Austin Meeting—Programs Directory - FY04
Prepared By Deb Jacobsen, Laura Estes, and Andy Bray
February 20, 2003
Where we are now:
Our deliverables for this year were to:
1) Verify and update program information in each region by 9/30/03;
Centers will need to update information. There is little they will
have to do on the coding end.
2) Add new programs as information is available;
3) Approve a QA/QC document (also known as the Collection Policy)
to address scope of data collection and display issues.
Items 1 and 2 are regional center responsibilities. The third item
requires national participation.
A draft QA/QC Policy was presented in Boston. Based on comments
from reviewing centers, two outstanding issues must be resolved
before approval of the Collection Policy:
1) Inclusion of a technical data definition. The program manager's
grant has covered creating this reference document. It is available
for administrative review upon request. The web group recommends
approval of this as an addendum to the Collection Policy.
2) Agreement on how to describe programs. A set of descriptive elements
was agreed upon before launching the Programs Directory. However,
the current database (and the national program search) uses a field
called "expertise" that has caused a number of problems.
The field was poorly defined and center use varied from not at all
to adding many new words to meet individual center needs. The result
is a quality issue in that the search performs poorly and is misleading.
In Reno the web group recommended that a work group brainstorm options.
That group made an initial proposal to the whole web group on February's
call and is waiting for comments back.
Options are - do not attempt to describe what programs do (this
seriously limits the functionality of the database), come up with
a controlled vocabulary (this has been tried and failed and is very
time consuming) or allow programs to describe what they do (shares
the data management burden with programs and gives us more useful
information than our own cataloging).
The P2Rx Program Manager is waiting on EPA funds, as recommended
in Boston, to create an input form that centers will use to update
their regional databases and that will simultaneously update the
national directory. This form will assist regional centers and make
the national directory more current and responsive to regional input.
It will also save both the Regional Centers and the Program Manager
time that would have been spent manual updating the information
in two places.
The Program Manager will remove the current search from the national
directory and provide an alternate search before the end of the
fiscal year.
How the Programs Directory helps P2Rx meet its goals:
Serve as the "first-stop" for pollution prevention
information for environmental service providers - The Directory
acts as a first stop for information on P2 Assistance Providers.
By providing detailed information about programs in the Directory,
we allow providers to more quickly connect with assistance providers
who share similar interest or who may be able to help with a shared
challenge.
Increase the awareness, accessibility, and usability of
P2 information. - The Directory acts as a referral service to P2
professionals from around the country and helps market the services
of our regional partners. The Directory is a value-added service
P2Rx provides to its regional partners who assist centers in the
development and dissemination of a number of the networks products.
Additionally, by compiling detailed information on the services
of programs, P2Rx is making it easier for individuals and businesses
to access the assistance they are looking for. Working with other
groups in the future to broaden the access to the Directory, P2Rx
will help to raise awareness about the wealth of experience and
services available at programs from around the country.
Facilitate dynamic, regional P2 networks. - The regional
directories are a resource for the regional networks that act as
an online phone book of programs from throughout the region. More
importantly though, the regional directories allow programs to learn
about what other programs in their region have expertise that they
may be interested in leveraging or learning from.
The P2Rx Program Directory and the Regional Center Directories
are unique to the P2 assistance community in the volume, depth,
and quality of information that whose collection and maintenance
is made possible through the distributed P2Rx Network.
Deliverables for FY 04:
- Centers will implement new program description requirements
in the regional programs directory as defined in the QA/QC Policy
(partially funded under the current year's grants and could be
partially funded under FY04 grants).
- Centers will update their regional programs directory one time
over the course of the year
- Centers will work with the Program Manager in providing the
Programs Directory to at least one partner (e.g. NPPR Yellow Pages,
Compliance Assistance Clearinghouse)
Resources required for FY04:
Programming - Regional Programs Directories would need to
be updated based on revisions put forward in QA/QC Policy, possibly
including the modification of the way programs are catalogued and
how this information is stored in the database; coding work could
be performed centrally and distributed. Estimated cost for code
development - $10,000; estimated time for implementing code at each
center - 3 days.
Cataloguing - Ongoing cataloguing of new programs as identified
by each center as well as the annual updating of all programs in
the database; recataloguing of existing programs to accommodate
quality issues identified in QA/QC Policy. Estimated time dependent
on size and scope of regional program directory; rule of thumb would
be 20 minutes per program.
National Collaborations - any exchanging of program information
with partners that would involve further describing or cataloguing
of programs would need to be funded through other mechanisms.
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