These pages are obsolete and being maintened mostly as a kind of "personal historical footnote" to the Y2k non-event, er, rollover. 

Happy New Year!

Beginnings of things are important.  As you begin your community preparedness project it's important to take a breath, marshal resources and built political momentum.  Your project will be more likely to succeed if you have a few well regarded leaders in your corner.  And you´ll need a "story" before you approach them.

In a way, this may be the hardest and loneliest part of the project.  You may find yourself getting frustrated and shrill as your comments appear to fall on deaf ears.  Recognize this tendency.  When you see it happening, take a breather.  If you are really feeling "stuck", give yourself the project manager interview.  You´ll find that this is a good way to better describe that which you´re getting stuck on -- and with that, figure out a way to get past the problem.

Examples and resources

A "Project Charter" is a questionnaire that is useful to organize your thoughts and build agreement as to what the project is about.  Follow the link and you'll see a generic version of the one that was used to plan a community preparedness project here in Minnesota.  This is only the charter for the planning,  the "deliverables" include most of the rest of the documents on this site.

Here's a PowerPoint sales pitch that you may be able to use as an outline for discussions with leaders in your community (you can either read it through your web browser, or download the pitch and use PowerPoint to view/edit it).

Developing detailed workplans for the project is incredibly tedious.  The rest of the sections of this site have detailed tasks, but here´s the complete workplan in downloadable format.  Go here if you are an MS Project user and want to download a file that you will work with in Project (or any other project manager that can read "mpx" format files).  Go here if you want to see an HTML version of the tasks and dates. This is only for a person who does NOT have MS Project and wants to read the task list.

Here´s a wonderful Y2k audit report that gets into all kinds of detail and may prove useful for the nitty-gritty planning stage where you´re actually getting out there and counting things.