New Library

January 21, 2011

William,

It was great talking to you last night, I have slept on your ideas about the library in Narra and as you might guess I have a few suggestions. Oh, who’s kidding who as usual I have a lot of suggestions.

The first one is - think big but act small. By that I mean, your overall concept or mission should be expansive and not limiting. The ‘act small’ part is to start with modest goals and concentrate on the detail of the particular task at hand. The philosophy is if you do a good job on all the little things the big things will take care of themselves (at least, to the point of opening opportunities for the big things).

I suggest you start with a brainstorming session, with whomever and whenever time and circumstances permit. Write every idea or thought down, regardless of practicality or how you think it might relate to your overall vision. Do not concentrate on organizing these ideas – not yet anyways. Make this a running project. Use your old phone as a portable Dictaphone so that you can note ideas you have on the spur of the moment.

As a separate activity set up categories of issues with which you will need to deal with to be successful. For instance, book acquisition, transportation, fund raising, partnerships, accounting, public relation and communication, budget, manpower, space, advisers, cultural issues – the list goes on.

Once you have gone through this exercise it is now time to begin to construct a business plan. Business plans have a standard form – you can find many examples on the internet. Try and tie everything together and set-up a time-frame (make it realistic, not optimistic) – everything happens slower than you expect or want it to happen.

The next step and this step precedes solicitation of books or funds, but not advice on how to proceed or the researching of problems encountered and successes of similar projects, is the design of a communication structure (you are going to be working in a global environment); set up a simple blog – start writing short pieces on the project like:

“Today I spoke with Mike Sula and he offered to run a book drive through Chinatown Coffee…”

Set up a Flickr (or similar site) for photos – very important – take photos of teachers, students, classrooms, school and city. Set up a twitter site and a YouTube site, not to mention a group on Facebook.

Keep in mind the general information theory – all computers and advertising is based on this theory. That is, information is conveyed most effectively through repetition.

I’ll leave it at that for now. I will follow through on the ‘Friend of the Library” and talking to Scott about military transportation, and my transportation vendors.

I look forward to talking to you soon.

Love,

Dad