Find an organization (City, County, Business, Utility Company, Community Organization, etc.)

Find an organization (City, County, Business, Utility Company, Community Organization, etc.) in Southern California that is currently engaging in a project based around Sustainability and/or Resilience. This could mean increasing their own resilience/sustainability, increasing local resilience, or creating tools to help others increase their resilience. The project should in some way involve information technology in its planning, execution, or maintenance.

 

In a few paragraphs, describe this project.

 

Some questions you might answer:

 

What threats is this project designed to resist? (i.e. what are the risks with how things are done now?)

What systems/communities will this project protect? How?

Who is in charge of this project? What other organizations are involved and how?

How is IT involved in this project. Would the project be possible without IT?

How much will this project cost? How is it funded?

How long will this project take to complete?

How is the project being planned? Managed? Monitored?

Tips for finding a project:

 

Casting a wide net on google is not the best way to approach this assignment. It’s easiest to find these projects if you look at specific areas/systems/threats to sustainability (for example, looking at a specific river or at a specific consequence of climate change).

 

Serious projects often cost millions of dollars and require buy-in from multiple organizations, so there’s always at least a small amount written about it. Likewise, organizations (such as cities) often go out of their way to highlight their sustainability projects. This is why it’s often easiest to start with a particular city and see what projects they’re doing.

 

If you’re still having problems finding a project, come to the teaching staff’s office hours. There are office hours throughout the week, all listed on the Canvas Calendar.

 

Guidelines:

 

For credit, you must have at least one source. For full credit, you should have at least two sources. Be sure to both cite your sources within your answer, as well as give us a link to your sources afterwards.

You need to discuss an actual project, not just an event or new business, etc. The specific project needs to transform the physical or social world in some way. A list of green “priorities” or a vague series of things an organization would like to maybe do someday is not suitable for this assignment.

You can do a proposed project OR a project completed in the last 5 years.

If the project is not explicitly described in terms of sustainability or resilience, you will need to explain why the project is nonetheless obviously focused around one of those topics.

If you’re not sure if a project will work for this assignment, come talk to the teaching staff.

Don’t use ChatGPT or similar systems or you’ll get a free trip to OAISC.