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Our team is working on our white paper draft to submit next week.

Our group has shifted away from the presentation and into full white paper mode. Remaining sections not covered in the presentation have been "assigned" to group members. I created a basic cover page and a draft of the section covering Greater Lafayette HRC sites.

After evaluating our white paper outline and deciding which elements should be presented on Thursday the 20th, we each worked on slides and notes/scripts for the presentation. Frank focused on background and questions, Rita focused on HRC sites beyond Tippecanoe County, Karen focused on opportunities for TCHRC website development, and I focused on Greater Lafayette sites. Due to difficulties in aligning our schedules, we communicated through the weekend and into this week through e-mail and our Drop.io site.

I am finishing up a section on Greater Lafayette HRC sites.

Right now we are waiting on an interview, and then we are going to rock it out in a marathon group writing session. Everyone is feeling pretty good about the whole outline thing, which means that we mostly need to get the text in there. Our recommendations are mainly educational I think. The outlying area in Tipp. needs to know more about what discrimination looks and feels like before they report it, and if the educational sponsor is the Council, all the better.

On Thursday, October 30th, the group discussed the outline of the white paper and assigned sections to individual members. I will contribute to the recommendations section, and will write about the Lafayette and West Lafayette HRC sites. Due to work for the PW Showcase, I was not able to do further work. There will be more to report next week.

Dear Business Writing Peers,
Since our last meeting with the Tippecanoe Human Relations Commission (THRC), which I have attached as a separate .doc file to this post, I have been entrusted with a follow--up task.

I contacted Mr. Mike Piggott to confirm some of the remaining and rather outstanding questions that were not addressed at the October 2008 meeting. Mr. Piggott was not present, but both Edith Pierce-Thomas and Shannon White were available. Moreover, David Blakesley was also on site recording the respective minutes for the October 2008 meeting.

This past week, I researched six other Indiana city Human Relations Commissions websites and eight other Human Relations Commissions' sites in other states. I wrote up a summary of each, highlighting features of each that I found to be particularly user-friendly for potential clients.

After posting my research on our group Drop.io site we are now comparing what we consider are important and necessary features for a well functioning and user friendly website with the Tippecanoe HRC website.

Our group has gathered a great deal of research, so it looks like the next step is to figure out where to focus our attention for the white paper.

Magnificent Cougar To Do List!
Ex Sum: Name problem (HRCT does not get complaints) and possible solutions (educating about discrimination, raising awareness, stream-lining the process for easy communication)
Intro: More in depth with issue and the research and areas that we investigated WOOT!
Background/research/previous approaches:History, local issues, WLHRC and LHRC and their work, how other communities work with HRC and their processes...  
Solutions: