Week of Thursday Jan. 24, 2008

We are off to a great start! Here are some of the things we went over at our meeting tonight

AWWA-WEF Committee Meeting
We were invited to attend this meeting on the 15th of February, here's more info. We'll talk about it in depth at the meeting, check your schedules by then and let us know if you can come..

Benefit Dinner
Danielle has taken the role as the head of the Benefit Dinner, so if you have any questions about it, send it to her. We will be eating at a restaurant called Mami Nora's on Sunday to test out their restaurant and to convince them to donate their food for our dinner. If you are interested sent Danielle an email. So far we have at least 7 people interested, so we're going to have a big crowd to intimidate them into donating their food. As far as the location of the dinner, we are looking at the Talley Ballroom, Alumni Center, and the Vaughn Towers. If you can think of any other location, post it on the message board under Benefit Dinner.

Research Group Meetings

Right now we are thinking about having our meetings on Wed. or Thurs. at 5:00pm. Since our schedules are conflicting we can possibly alternate between the two. We should be starting back up next week so you will know soon. Hanna and Akeem will be working on the proposal to the SODIS research and the field trip to UNC to analyze their sand filtration system. As far as research presentations, if you do not have a treatment method to research, email Akeem.

Slow Sand Filtration Group: Wednesday, February 6th @ 3:30pm in Weaver Labs.
SODIS Group: TBD (Look for information: http://www.fundacionsodis.org/)

Dr. Borden
Hanna and Akeem are still communicating with Dr. Borden to capture his interest in our project. Hopefully it will become a senior design project so we can progress with our project faster.

Questions for Reed and Luc
Reed is the representative from Water for People who is helping us with our project. He will be going to Cochabamba this weekend, so we came up with some questions. If you have any questions that you think he can answer in Cochabamba, post it on the message board.
Luc works at the capacitation center and is a valuable source of information for our project. If you have any questions for his, please also post them on the message board.

Week of Thursday Jan. 17, 2008

At last week's meeting we met some new people, who hopefully will bring new ideas to our project.
Quick meeting minute:

- The CDs with GIS information are here! We've been working on getting as much information from them on to understandable maps for all. (Some are already posted on the Files section) Anyone with some experience on ArcGIS or related programs, please get in touch with Hanna (hkrodriguez@gmail.com).

- Benefit Dinner:
* We need someone to get involved in this! Akeem has most of the information, just reservations remain and a formal person to appoint to this task (ASAP!!!).
* Tentative date: Weekend of February 23 !!! (COMING SOON!!!)
* Caterers: Mama Nora (New restaurant in Durham)
* Location: Carrol Joyner Visitors Center (accross from Wolf Village in Western Blvd.) or McKimmon Center.
* Miscelaneous: McKimmon Center has tables and chairs for rent. If we decide on the visitors center, we'd have to be transport them from the McKimmon Center.
More info on the Visitors Center on the Discussion and the Files.
- Research committees:
* New research will be taken over by a new member, related to ceramic filters. Once we get the date settled, he'll be one of the first ones presenting.
* For those who haven't presented: be prepared to really soon. We need to determine whether or not another treatment method will be experimented on so Dr. Knappe can do his thing and fin the resources to get it done. This means that once you present and we determine which methods we'll use, you should prepare a proposal for Dr. Knappe, go over it with him so we can hopefully get all the funds we need ASAP.
* Hanna and Akeem met with Dr. Knappe last week for the SODIS proposal and are doing pretty well. We'll get you up-to-date on that next meeting but basically the experiments will begin soon!!!

- Other announcements
* Reed Palmer, our contact from NC Water for People is making a trip to Bolivia to the Water for People - Bolivia headquarters, where he'll ask some questions and try to get some information we requested. * Mr. Luc Mattheij, the director of CETCFIA (the Capacitation Center) will be contacted at the end of this week. If on your research you come across some questions you might want to ask him, please post it or bring it to Thursday's meeting. We will be punching in some numbers as far as existing tanks' capacity and such, especially since we have a new tank to account for than the two the assessment trip people saw. An mainly because of the fact that we'll be supplying water to a hospital during the dry season too!! We should be doing that on Thursday, so, if you can, overlook the assessment report, the new tank specs, and Mr. Mattheij's answer to the questions (where he explains more about the hospital) posted on the Files.