Group Reflection

1. Group meetings right before leaving the site each working day were very useful for coordinating our comparatively large group.
2. Computer labs take a lot of maintenance, often more than the community group can afford to provide. Everything that can be automated should be.
3. It is much faster to reinstall Windows than to clean a system of all its junk and malware, but you might have to get permission from Lewis & Clark LS first. We should have done so earlier in the month.
4. Even if you think you’ve fixed a problem, you may need to go back and fix it again… on the last day, right before you leave.
5. Detailed inventory sheets are invaluable. Make sure they are also legible, complete, and up-to-date.
6. Just like if we were playing a LucasArts computer game, whatever we may want is in the mysterious locked file cabinet.
7. Katrina drives like a crazy woman 
8. Often what you think you will need to do changes once you start a project. Be prepared to adapt quickly.
9. Listen to what your clients/partners need, but also watch what they actually do too.
10. As unlikely as it may be, efforts should be taken to create documentation while the work is being done, rather than doing the documentation after the work is completed.
11. Between Lewis and Clark, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the library board, Centreville has to deal with several indifferent or otherwise distant bureaucracies which have an inordinate say in how the library does its business. Public libraries are tough places to get things done.
12. Some sort of air-tight administrative permissions setup is invaluable in a public computer lab.
13. Computer and information literacy training will be an increasingly important part of children’s education. The best means of providing that education has yet to be decided.
14. Deciding on an optimal OS for a computer lab would benefit from on-site observation of real computer use, and perhaps interviews or even focus groups.
15. The only thing harder than networking computers is networking printers.