Update - October 2, 2003
An Update from the Avalanche Center
http://www.avalanche-center.org/
October 2, 2003
Online in html: http://www.avalanche-center.org/Organization/updates/
Translations: https://translate.google.com/
(To translate this update enter the webpage URL above and then follow
the link on the translated page.)
This is a brief update on what is new and upcoming on the internet
Avalanche Center, http://www.avalanche-center.org/
Quick Contents:
- General News
- Avalanche Store - Logo Items on Sale!
- Incidents Section Improvements
- Education Section, Course listings
- News and Updates Section - NEW!
- How You Can Help - Current Needs
General News
Welcome to the first Avalanche Center update for the 2003-2004 season!
While most people stopped thinking about snow and avalanches over the
summer those of us behind the scenes at the CSAC have continued to pursue
a number of things to help keep this project at the forefront of avalanche
awareness and information dissemination.
While most of the information below focuses on website improvements
we spent a lot of the summer preparing a generic proposal to seek small
grants for operating funds from foundations. This was finally completed
and sent out to about 20 potential sources of support. So far we have
received three responses declining support, but there are over 17 left
to go. Special thanks go out to Chase-Brooke (www.chasebrooke.com)
and especially Rick Padden for helping guide us through the grant process
as part of their free non-profit assistance program which we qualified
for. And also to board member Phil Caterino who has extensive experience
in the non-profit sector and helped with advice and reviews. Regardless
of the outcome of this initial effort we now have materials which can
form the basis for future fundraising efforts, so this has been a big
step forward.
Avalanche safety is a hard thing to fund - the outdoor industry has
shown very limited interest, foundations often prefer to support youth
programs or social services (especially in the current economic climate),
and government agencies involved in recreational avalanche safety in
the US are unfunded or underfunded and left to fundraise for themselves.
Given that most avalanche fatalities today are recreationalists who
purchase skis, snowboards, snowmobiles, etc and who go into the backcountry
by choice it is hard to make a case that our safety is the responsibility
of anyone other than ourselves. Individual contributions remain one
of our most important source of support.
Along with the proposal writing we also spent some time on organizational
development. We have reassembled a new Board of Directors and most of
a new set of Officers. A new part-time student office manager started
working recently. The entire Organizational Info (or About Us) section
of the website has been reviewed, brought up to date and revamped. There
is information there about our board, officers and staff and this will
be expanded as we continue to regroup.
Avalanche Store - Logo Items on Sale!
We ran out of clearance items early in the summer, with the exception
of books. Usually in the fall we just take items off sale and use them
as the start for this seasons inventory, but the few book titles which
we have plenty of will be left on sale for a little while yet.
CSAC shirts and decals are on sale for our cost or close to it. Your
purchase of products with the very cool skiing skeleton logo now will
help our early season cash flow as well as promote this resource as
winter approaches. How long these items will be on sale will depend
on the volume of orders and the size of the inventory and the sale may
end at any time without advance notice, so buy soon!
We have also verified products and prices for the coming season. Most
existing products will still be available and only a few prices were
adjusted. There are some new products out and we will be adding these
to the web store this fall. Remember that we can sell any items in any
of the product lines we carry - if you would like a new item which has
not yet been posted or a non-avalanche item such as a pack please inquire.
(Many of the companies whose avalanche gear we carry also make other
items, but we only post and directly promote avalanche safety gear.
However, the other items can be special ordered on request.)
Incidents Section Improvements
Aside from ongoing link checking and page maintenance the most recent
improvements have involved our search features. By using new php scripting
(with a lot of trial an error) we have been able to significantly improve
our incident searching. Instead of choosing a month and year searches
are now based on the selection of a date range, along with state/country
and activity. We plan to add a key to allow searches for incidents with
a number of fatalities within a specified range as well. The initial
search results are now automatically ordered by date, but they can be
reordered by clicking on the appropriate column heading. The results
page also indicates how many records were found in the search.
We are still reserving full search capabilities for contributors, but
the public search page incorporates these new developments and now lists
the first 10 results rather than 5. (When sorting the results all results
found are included so the 10 incidents listed may not be the same.)
The full version in the contributors section returns all records found
and also gives the total number of fatalities.
Our incidents database now contains the past three seasons with a total
of well over 400 accident reports. In addition to continuing to add
reports during the coming year we are working on going back further
as well and hope to have our 1999-2000 reports be included in searches
later this fall.
Education Section - Course Listings
In our Education Section we have been adding course listings as they
come in. Several guide services have submitted their courses and there
is already a good selection for Colorado and California with a few entries
for other states as well.
We are continuing to make our course listing searchable and have applied
some of the same improvements developed for incident searching. Courses
can now be search for a given date range as well as by state and level.
Like incident results these are returned ordered by date but can then
be resorted by other parameters (such as location or cost) by clicking
the appropriate column heading.
New additions to our educational content are being considered, some
of which may be possible with a bit more php script work. Online lessons
or tutorials are something that has been considered for many years now
and we would like to implement some things along those lines if we can.
However, doing this right takes a great deal of planning, page design,
and scripting. The reason we have not done this so far is that doing
it right would take more resources than we have, and if we can't do
it right we'd rather not present a poor effort. Maybe this will be the
year to introduce something like this, we'll see.
News and Updates Section - NEW!
There is a new section this year for updates and news stories. The
navigation bar icon for this is a rotating snowflake, which is now on
the bar at the bottom of all the other main section pages. This section
will contain information on what is new on the site as well as news
stories.
As we search around for incident information we are finding more news
stories related in some way to avalanches but not to accidents. This
section is an effort to start posting that information, as well as relevant
press releases for things like events and equipment, in one place.
We have always had a "What's New" page but it has rarely
been updated. This season there should be some news posted there periodically.
This will be general overview information, not page-level details. There
is also a script which will list every page updated in the past 7 days
which can be found in this section. This is a good way to see exactly
what has been changed or added, although it does not distinguish between
formatting updates and content changes. (One of these days we will change
it to let viewers select the number of days to check, rather than using
only 7 as it does now.)
How You Can Help - Current Needs
There are a number of specific tasks, many of them small, which we
could use help with. Please contact us if you can help with any of the
following tasks:
Verify course providers - In our Education Section course listings
each state has a list of providers above the specific courses. These
have not been verified in a long time. It would be nice if somebody
in each of these states could verify the contact information with the
providers so that we can keep it up to date, and also to see if there
are additional providers or contacts which should be listed. For states
or countries not listed we will be glad to begin a page if somebody
wants to submit information for it.
Auction - The annual online fundraising auction will take place again
this year in early December. (More on this in future updates!) For the
next two months we will be canvassing the outdoor industry for donated
goods to auction off. Many of you reading this update have the potential
to help us find items to auction. If you work in the outdoor industry,
retailing, or other related fields please consider talking to the appropriate
people about donating one or more items. Or suggest it to your local
retailer. We commonly receive items which are brand new but difficult
to retail because they are last years model. As a 501c3 organization
items contributed to us should be tax deductible.
Contributions and Matching - Making a contribution to help support
our work helps us a great deal, but many people could enhance that benefit
greatly by obtaining matching funds from their employer. Many companies
have such programs, although in the current economic climate they may
be less common than in the past. For the past four seasons we have received
matching contributions, but typically only two or three per season.
Companies participating in the past include Patagonia, Safeco, Microsoft,
and Hewlitt-Packard.
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