Meeting Eighteen

Today everyone stayed back after school to complete our survey analysis and to sort out survey answers again for our cross-analysis.

Just a few more analysis and we can move on to our recommendations!

Meeting Seventeen

Chronos met us today to discuss about our progress of our report. I asked him if we are on the right track overall and he said there's nothing much wrong about our report except for a few analysis that we should include to make it more "firm"

He also told us to take note of the consistency of the words used and to update our FYP blogs regularly.

After this meeting, we felt more urgent to get things done as other teams seem to be finishing soon!

Meeting Sixteen

Absent for today's meeting as I was sick. Team mates picked out information of certain questions to do cross-analysis so we had to go through the surveys one by one again to sort out the answers.

After doing so, they delegated the work again to come up with the cross-analysis that are needed!

Teamwork = efficiency

Meeting Fifteen

Today's meeting was at SMU! Reason why is because it is a saturday and we wanted a change of environment to do our project today.

Today's MAIN objective was to compile our survey results together so that we could do up the charts and graphs of every single question and then move on to our anlaysis of the results.

While we were doing that, I found out that the surveys that I gotten some were not completed! Like it was just two pages done and they gave back the surveys to us. Also, some didn't understand how to complete the survey questions. They ticked when asked to rank, or ranked when asked to rate. And in the end we threw away 30 surveys! So we are only left with 120 surveys for analysis.

Sham got the collated results and did the graphs up on the excel sheet. Our day was spent like that telling each other numbers and flipping pages.

Meeting Fourteen

Today's meeting agenda is finalizing the report format and delegating the tasks of report writing.

We sent Chronos our report format the other day and he discussed briefly with us what are the things to be changed like the 'Hypothesis of our report' and to include why did we choose our three eco-friendly concepts.

After the changes of the report format were made, we delegated the work load and compiled the survey results equally. Also, we did up our Literature review and synopsis together to ensure the consistency of it.

We stayed in school till around 5pm and went home to finish up the remaining work.

Meeting Thirteen

Today was supposed to be our third round of surveying and nison, kelye, jesslyn and i met up at city hall mrt station to go to Suntec City Convention Centre together. Shamela couldn't join us as she has school today.

When we reached Suntec City Convention Centre, the event wasn't even set up! We tried to look around to see if we got the location wrongly but it seems like there wasn't any event going on. We thought STB must have gotten the dates wrongly. We thought this would be another wasted trip but nison who's from City Harvest Church suggested to go to Singapore Expo for Asia Conference. It's a religious conference organized by Christians and nison said that there would be a lot of participants that we could survey on.

So off to Expo we went. After the long mrt ride, we finally reached Expo! But there wasn't any conference going on. Actually the conference only starts in the night! We were already there around 2pm. We tried to look for alternatives and we saw Home Decor Exhibition with exhibitors showcasing their products. And we surveyed them in the end! But of course, we explained to them what our survey is about and made them understood as a participant's point of view.

After collecting around 40 surveys, we ended our day!

Meeting Twelve

Carbon Forum Asia 2008

Today we got ZERO survey results. The event organizers refused to let us survey their delegates because they are afraid delegates might feel "too tired" after doing our survey. They actually hired part time stuff to conduct their own event survey hence they are afraid that the delegates might be reluctant to do the event survey after completing ours.

So with that reason, we went back feeling dejected. It's another important day wasted and we had to think of something to ensure we are adhered to our timeline. We decided to meet up next tuesday to do a final round of survey!

Meeting Eleven

Today is the second round of surveying the delegates. We will be going down to Raffles Convention Centre for the Aviation Outlook Asia 2008. When we went down, it was unfortunate that all the delegates are attending workshops all the way until 5pm so we only managed to get 30 surveys.

I was quite disappointed that we only managed to get 30 survey results when our actual target was 50. But then again, it can't be helped. I'm just hoping that the next time round will be better!

Meeting Ten

Today is D'Day! We are going to start our first round of survey! With that in mind, we headed down to Suntec City Convention Centre to the two conferences going on.

JEC conference actually had this exhibiton going on too for the participants so this allowed us to get in touch with the delegates easier. So we waited outside of the exhibition halls for the delegates as they make their way out.

At the end of the day, we collected 50 surveys! But of course we banged into "walls" along the way. Some delegates just didn't want to entertain us or some are very enthusiastic but they can't understand english that well so we had to explain each and every question to them in chinese.

But along the way, we got quite good responses like "oh, you're from the hospitality faculty?", "this idea seems good!". So I'm quite happy afterall.

Meeting Nine

As we didn't have time to edit our survey questions at the previous meeting, we did it today as requested by Chronos. While editing the questions, we discussed among ourselves on how each question will help us in our research and analysis and made sure that it's not just another redundant question.

The events that we searched previously were over or the event organizer didn't get back to us so we went to search for upcoming events for this week. After getting the information of the event, we called or emailed the event organizers to inform them about surveying the delegates. Some rejected us straightaway but there are some who agreed to let us in after looking at our survey questions.


These are the two events that we will be going to next week: ITB Asia and JEC Asia, both at Suntec City Convention Centre.

Meeting Eight

Today we met up with Chronos to discuss about our survey questions that we've just done up. After this, we are able to go to events like conferences or exhibitions to survey the delegates and participants.

These are the pointers that were discussed:

1. Surveys questions have to be purposeful

2. Green initiative movement in recent years has to be edited into paragraphs as it is more explanatory

3. Survey question techniques have to be clear in getting the answer you want, e.g ranking questions to eliminate

4. We have to standardize the words used in surveys

5. Question 4.3 has to switch with question 4.2

6. Asking delegates what they think that are wasteful in events and then can be recycled

7. Paperless - pre-conference, during conference and post conference

8. Rephrase the questions to more rating and ranking (This allows us to know the perceptions of the participants better)

After that, we went to Singapore Tourism Board website to look for conferences and exhibitions that we can go to. Knowing that we can't just start surveying the delegates like that, we looked for the event organizers' numbers, hoping to have access to the event.

Meet-up with Nison

Today Nison and I decided to meet up to look through our survey questions before sending it to Chronos.

Points that were discussed:

1. Survey seemed too "sudden". It would be more appropriate to give a brief introduction of what this survey is trying to achieve.

2. Consistency of words in the questions. E.g. Delegates/participants; Ranking from 1 to 5 (1 being the most important)

3. We finished up the questions about paperless

After that, we sent the survey questions to Chronos and our team members. Selamat Hari Raya!

Meeting Seven

I was absent due to not being able to find replacement for work committment.

My team members came up with the first draft of survey questions and was sent to me. I looked through it at home and edited the wordings and format of the questions.

I found that our questions were too vague and delegates might not be able to understand so I called Nison up and asked if he has any suggestions. Both of us thought that it would be good to meet up on 1st of October which is a public holiday to finish editing the survey and send it to Chronos.

Meeting Six

After we have compiled our literature review, we sent it to Chronos and he is to go through with us what we have found and how to improve on it today.

These are the various pointers discussed:

1. Include references for our literature review. This is important as we actually forgot to name our resources which will be deemed as plagiarism.

2. To tidy up our individual reviews. Chronos stated that we need to "link" our literature review back to our fyp topic. It means that we have to let the readers know that our literature review actually helps us with our fyp topic. So we need to sort of summarize the review and mention how does it help us.

3. Next, we need to start on our survey questions. As this is the first time that we are coming up with questions with regards to greening efforts, we are a little clueless about doing up one. We figured that questions have to be categorized for different sections.

4. To come up with the survey questions, we need to anticipate what sort of questions would the delegates ask first. To do that, we will read through our literature review and pick out potential questions that they might ask and if possible, to include them in our survey questions.

5. As we are going to conduct surveys on both delegates and events organizers, we plan to conduct a focus group survey for events organizers while mass survey questions for delegates. This is to speed up the process as we are able to know how and what events organizers feel about our concepts straightaway when conducting a focus group discussion.

6. While doing so, we are going to shortlist events that are coming up for us to interact with the delegates and hopefully, to get them help us with our survey.

So after our meeting ended with Chronos, we continued our own meeting and did the touching up of the literature review and then read through it as a team. Before going home, we listed out our own individual questions and share with one another as a form of discussion of how to do up our survey questions.

Meeting Five

This meeting was about coming up with the literature review as a team and because we have a few areas to look at, it would be more efficient for us to split the workload up. So below is the task allocation:

Jesslyn - Overview of Environmental Statistics
We want to include this in our literature review as to give an introduction for our green efforts concepts. "Why do we need all these new concepts?" the reader might as when going through our report. So in order to set the reader's direcetion clear at the start, we feel that it would be good to include that.

Nison - Conferences' Efforts
This section is included because we want to have something that we can refer to as a start for our FYP topic. By knowing Suntec City Convention Centre's initiatives and efforts, we can then see what are the methods and ways conferences can use or are already using.

Sham - Organic Food
This is one of our concepts for the green efforts therefore it should be included in the literature review.

Kelye - Biodegradable Materials
This is one of our concepts for the green efforts therefore it should be included in the literature review.

Me - Going Paperless in Conferences and Exhibitions
This is one of our concepts for the green efforts therefore it should be included in the literature review.

So after the tasks were allocated, we begin our individual work. As there hasn't been any conferences and exhibitions that were held paperless yet, I couldn't possibly talk about them. So I decided to go online and find out more about how paper wastage is taking a toll on our environment.

This is the first website that I found: http://eetd.lbl.gov/paper/ideas/html/issues.htm This website talks about why should we care about paper usage and the environmental issues involved. It says that producing paper has land-use and forestry impacts, and the pulping, bleaching, and paper-making processes produce a variety of harmful emission and the other issues like economical. I didn't include the economical part because I think that it's irrelevant.

The other website that I found is: http://www.environmentalpaper.org/documents/recycledfiberfactsheet2.pdf It talks about the facts of producing paper and compares how using recycled paper is better than using virgin pulps paper. Also, it talks about the benefits of using less paper and what it does to save the environment.

After reading through the website, I begin to summarize my findings into my literature review. We stayed in school for around 2 hours or so before we decided to call it a day and go home to complete it before the next meeting.

Meeting Four (NLB Trip)

Today we went down to the National Library Board to gather information for our Literature Review.

As I didn't know what does a literature review consist of and it's my first time doing one, I asked my teammates how to go about doing it. I found out that it's actually researching on the certain area or topic and gather as many findings as possible and summarize them into a review.

Chronos directed us to the National Library because he told us that we could make use the magazines they have over there like Times Weekly or newspaper cuttings and then learn about the recent happenings of the green efforts in events industry.

So with that in mind, we headed to the library and see if we could find anything over there. At first, we tried to find related books at the Sociology and Science section but couldn't find any. Beside it was the magazine section so we decided to try our luck. We didn't know that the library actually keeps the whole periodical publication of Times Magazine. We then took the whole stack of magazines and distributed among us to search for any article that talks about greening of events.

After an hour or so, we managed to get 10 over articles with relation to our fyp topic. However, I feel that the articles that mentioned about making events more environmentally friendly are too general for us to make reference from them. Nontheless, we managed to get some solid findings that we can show Chronos in the next meeting.

Meeting Three

Today we met up with Chronos with our project outline that was done the last meeting.

These are the things we discussed about -

• Our objectives are too vague and our concepts are not mentioned in our objectives. The reason why our green efforts concepts should be included in the objectives because it should set the directions of our FYP as our topic mainly revolves around our ground-breaking concepts. And therefore, we should then mention our green efforts concepts in the project objectives.

• Chronos commented that our project outline should include the specific tasks that we want to complete on the particular dates to ensure that we are able to complete the project on time. He also requested us to let him know the meeting dates that we would like to have with him.

• After letting us know what we should do for our project outline, we then seek his advice on how we should carry on with our project. Because our project topic is to find out how events organizers and delegates will react to our green efforts concepts so the best way to know their reactions is to conduct surveys and interviews. However, we lack of experiences and contacts to even reach out to our target audience. We then brainstormed ideas on ways that we can get our contacts and how to survey our delegates. Each of us came up with ideas like STB Tourism Court, STB homepage, a few local pro-green events activists and going down to events itself. With that in mind, we decided to come up with our survey questions first and then at the same time, we would begin to hunt for events organizers and delegates to do up our surveys.

• Lastly, we discussed briefly how our survey should be crafted. Our survey should be done up on two levels. The first one is for the events organizers, mainly telling them how the delegates feel about our concepts and the workability of them. The second level is to target the delegates, telling them about our concepts and finding out how they feel about our concepts.

After this meeting, we set a date to the National Library Board to do up our reading and information collection. And then after, we can do up our survey.

Meeting Two

Today we are meeting up to do up our project outline so that we can submit to Chronos and let him look through, and advice.

These were the pointers that we discussed and typed down:

• Team introduction and justification of our topic as a Final Year Project (FYP)

• Key objectives of Project

• Scope of Work Covered
• Determine and collate ground-breaking eco-friendly methods that can be used in conferences
  i. Paperless
  ii. Bio-degradable materials used at events
  iii. Food and catering - organic food
  b. Procedure of organizing conferences
  c. Survey of event organizers and delegates opinion on chosen eco-friendly concepts through 3 designated conferences

• Methodology
• Job Scope of each team member
  i. i.e. Co-relation/Task Breakdown of each member
  b. Process of obtaining information
  c. Tabulation and evaluation of survey results
  d. Process of analyzing obtained information
  e. Process of concluding analyzed information

• Limitations and/or Challenges
• Predicated / Pre-mediated
  i. Possible workarounds and/or solutions
  b. Unforeseen Challenges and Limitations
  i. Turnover/recovery time for challenges faced
  c. Limited sources in regards to certain green practices

• Work Schedule
• Plan of general project outline based on
  i. Project Objectives
  ii. Manpower Allocation
  iii. Project Deliverables
  iv. Key Milestones to be met
  

With this framework in mind, we were able to work step by step towards our goal and most importantly, not to lose track from our initial goal and objective. After coming up with this framework, we now need our advisor to let us know what's missing and if we are on the right track.

Meeting One

Today is our first official meeting with Chronos Kwok, our advisor. The meeting took place at my class, E65Q and all my team members were present.

Things that were discussed:

• Our proposed freely chosen FYP topic: 'Identify eco-friendly methods and concepts and to evaluate the level of acceptance of events organizers and delgates'

• Our understanding on greening of events

• How to go about building on our understanding of green events in the world

Chronos mentioned that we need to "strengthen" our FYP topic as it sounds very "empty" and contentless. Our team realized that there are a lot of things we need to know about how have event organizers been neglecting the fact that they are wasting a lot of resources and actually there are methods that they can implement to reduce them.

At the end of the meeting, we decided to go read up more on greening efforts in the world and the problems that have been arising due to increase in events organizing before our second meeting to aide us in the discussion. To find more information of all that, we thought that National Library would be the best place.