Supporting Elizabeth

In response to Elizabeth's request for help, I suggested that we could set up a buddy system to make sure that any commitment we made to Elizabeth would be kept. I initially suggested that we could get into small groups in order to support each other.

Reading people's responses to Elizabeth gave me the impression that there were some people who wanted to help but could in no way promise to be reliable, mostly due to their own health concerns. This saddened me a little, and I wondered if it would be possible to provide a framework to enable these people to help Elizabeth, also.

With the help of the boyfriend, I think that I have come up with a plan which will enable everyone to do what they can without the worry that things will not get done. This would be a buddy scheme in which everyone was involved, and would be based on this website: http://www.rememberthemilk.com/.

The way I envisage it working is that everyone who wants to make a commitment to e-mail Elizabeth does so. They then enter the details onto the website (or let me know the details and I will enter them myself). This sets up a daily, weekly or monthly task that displays, in date and time order, so that everyone can see it. When anyone completes their task, they go onto the website and mark the task as completed.

If an item was not marked as completed by a certain time period after its due time (we might want to discuss this), the person monitoring the site would complete the task (i.e. send the e-mail) themselves. The idea behind this is that some people would not know whether or not they will be able to send the e-mail until either they do send it, or they do not send it; there would be no need to let anyone know in advance whether or not they would be OK to do that. There would therefore have to be people monitoring the site (details to follow).

There would be no guilt and no judgement associated with not sending the e-mail when you were supposed to - this is intended to be a support system, not a way to make people feel bad. It is expected that some of the people I would like to take part will often not be able to send the e-mails they are down for, and this is to be a friendly safety net.

The time zone we would be working on is Victoria time, as that is Elizabeth's time zone. This is GMT - 8 hours. Details of your time zone can be found here: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/.

As I mentioned above, we would need people to keep an eye on the site. I can commit to Sunday, Monday and Friday 08.00 - 16.00 Victoria time, and will often also be able to do the same on Thursdays and Saturdays. This means that we could well need people to oversee the site on Tuesday and Wednesday 08.00 - 16.00, and every day 16.00 - 00.00. I am aware that this is very much based on my thoughts (other people may have different times for availability), and also that, once we know when e-mails are due to be sent, the amount of monitoring will go down as people will just need to check the site when e-mails are due to have been sent.

If people were to volunteer to monitor the site, they would take full responsibility for checking the site at appropriate intervals and sending missed e-mails promptly. I think that they should also make it known if they encounter any problems. I think that this would be as flexible as possible - people do what they can and make sure that as much coverage as possible happens.

If people who were not monitoring the site noticed that an e-mail needed sending (after the due time), they could mark the e-mail as sent and then send it themselves. If people fell behind with their sending, they might want to talk to other people about setting up a smaller buddy system between themselves, but then again they may not. There would certainly be no requirement to do so.

If people wanted to add tasks such as sending letters, I think that this would be a slightly different system (although not necessarily). My thought is that I personally would not like to commit to sending letters in lieu of letters sent by somebody else, as I find writing letters really difficult as it is and struggle to get my own done. I would be happy to amend my letters to include, say, $5 for beer/a treat, or whatever, though. This is a topic I am happy to discuss further if anyone wants to do so.

Let me know what you think in the comments. If you want to take part in this, please e-mail me: optistatic at hotmail dot co dot uk. My Remember The Milk e-mail address is a different one, which I am happy to give out on an individual basis but do not want to have published on the Internet. Once I receive your e-mail I will invite you to join Remember the Milk as a friend though my other e-mail account, and we will see if we can get this concept off the ground!