I am proud to be one of the first BOPA board members to support this effort, and I was honored to be a part of the local awards ceremony in March at Baltimore Center Stage. Maryland students were awarded Gold Key, Silver Key and Honorable Mentions for their visual art or writing submission. Also, "American Voices" and American Visions" nominees were announced as the strongest regional works. Honored writings were read, and honored visual art was displayed. Gold Keys are automatically forwarded for consideration at the national level. Among the honors are opportunities for recognition, exhibition, publication, and scholarships.
Keynote Speakers were BOPA CEO Donna Drew Sawyer and filmmaker, curator and video essayist Kirk Shannon-Butts, who serves as curator for City Hall, City of Baltimore, and a member of the Baltimore Public Art Commission.
Nationwide, students submitted nearly 340,000 original works this year. The awards program is a venerated program, dating back to 1923. Past recipients include visual artists Andy Warhol, Hughie Lee-Smith, Paul Chan and Ken Burns, as well as writers Sylvia Plath, Truman Capote and Joyce Carol Oates.
Photo (provided by BOPA): In the front row (left to right) me, BOPA CEO Donna Sawyer and Past Board Chair Tom Crawford.
A few months ago I was in the middle of my most important, and ultimately most enjoyable, multimedia project to date. This was the creation of four instructional videos for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), during the final months of my assignment with the CMS Office of Information Technology (OIT) through my employer, government contractor SeKON.
In my role as a Senior Communications Specialist and editor of the OIT newsletter at CMS, I had become familiar with Section 508, the federal government law that mandates the accessibility of documents and media to people with disabilities. However, to work directly with the CMS Section 508 Team (seen below, leading a training session for employees), was an unexpected pleasure. These are the the people behind the oversight of 508 standards throughout CMS, and they required a series of videos to better instruct employees and contractors about the need for and the requirements of accessibility.
The project involved meeting with the Section 508 team, writing and reviewing the script, creating the whiteboard animation, and recording the voiceovers. (CMS maintains its own professional video and audio studios, but for this project, because of the short deadline and to help expedite the process, I handled the one-on-one work with the Section 508 Team and created the animation myself, so I relied on the CMS for only their audio recording and editing services.)
You can see and hear (and read, through closed captioning) these productions on the CMS YouTube Channel:
By the way... the CMS audio team liked working with me so much that they asked me to provide the voiceover for an early version of one of their productions for
MLN Telehealth Services.
Montage of images at the top of this page includes actual screen shots from the white board animation, plus a stock photo of a microphone and facilities similar to those at CMS.
As part of the SeKON team working for the Office of Information Technology (OIT) leadership at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), I attended
Convergence 2018, the fourth annual conference for the IT community at CMS. I have been serving as the Senior Communications Specialist on the project since October 2017.
Pictured: (Above, l to r) SeKON's Dr. Dayo Oyeleye, OIT Deputy Director George Hoffman, SeKON Chief Operating Officer Alison Rosen and me. SeKON Client Relationship Manager Brian Pariroo (below), the person who recruited me to the company, welcomes conference attendees to the breakfast hosted by SeKON.
