How do we know when we're finished?

Quote of the Day: “If you don’t know where you’re going, when you get there you’ll be lost.” — Yogi Berra

Here in the inner sanctum of the Downsize DC management team we’ve been having a Yogi Berra style discussion about the status of our One Sack database project. You’d think it would be easy to know when you’ve completed a task, but it isn’t in this case. Here’s where the confusion comes in . . .

• If One Sack is done when all of our records for Dispatch subscribers, donors, and users of the Educate the Powerful System, are integrated into one database that is being used on a daily basis for all activities, then the One Sack project is indeed finished.
• However, if One Sack is only done when there’s no confusion about which data belongs to which record, then we aren’t quite there yet. Specifically . . .
• We have about 2,000 donor records that could belong to existing Educate the Powerful users, but there’s enough variance in the address information that we’re going to need to go through many of them manually, and perhaps contact some people to clarify the situation. This is the tedious part at the end, that we talked about last week.

So, like Yogi Berra also said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

We’re now moving forward on two parallel tracks . . .

• We’ll have a meeting in the coming week to review our extensive list of new tools that we want to create, and choose the one we’re going to do first.
• We’ll also be doing the manual work to resolve the remaining issues from the One Sack project.

We think this is pretty good news all-in-all, but it get’s better. First, we want to report that our friends at Free Talk Live have chipped in to help us with the financing for this One Sack project. They have . . .

• Waived the fee they normally charge to run our radio ads on their show, plus . . .
• They’re doing “live reads,” so their listeners will know how much they support Downsize DC
• This is an especially big deal because Free Talk Live, now heard on over 80 stations, is one of the Heavy 100 talk radio programs in the country according to Talker’s Magazine
• Many thanks to Ian and Mark for their support, and please check out their show: http://freetalklive.com/

But the news gets even better. We’ve done well enough with financing that we can get by with just $1,000. Obviously, we don’t want to just get by. Yet surely, there’s someone out there who’s been meaning to make a $1,000 contribution, or two people who could do $500, or maybe 500 of you would like to contribute $2 each. Whatever you can do will help.

$1,000 isn’t much, but we do need to raise that amount today, and through the weekend, ideally with some of it coming in the form of new and increased monthly pledges. Contribute here if you can.

Thanks for your support!

Jim Babka
President
DownsizeDC.org, Inc.