strange Behaviour

How do you base your community project is up to you, but of course as I mention in all my blogs, the core are the people.

For example if you want to base your community when photography is involved, of course the main topic of your community you will take on images they take or which you want to represent. But when you want to involve your community work they are the best solution although it’s not always the best decision to base your feedback on images only. But you have to choose a core.

Deviantart is a good example of community which is really complicated. It’s based on images and on text as well. In fact it’s a community based on creativity itself. It is a product of a years of work and hard dedication. And not only of staff behind it, but a huge amount of feedback and work as well was done by contribution of community. It would’ve never made without it.

Another good example I have is just to show how quickly you can exploit a market targeting privileged. Is for every one well known Facebook. First they invited students from Oxford only what made their Social network privileged. And then I don’t even need to tell how they followed. Of course it was made functional and functions like tagging in my imho made it very attractive, but marketing made a very huge role in granting first market share for the company. As in Deviantart example we can see that it was made to serve purpose and grew from it.  

In order to start getting some feedback we must have an access to our target group and people who participated in the project (and hopefully is still participaing). We assume that you have made nice long standing connections which I mentioned in previous blogs and then you must have communicated about whole process in all the way. So the good start is half the job. This will make half of your questions easier to answer, because people who you work with must be passionate about the theme.

Another very important part is get good feedback from your teammates and yourselves as well. It may sound strange, but we sometimes can’t really notice the whole process as a whole. It may take some time just to obtain a ‘fresh eyes’ and in that part I suggest communicating within your team briefly. You may found some things which you didn’t like along the path and even may want to fix some of your design (we all know that design is being polished ten thousand times till its ‘good enough’) as clear mind provides with some insight in your own work. Anyway don’t haste and do careless fixes because you may cause may damage than good. That’s why your teams here for.

If you can do it, share your research and insights with your target group and research connections. The best way to do it of course to gather for a last meeting to see really how people feel like about the whole process. That should give you more ideas about your design and you may (yes, again!) redesign it!

For nice feedbacking and talking methods on various socal themes google “Compass”. Issued for NGO’s from NGO’s.

If you had a design challenge, would you join and participate in one of the types of online communities we’ve been researching? Why or why not?

To answer the question directly – yes I would, especially if I would have a my design challenge directly (or not) related to it. Online communities give you a good retrospective of things you may get told, but you imagine them a little bit further form the environment of the actual story teller. This may give your mind more generated creativity, as you need to imagine the whole scene by yourself (of course it depends on how detailed story is) therefore it’s not given by the story teller.

Internet have many facilitation tools either free or paid. Of course paid ones are most of the time comes with the better quality, but we as a students are much more dependent on our budget which is rarely big.  Free stuff here I come.

We as a students in online facilitation must be creators and contributors. In order to understand both sides of the game, so we could improve our quality of facilitation. Teachers in other way should be either spectating or contributing as facilitating group. The feedback of how the facilitation should’ve went can only be given after the facilitation itself. I don’t know if I must mention the reasons, but it’s called feedback for a reason. And the other is that we must make our own mistakes so our teachers could explain them for us simply pointing them out and correcting our path, not putting our feet in their engraved one.

To generate better facilitation experience enhance dialog between facilitators. It provides a dialog and the breakout of ideas, especially if you’re people motivated to facilitate. I’ve tried getting online feedback myself (not exactly a facilitation) and it’s not an easy task. I’ve posted in numbers of forums which I’ve found and only one person responded. But what a person he was! When I told him more about my project he gave me a lot of tips, places where I could find information and even corrected my grammar in my text! If you look deep enough you can find people like this in forums and then they can be your gateway to more enthusiasts which could be a valuable facilitators for your study. Before that, I couldn’t believe that these kind a people exist.

Of course in team’s facilitation I believe there’s one more very important thing is to keep in close contact with your colleagues. It depends on your project, but meetings offline are crucial for project success.

Today’s world have this very fast growth speed of technology. Doesn’t matter which direction you will look at, games industry or software, you will see that new versions, fixes and updates of platforms which we use are reaching us more frequently than ever. And I will tell you a fact, not a secret, phase will keep rising up.

Me personally have some software I like, but that mostly depends on how much I’ve worked with it, so whenever there’s is a need of using a different one I don’t get frustrated too much. I just do it.

Of course if you’re working on the team there may be more strict choices made by people who don’t like changing their working environment so much. Well if there is a situation that with certain people a compromise just can’t be reached then at first I wouldn’t like to work with these kind a people. They may be left in management field, but in a design process it would be extremely painful for me to work with them. Although I could, because I am flexible. Anyway, I believe these kind a people rarely get to a creative process so I believe there’s always a room for a group agreement. If still a person has a ‘crush’ on his software of choice then a group just should assign a whole task to that man and hope that he gets it right. Of course feedback and corrections afterwards are a must.

The main goal of this phase is to add your idea a touch of innovation. But good ideas does not come easily. Most people who had those says that it's the simplicity which makes good ideas great.

I myself participated in few of the brainstorms and would consider myself as an experienced user. But brainstorming is nothing about your experience or something you know. In fact the less you know the better it is. Brainstorming is not a science, it's an art. The less you know, the less you borders build for your imagination. If you wouldn't knew that plains do fly you wouldn't draw them in the flying in the clouds or even give them wings.

In this moment of such a rapid technology we have a huge opportunities of creating innovative communities. Facebook is not a new way of community or anything like that. It's just trendy up to date way of communicating which poped up just in time to  offer people the gap which those days networks (myspace, etc.) missed. It involved short messaging and at that time, better privacy settings (this matter is very much discussed atm., but lets leave it for later).

I take a deep breath. And jump. It’s always scary to jump in those areas of the new waters. Where you have no knowledge of how deep and warm water is. But almost always we turn out just ok, as soon as we take a first step to it. We adjust to water temperature, we check the depth of the water.