My Volunteer Experience - Stathis Avramis

Photo: Volunteer Stathis Avramis working in the SAcommunity Team at Connecting Up, a service of Infoxchange

SAcommunity wanted to highlight our affection for 'the old guard', our experienced and established SAcommunity veterans. People who make up our core team, and return regularly each week to volunteer and keep the service running. They assist us in decision-making, idea development and implementation, check and create processes, and critically, help our new volunteers and interns find their feet at our organisation and in a new office environment. We felt we were more than overdue to introduce, acknowledge and thank some of our team members. 

Our Volunteer Stathis
Stathis Avramis has volunteered with us since 2 March 2018, bringing with him his extensive qualifications and background in a variety of fields. He has a Bachelor of Arts with a Major in Politics, before studying Library and Information Management and then Computing and Information Technology. He has worked in a number of roles including in a bookshop and in a range of work related to computers, IT support and websites. A regular volunteer for many years Stathis explains that he "enjoys volunteering with SAcommunity as a practical means of giving back to the community". Stathis has always helped us with Data, even attending the GovHack Connections event back in August 2018.

Total Hours 2,811 This Year 184 Joined 2 March 2018 Last Check-in 17 April 2024

International Volunteer Day 2021 Volunteer Program Workshop 
Photo (L - R) Tina Vuong Customer Engagement Manager Infoxchange, Pankaj Chhalotre Head of Connecting Up, with Volunteers Stathis Avramis Data Analytics Team SAcommunity and Rex Porter Information Management Team SAcommunity

Volunteers Stathis and Rex discussing the Volunteer Program with Staff members Tina and Pankaj to look at strengths, areas for improvement, opportunities and challenges. 


Image: Stathis Avramis with volunteers Yang Jiao, Camille Sze Pui Ko and Intern Jordana Izquierdo

Stathis' SAcommunity Data Analytics Team
Stathis leads the Data Analysis Team, an established volunteer and intern program he has been instrumental in implementing since its beginning in August 2020, as a project concept from former volunteer Niru. The Team provide service statistics reports for councils using Google Analytics and visualisation tech tools Power BI and Canva, to display community service information and demand in various councils. The reports enable councils to identify and prioritize the services and facilities that are most valuable to the local communities they serve.

To realise this program, Stathis solved IT coding challenges in the data exports, with several python projects, including creating python code to reconfigure Excel file data, and extract subject heading information from data exports. Stathis then produced step-by-step documentation, and started training team members from early February 2021. Since then, Stathis has continued to onboard and train new recruits in our Data Analytics Team to prepare these valuable statistics reports. The visual reports have a dual purpose of more easily enabling a greater understanding of services across the state, as well as in quickly providing a deeper insight into the database information itself, allowing effective data cleaning to improve accuracy, correct inconsistencies, and to restructure data to improve the user experience.


Infoxchange IXCEL award - recognising and rewarding our people
Stathis was nominated and selected as one of the winners for the Infoxchange Standout Individual Award for August to December 2022. To acknowledge his contributions which help us to achieve our vision, mission and objectives as an organisation to achieve social justice outcomes. 

Power BI and Canva Reports
This award recognised his achievement in developing the program, documenting procedures and training volunteers and interns to use Power BI and Canva to present SAcommunity web analytics reports for local councils. The creation of these visual reports assists in cleaning the database, building council relationships and understanding the South Australian community sector.



Image: Volunteer Camille Sze Pui Ko with Volunteer Stathis Avramis

Python Programming
In addition, in July 2022 Stathis created and completed a Python program to handle Excel artefacts and mojibake in the SAcommunity data exports. This program saved hours of manual work by staff in allowing the cleaning of data exports in minutes to provide to councils, libraries, government and for other team members as part of their report creation.



Image: Volunteer Stathis Avramis with Intern Putri Kamaluudin

Geolocation
Stathis is consistently examining ways to improve SAcommunity, data presentation and the data analytics program through coding, helping each new students. In August 2022 Stathis assisted in a project to start to examine geolocation data initiated with our volunteer Ziqi and after Ziqi moved into a tutoring job, Intern Putri Kamaluddin during her internship in February to April 2023 took up the challenge, mapped councils and electorates and documented these processes with Stathis support, In June/July 2023 Stathis began working on this documentation to adapt the plan for the Data Analytics team to continue with. Stathis also created a Python program to provide text-based subject headings from the existing codes available in SAcommunity exports to assist with volunteer Camille Sze-Pui Ko's upcoming AI Machine Learning Industry Project.



Google Analytics 4
Stathis also investigated SAcommunity website and the impact of the transition from Google's Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 over June 2022 - July 2023, as Starting July 1, 2023, standard Universal Analytics properties stopped processing data. Stathis consequently setting up the changes required for migrating to the new reporting structures and frameworks needed for the SAcommunity directory. In addition, as the new reports are different from those in Universal Analytics, he has been documenting these new processes for the new interns and volunteer Data Analytics students. Whilst volunteer Waleed Sayeed has been saving our Historical Data from Google Analytics to ensure that these website analytics statistics can be saved for our reports for councils.  

Stathis demonstrating and discussing the Python code he has written to reconfigure Excel file data for faster council exports. Photo (L - R): Cameron Brown Web Developer & James Newport Senior Web Developer Connecting Up, with Volunteer Stathis Avramis

SAcommunity Volunteer Team 'Scotty Award'
In our volunteer team, and as part of celebrations in December for International Volunteer Day 2022. Stathis was given the 'Scotty Award' named after Commander Montgomery Scott, Star Trek Enterprise's engineer.

Stathis is our IT Guru and problem solver with the technical knowledge and skills that allow him to devise effective solutions to dire problems, much like his award namesake Scotty. In the office, this has ranged from coding and Python projects to providing assistance with a range of tech and tools. He has created a 'pop-up' program with volunteer day-to-day tools, answered Office365 and Microsoft Teams queries, assisted with Better Impact e-modules, and our CiviCRM database, resizing media image files and generally assisted with volunteer capacity building.   

Stathis also introduced us to really good Turkish delight and now we can't go back to any other variations. 

Catch-up with the Data Analytics Team February 2023
Image: Pankaj Chhalotre, Head of Connecting Up with volunteers Stathis Avramis, Ziqi Xu, Yang Jiao and James Newport, Senior Web Developer.

Opportunities for Digital Skills development