that for security reasons there is a time-out on your connection. If you have not been active (clicking on some-thing) for more than 60 minutes, you will automatically be disconnected. Completing some parts of the form requires quite some time. Therefore, to avoid any loss of data, a button “Save & Continue” is provided several times in the form. A click on this button will store the project as it is (still going through all the checks for consistency), and let you continue with the completion of the remainder of the form. We strongly encourage you to use this button!

Find the errors: If there are errors in the form, the project is not stored. A big red heading is displayed with some hints where the error(s) occurred. Scrolling down the form will show you where the error is exactly located (fields and headings highlighted in red).

Buttons and links: A short description of the links in the menu on the right and the buttons in the form is given below.

All Projects – Link to return to the projects listing. All unsaved changes will be lost! Note: clicking on any of the items in the top menu has the same effect – you are redirected to the new target page without saving any changes.

Create Project – Link to access an empty form to enter a project. All unsaved changes will be lost!

15

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View Project – Link to visualize your project as the other LTV coordina-tors will see it. All unsaved changes will be lost!

Save & Continue – Click on this button from time to time to avoid losing any data in case of a timeout, crash,...

Save & View – Button to store the project and display it as the other LTV coordinators will see it.

Save – This button at the bottom of the page will store your project in the database (maybe display some error messages if it is not happy how you completed some of the fields) and then lead you back to the listing of all projects.

Request Publish – Button to store the project in the database and send an automatic email (see Figure 6) to the corresponding working group administrator to request publication. An automatic email will be sent to the contact person of the project as soon as the administrator ac-cepted/rejected the project (see Figures 9 and 10 respectively). Please refer to Figure 1 for a detailed workflow of project publication.

Removing projects from the database: You cannot delete projects. If you want to remove a project definitely from the database, please send an email to [email protected] with:

Subject “Project to be deleted from LTEG Database”

Content The name of the project that you want to be removed.

You will find that most projects can simply be deactivated until the next opening occurs.

Detailed field descriptions: To get detailed information about each field on the form to enter/update the projects, please refer to Appendix A.

Deactivating projects with passed deadlines: To keep the database up to date, projects with an application deadline in the past are deactivated automatically. The contact person of the project gets an (automatically generated) email when this happens (see Figure 7).

5.2 Publishing projects

To ensure high quality of LTV exchanges, the regional working groups are in charge of keeping an eye on the open LTV positions. Please refer to Figure 1 for a detailed workflow of this process. The work of the administrators is different depending who submits a project.

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5.2.1 Projects from branches and groups You have to proofread the project.

1. Ensure that the project type is correct. This is typically either the acronym corresponding to your WG, or “EVS”, respectively “EVS-NF”, if the project is to be funded through the Youth in Action pro-gramme16.

2. Ensure that the descriptions are clear and understandable.

3. Correct the English if needed. Pay particular attention that political correct formulations are used. For example, make sure the project talks about physically challenged people rather than about crippled people.

4. Check that the project is in accordance with the applying practical procedures.

5. Make sure that non of the fields appearing on the vacancies list holds any email or internet addresses.

Projects that fulfill these criteria can be published by clicking on the Approve button. If wished, you can add a few words in the field Comments. They will then be added to the email sent automatically to the contact person of the project. See Figure 9 for an example of this email.

Figure 9: Example of the automatically sent email to confirm that a project was accepted and is now published. The red parts are automatically com-pleted based on the information stored in the database. The blue text corresponds to what you entered in the Comments field.

Some fields of the project are editable to WG administrator. If a descriptions is bad (or the used English is bad), it is up to the WG administrator to decide how much editing he/she wants to do. If it is too much work, he/she can

16

Even if most “EVS” projects take place in Europe, it is possible to have Youth in Action programme funded project all over the world.

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simply reject the project and use the Comments field to put a message like “Please do re-write your project description in short and simple sentences. Also, please spell-check your texts before re-activating the project.”

Projects that need major changes to be compatible with the practical pro-cedures have also to be rejected. Use the Comment field to explain to the contact person of the project what he/she needs to improve. This comment is included in the automatically generated email, see for example Figure 10.

Figure 10: Example of the automatically sent email to reject the publica-tion of a project. The red parts are automatically completed based on the information stored in the database. The blue text corresponds to what you entered in the Comments field.

Please note that branches and groups are basically entitled to publish their projects “uncensored”. If their project shows irregularities (non-respect of practical procedures, bad descriptions,...) WG administrators should make suggestions and offer help to improve the project until it reaches the needed standard for publication. The answer “We do not (ever) want to publish your project.” basically does not exist for branches/groups.

5.2.2 Projects from partners and contacts Perform the same checks as for the branches/groups.

1. Ensure that the project type is correct. This is typically either the acronym corresponding to your WG, or “EVS”, respectively “EVS-NF”, if the project is to be funded through the Youth in Action pro-gramme17.

2. Ensure that the descriptions are clear and understandable.

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Even if most “EVS” projects take place in Europe, it is possible to have Youth in Action programme funded project all over the world.

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3. Correct the English if needed. Pay particular attention that political correct formulations are used. For example, make sure the project talks about physically challenged people rather than about crippled people.

4. Check that the project is in accordance with the applying practical procedures.

5. Make sure that non of the fields appearing on the vacancies list holds any email or internet addresses.

Furthermore, you have to

• check whether the organisation is able (capacity, organizational skills,...) to host an LTV

• decide if the project is worth of SCI support (does it fit to SCI aims and ideology?).

If everything is fine and you WG trusts the organisation to do a good job on the hosting, accept the project. Otherwise reject it. The contact person will get the corresponding email automatically. In case of rejection, please use the Comments field to clearly state if the project will be accepted if revised properly, or if it will not be published under any circumstances.

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6 Access for mentors

The menu bar changed. As a mentor19, you have access to:

• Projects: Listing of all stored LTV projects. It grants access to the detailed information for all stored projects.

• Statistics: This is the place to register the incoming and outgoing volunteers.

• Logout: The tab to click once you are done with your work on the long term database interface.

6.1 LTV statistics and quality

LTEG (and SCI) would like to know what is done in LTVing. How many vol-unteers are exchanged? What are the trends? How many LTV projects are successful? Who does what in terms of preparation of outgoing volunteers? To answer these questions we need complete data from the organizations involved in LTV exchanges. The collected data will serve several purposes:

• Regular (at least on an annual bassis) analysis of the collected data by LTEG to provide trends in LTVing to the SCI network.

• Ongoing rough quality check on the projects.

• Provided to the International Secretariat for annual reports and fur-ther analysis.

18_{If you do not yet have the login information (or if you forgot your password), send an} email to your LTV coordinator (or to your organisation’s office)

19_{It makes sense to ask the mentors who know the volunteers and projects to do the} tasks described in this section. However, organisations may choose to give this access right to any other volunteer/staff.

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Please help us to collect all the data, such that we can get a good picture of LTVing in the SCI network. Do not be afraid of the “quality check” aspect of the survey. LTEG’s aim is to improve LTVing within the SCI network. We need your feedback for this! Positive feedback is of course very nice, but negative feedback is important as well. There are many reasons for problems in LTV projects, and it is very important for LTEG to learn about your experiences and needs. LTEG’s aim is not to punish anyone because of a project that turned out badly. The idea is rather to be able to offer concrete help in order to avoid similar problems arising again with other volunteers.

Please note that the online assessment is only a minimal feedback for LTEG in order to allow the working group to better support LTVing in the fu-ture. It does not replace a complete and personalized final evaluation as each sending/hosting organization is supposed to perform (refer to the LTV practical procedures for details).

6.1.1 How does it work?

The flow-chart in Figure 8 illustrates the process of registering incoming and outgoing LTV volunteers. You might wonder about the redundancy in the collected data (since we get the “same” data twice, once from the hosting and once from the sending organisation). This is a desired effect to check for consistency. Do not skip entering your LTVs in the system, thinking that your sending/hosting partner will do it anyway. In case of volunteers that were entered a single time, non-responding organisations will get reminders20.

6.1.2 How to register volunteers?

Click on the menu item Statistics. If you want to register an LTV who just finished an LTV project where your organisation acted as host, click on “Register incoming”. If you want to register an LTV who just returned from his/her project abroad (your organisation had the role of sending), click on “Register outgoing”.

In both cases you will be asked to complete the same form. Questions are organized in blocks. The first two blocks are used for the statistics. The remaining three blocks relate to the project quality. If you have all information ready, completing the form will not take more than 5 minutes per volunteer. Please note that the form has to be completed in one go. You cannot store partially completed forms. Hence, we suggest you make sure to have all the data ready before starting the registration process. A

20_{exceptions to this: LTV sent and hosted by the same organisation, or LTVs sent (or} coming from) outside of the SCI network

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checklist is provided in Appendix D. You might want to print it out and use it during the evaluations with the volunteers.

Completing the form is very intuitive. The questions are explicit. You either have a field to enter plain text, or you can choose your answer from a “drop down list” (sometimes multiple selections are allowed). If you need further explanations for some of the questions, you can click on the corresponding blue question mark (if javaScript is enabled), or refer to the detailed field description in Appendix C.

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7 Access for Quality Checker

The menu bar changed. As a quality checker you have access to:

• Projects: Listing of all stored LTV projects. It grants access to the detailed information for all stored projects.

• Statistics: This is the place to assess the data related to the project quality/outcome.

• TechNews: Improvements that are planned and their progress. • Logout: The tab to click once you are done with your work on the

long term database interface.

7.1 Monitoring the quality of LTV projects

The LTEG AM 2010 decided to start monitoring the outcome of LTV projects to see how LTVing within the SCI network could be improved. Your job as a “quality checker” is to assess the data provided by the send-ing and the hostsend-ing organisations. Based on predefined criteria, you ought to decide if a project ran smoothly or if there were major problems. The idea of the process is not to punish anyone for anything. It is rather a process for LTEG to gain a better insight into the daily problems of LTVing, such that the WG can support LTV exchanges better. A flow chart illustrating the whole assessment process is depicted in Figure 2.

To access the projects to be assessed, click on the icon Quality assessment (or on the menu item Statistics, and then on this icon). You see a listing of projects with different states:

• open Data has been provided, but was not yet assessed.

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If you do not yet have the login information (or if you forgot your password), send an email to [email protected]

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• alertedSG Project has been assessed. There were some serious prob-lems and the LTEG steering group was alerted to contact the hosting and/or sending organisation.

• fine Project has been assessed. There were no or only minor problems. Note that an overview of all project evaluations will be provided to the participants of the next LTEG annual meeting independently of the decision of the quality checkers.

Projects to be assessed are assigned to quality checkers automatically. In the column Operation you can see what rights (or duties) you have for each project:

• view The project has already been assessed. By clicking on the link you can see the details of the assessment.

• assigned The project has not yet been assessed. It has been assigned to another quality checker.

• assess The project has not yet been assessed. The project was as-signed to you, and you can access the assessment form by clicking on the link.

You get an automatically generated email to let you know when you have to assess a project. An example of such an email is shown in Figure 11.

Figure 11: Example of the automatically sent email to request the publica-tion of a project. The red parts are automatically completed based on the information stored in the database.

7.1.1 Assessing the data

The form to assess the projects contains online help (the blue question-marks). Please do stick to the guidelines provided by the online help (also accesible in this manual in the Appendix E) when assessing projects! Oth-erwise it will be difficult to compare projects assessed by different LTEG activists.

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At the end of the form, you can put some notes in the field Comments. After that, you have to decide whether or not the LTEG steering group has to be alarmed to take immediate action for a given project. Please remember that all projects can be discussed during the next annual meeting, thus do only ask the LTEG steering group to take immediate action if it is absolutely necessary (for example if it would be grossly negligent to send another volunteer to the project without first solving some issues).

If you decide to ask the LTEG steering group for immediate action, you have to choose whether the hosting and/or the sending organisation should be contacted. Depending on the choice, a slightly different email will be sent to [email protected]. An example is given in Figure 12.

Figure 12: Example of the automatically sent email to request immediate action from the LTEG steering group to solve some problems regarding a critical LTV project evaluation. The red parts are automatically completed based on the information stored in the database. The blue part is the comment you added in the field Comments of the assessment form.

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8 Overview LTDB users

There are some additional users which are used by the LTEG steering group. For the sake of completeness, the list is given here:

Vacancies list administrator – user that can generate the vacancies lists holding all published projects.

Database administrator – has the same rights as all working group administrators put together.

System administrator – Has the same rights as the database ad-ministrator. In addition he/she can generate new users, passwords, change working group assignments, ...

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A

Creating/updating projects: detailed field

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All fields in the form to create/edit projects are described in detail below. The information content is the same as provided by the online help (the blue symbols with the questionmarks).

Organisation

content Name of the organisation (SCI branch, group, partner or contact)

mandatory yes

additional You cannot modify this field, as you are only allowed to enter projects for the organisation corresponding to your login. Hosting organisation

content By default hosting organisation is set to the same value as “Organisation”.

mandatory yes

additional Some projects (often EVS) are not coordinated and hosted by the same organisation. In such a case, the coordinating organisation (for example SCI Germany) should enter the project in the database and select the hosting organisation (for example SVIT Ukraine) in this field.

Contact person

content Name of the SCI branch/group/partner contact person re-sponsible for this project. The sending organization should contact this person if there are any questions about the project. Application forms for the project will also be sent to this person.

mandatory yes

characters maximally 50 characters

additional This information is not printed in the vacancies list. In case of an EVS which is not coordinated and hosted by the same organisation, please specify a contact person from the coor-dinating branch.

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Contact email

content Email address of the contact person (SCI

branch/group/partner/contact) and if needed of the working group in charge.

mandatory yes

additional Multiple email addresses must be separated by a comma. Volunteer’s application forms must be sent to all email ad-dresses mentioned in this field. This information is not printed in the vacancies list.

Hosting country

content Select the name of the country where the project takes place. mandatory yes

additional By default the country is set to be the country of ’Organisa-tion’.

Long term type

content Select the “type” of your long term project mandatory yes

additional AY: long term project according to the Abya Yala practical procedures; EVS: European Voluntary Service where fund-ing has already been granted; EVS-NF: European Voluntary Service where funding was not yet granted (maybe not even applied for); LTEG: long term project according to the LTEG practical procedures; MIDI: long term project according to the MIDI WG practical procedures. Often, your project type corresponds to the working group (WG) in charge of moni-toring your organization. If you do not know to which WG you belong, refer to Appendix B.

Accreditation number

content Corresponding project number in the database of the Euro-pean commission (EIref)

mandatory only mandatory for projects of type “EVS”

additional format: YYYY-CC-num, where YYYY stands for a year, CC for the country and num is the projet number.

Project theme

content Choose the theme of the project in the given list. mandatory yes

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Project language(s)

content Specify the language(s) that are mostly spoken in the project. If the language is not in the list, please select “other” and specify the language(s) in the field ’Others’ at the end of the form.

mandatory yes

additional To select several languages, click on the first one, then press the Ctrl-key, click on the other languages you would like to select (while keeping the Ctrl-key down).

Country language(s)

content Specify the language(s) that are mostly spoken in the region where the project takes place. If the language is not in the list, please select ’other’ and specify the language(s) in the field ’Others’ at the end of the form.

mandatory yes

additional To select several languages, click on the first one, then press the Ctrl-key, click on the other languages you would like to select (while keeping the Ctrl-key down).

Active

content Your project will be printed on vacancies lists and visible online if you check this box. So if your project is ready to be published, don’t forget to activate it here!

mandatory only check this box if you want to make your project descrip-tion public

additional Your project can only be set ’active’ if it complies with all the rules (i.e. all mandatory fields are completed, the dates of the project make sense, there is at least one open space for a volunteer,...)

Name

content Name of the project mandatory yes

characters maximally 50 characters Location

content Geographical location of the project, name of the city/village mandatory yes

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Number of vacancies

content For how many long term volunteers is the project looking? mandatory yes

additional Only projects with at least one free place can be set as ’ac-tive’.

Number of volunteers

content Number of other volunteers working in the project (future collaborators of the long term volunteer)

mandatory no

Now comes the part about the dates (format for a date: YYYY-MM-DD) and the duration of the project. The system was set up to allow to enter almost any “kind of project durations”: fixed dates, fixed duration (without specific dates) or fixed end/start date without (no specific duration). You will learn to appreciate this flexibility when using the system to enter your projects. However, at the beginning it might be a bit confusion. Below we discuss all options in detail:

1. Project with fixed start date and end date for the volunteer’s engage-ment: specify the respective dates in “Work start”, “Work end”, “Ap-plication deadline” and “Decision date”.

2. Project with a fixed start date, but an open end date: set the given start date, set the end date to 0000-00-00 and write something in period (e. g. “volunteer should stay for at least 3 months”). Provide the “Application deadline” and the “Decision date”.

3. Project without fixed start and end dates:

– No restrictions either on the work start nor on the work end date: set the “Work start”, “Work end” and “Application deadline” to 0000-00-00. Provide some information in “Period” (e. g. “vol-unteer should stay at least 3 months”) and in “Application info” (e. g. “volunteer will get a decision about his/her application within 2 weeks”).

Such project will appear on the vacancies list as “ongoing”, mean-ing that volunteers can apply anytime for any period convenient for them (as long as it complies with the information in “Period”). – If the project can only host someone between given dates (for example in the summer), set the “Work start” to the beginning of this period, “Work end” to the end of this period. Set “Ap-plication deadline” and “Decision date” to 0000-00-00. Provide some information in “Period” (e. g. “volunteer should stay at least 3 months”) and in “Application info” (e. g. “volunteer will

SCI Long Term Projects Database. Extensive Manual

Extensive Manual

http://longterm.lteg.info

Acknowledgements

Table of Contents

1

Introduction

2

General information

3

Public interface

4

Access for LTV coordinators

5

Access for working group administrators

6

Access for mentors

7

Access for Quality Checker

8

Overview LTDB users

A

Creating/updating projects: detailed field

de-scription