OKC 2010 draft announcement. 2010-05-18d

The Oklahoma BRFSS program will be hosting a Survey Supervisor and Interviewer Training Workshop ** (coordinated with BSB and Claude Comeau). This workshop was very well-received in 2009. We are planning to hold a similar 2 day workshop in August 2010 that will include a focus on the new cell phone protocols, the upcoming CPPW/ARRA projects, and other BRFSS data collection issues and concerns.

The dates for the 2010 workshop are August 23 & 24 (Monday and Tuesday) at The Hampton Inn & Suites- Oklahoma City/Bricktown. Room rates are $83 single, $113 double, $143 triple, $173 quad. There will be no cost ***to attendees for participation in the workshop session (beyond their own travel, lodging, and meals).

This workshop is designed to introduce and discuss issues and provide information that will improve BRFSS data collection quality and other BRFSS practices. The goal, as before, will be to exchange information with other data collectors about best practices, effective tactics, and useful experiences. Last time, participants found the combination of presenters and the following discussions between participants very helpful.

This year we will include discussion and review of cell phone experiences and the cell protocols, as well as discussions of landline and mail survey issues. With many states’ CPPW/ARRA projects starting in August or September, we will have a session for sharing experiences and questions about the preparations and early stages of those new surveys. Other topics are also being explored and will be added in the next few weeks. Your comments and suggestions are encouraged and appreciated.

Please send us topic ideas you would like us to consider for the conference. Those could be topics that you would like to learn more about, or topics you would be willing to present to the group. We welcome new ideas for new topics we have not covered in past sessions, as well as suggestions for continuing discussions of ongoing issues.

There will be a section where states can share their state's interviewer training materials. We would like to compile information to include in our package for the conference during the state-sharing sessions. Hopefully you will send or bring us what you have that is unique from your state to make the package complete, so that we can share information that might assist all of the states.

To help us plan, we would like to get a preliminary count of how many people may be attending. If you and/or some of your staff are interested, please let us know by answering the next few questions and sending your responses to: Andrew Evans (a.evans@srbi.com).

1) What state or organization are you from? _________________________
a. How many attendees may be coming from your state? _____
b. What are their positions? (coordinator, project director, supervisor, interviewer, etc.) ____________________________________________

2) How likely is it that your staff will attend?
a.) Will definitely attend.
b.) Are fairly sure we will attend.
c.) Need more information before we can decide.
d.) Think we can but need to check on travel (funding).
e.) Would like to attend, but are unable to because of travel (or some other) restriction.
f.) Are not interested in attending.
g.) Unsure
h.) Other_____________________________________

3) What topics would you like to learn about at the workshop? _____________________________________________
4) What topics would you be able to present to the group, or lead discussions on? _____________________________________________
5) What materials would you be able to share with other participants? ___________________________________

We would appreciate your response by Monday, May 24, 2010.

Since our email lists may not be up to date, please accept our apologies if you received duplicates of this message, and please forward it to anyone who you think might be interested.

Thank you very much.

Slow connection 8/23 11am

Sorry about the slow/frozen audio/video/pres. Dimdim seems to be slow right now. We'll try to get the next presentations cached again and see whether that helps.

Travel note - Airport Express

Information from Joyce Kirksey and Karin Mathison on airport-to-hotel travel:

Take the Airport Express to the hotel. They are at the airport for every flight. The # is 405-681-3311. They have 24 hours service to and from the airport.

The cost is $20. You won’t need a reservation from the airport to the hotel, since a shuttle leaves about every 8 minutes. They take MC and Visa right in the shuttle. From the hotel back to the airport, you will need a reservation, which you can make from the hotel once you know how long the ride takes. It should be about a 15-20 minute ride is what they told me.

Agenda revision - communication ideas

We've made a minor revision to the agenda. The Tuesday afternoon General Sharing session has a suggested topic to get us started: ideas for improving communication within the data collector community. Email, information distribution, working collaboratively - anything is fair game. Whether you think something's working well, or especially if you don't, we'd be glad to hear from you.

Web conference practice sessions: Aug 20,

Claude will be hosting 2 practice sessions for the web conferencing software on Thursday, August 20: one at 10 am EDT, and the other at 3 pm EDT. Email him if you want to be included but haven't signed up yet.

Agenda Revision - Web session numbers

The agenda has been updated to include a column showing which web conference sessions will be associated with each on-site session.

Agenda revision - no call center visit

We had to delete the "Visit to Oklahoma Call Center" from the agenda, due to lack of available transportation. We'll change the 4:45-5:15 pm time to Open Discussion instead. The updated listing is posted in the links to the right.

Remote Viewing - Initial Information

(Look below for older posts, and to the right for links to useful sites and documents.)

We're going to try something new for the Oklahoma workshop presentations. We'll be sharing them over the web, so people who can't attend in person can still view them. There are a number of details that we're still working out, but here's the basic information. As things change, we'll update this blog.

We'll be using a web site named DimDim.com to host the "broadcast" of the meeting. If you want to view the sessions remotely, you'll use a web browser to open a special URL that takes you to our meeting on DimDim. Your browser window will display a number of things:

- A copy of the current presenter's slides, advancing along with the In-Room (IR) slides being shown.
- Audio of the IR presenters (and maybe other IR people) speaking.
- Video of the presenters (when possible).
- A chat window where you can type messages that will be visible to other remote viewers, and to the person running the IR broadcasting PC (separate from the presenter). If you have questions for the presenter, that person can relay them to the IR group so that we'll have a mix of remote and IR contributions to the discussion.

You should be able to connect and view the broadcast from any computer that meets the system requirements: a broadband internet connection, an up-to-date web browser (IE 6+ or Firefox 2+, Mac/Win/Linux), and Flash 9 installed. It's possible, though, that security settings on your own site's network (like firewalls) will block you from connecting.

Up to 50 different remote computers will be able to connect, so you can gather a group at your site to all watch together on one computer, or connect individually from your office.

We're planning to do a test broadcast a couple of weeks before the actual workshop, so that people who will want to connect remotely can try it out. That will let us all make sure our connections work, get settings adjusted, and practice communicating back and forth. The dry run will make it much easier to participate in the actual broadcast from Oklahoma.

If you think you might be interested in remote viewing (even possibly), please download and fill out the form at this link and email it to Claude Comeau so that we can let you know when the test meeting will be. We'll need to have email addresses for all potential remote viewers so we can send the URLs for the test and actual meeting connections.

It's the first time we're doing this, so we'll be filling in more details as we go, and some of the plans may change. As we get closer to the workshop dates, we'll post updates about the DimDim information (and other workshop news) here on the blog.

If you have questions, you can post a comment here or email brfss2009okc@gmail.com. Thanks.

Bob Cradock

First Blog Post

(Look below for older posts, and to the right for links to useful sites and documents.)

We'll be posting information about the August 2009 Workshop on this blog, to make it accessible to as many people as possible. This will be updated as things change.

Emails will still go out, but since we know it's not always foolproof to make sure those reach everyone, and it's confusing to sift through multiple messages to see what's current, the blog will help avoid that.

This is not an official CDC or BRFSS site, but just a way for the planning committee to communicate with people interested in the workshop.

Thanks, and if you have suggestions, you can post comments here or email brfss2009okc@gmail.com.

Bob Cradock