Which community?

Nowadays, our technology is changing super rapidly, especially online networks. If I had to design and foster online communities or network based on my experience in this course and my project, these would be my design principles:

1. Project-oriented.

Online networks that we currently have are mostly oriented for sharing information or personal stuffs with public, but how about the 'professional' side? Certainly, we have some platforms such as Basecamp, Asana which are project-oriented, but won't it be nice to have both sides (personal and professional) in one platform? To develop this, I think that it would be great to combine best online communities' features such as Basecamp's 'updated to-do list', Facebook's event creator, etc.

2. Separation personal-professional

Now, imagine that we have both sides: Personal and Professional. It's so great! But how to avoid all the distractions? I guess the best idea is to have a separation between them. To develop this, I think that having a feature such as "Change mode to...(Professional/Personal)" would be a great idea. It will avoid users to see distractions from the other side. For example, once user is on Professional mode, the screen is set in such a way to avoid the notifications from the Personal side, so that they can easily concentrate on what they're doing.

That's all what I can think about design principles for my online community because, apart from that, I think that current online platforms possess already great features!

If I had a design challenge, I would love to join and participate in one of the types of online communities we've been researching in Project Community class.

Firstly, by experiencing different projects in this challenge, we surely will enrich our knowledge and competences in design. For example, improving water quality in Africa. By participating in this online community, we may learn more about how designing different machines to reduce the turbidity of the water such as water filters. I think that this process would guide designers to experience the variety of the design field.

Secondly, the discovery of new people is one of the advantages of joining this online community. Thanks to this discovery, we could extend our networks and also understand some new cultures. I think that network is one of the most important aspects for designers nowadays. Consequently, participating in this online community would be a great step for the future designers.

Finally, this challenge will also help us improving our skills to face the problems, deciding which platforms will be used to handle this problem. My group has been working on 'Work Team' in this Project Community class, so maybe in this design challenge, I would like to experience the other department as well such as 'Idea Networks' or 'Marketing Product'. Thanks to this, we gain more skills that will be useful in our future project. For example, by participating in 'Idea Networking' we would (maybe) discover some other platforms, let's say, for generating ideas or finding design inspirations, etc... and this process is a great tool to enrich our experience in working by learning how to find a solution through platforms. :)

Me.

This is the 6th week and I have to say that the confusion is less and less present compared to the first week, things to do and to research become more specific (for example: research is now focused on only 2 platforms). Personally, the discovery of tools used in Project Community class is one of the best internet learnings I've got so far, such as Google Hangout and Basecamp. These tools will surely be useful for my future project. For the coming weeks, I'm looking forward to learning more about Prezi since that's one of the main tools used for my group's final multimedia presentation.

(image source: Wikipedia)

How about the group?

I think that my group improved a lot since the first week. At first, things were so confusing, we didn't know each other very well: working in a group with people we don't know isn't an easy thing. But as time goes on, we learn more and more about each other, conversation is getting easier between us, and therefore the group organization becomes more natural for us. We also have faced some problems together, we completed each other's lack to finally come up with better result in the end. And I hope that for the remaining weeks, we could use our time wisely in order to be able to create the final presentation that we all wished.

And the class...

Thanks to the Cultural Differences class for example, the students know more and more about each other, we discover other stories, other cultures.. I think this process is essential in this course, to facilitate learnings not only for students, but also for the instructors.

Talking about the link between my group with other group in the class... we decided to collaborate with group 6. Want to know more about this collaboration? Just wait for the result! :p

     Knowledge is one of the most essential things that we can gain in our daily life, can be obtained by learning anywhere and from anyone. This week is my 5th week at the university, and I have to say that, in this early beginning of the year, the people from this university play some roles in facilitating my learning process. 

     First of all, my learning process is being facilitated by instructors. They keep an eye on the students, make sure that they are all on the right track. In order to do this, they constantly give students input and comments. However, this learning process can be stressful sometimes. Uncertainty of the tasks and also overload assignments are mostly the reasons behind this, and sometimes, some of the instructors are really there to help students to overcome their stress.. By doing this consultation with their students, I think that instructors can also learn new insights from the students, about their personality and maybe, their culture as well.

Not only through instructors, my learning process is also gained through other students. In some cases, it’s even easier to learn from my classmates than from the teachers, since it’s more comfortable communicating with someone who also is a student and has the same problem as me. Through instructors and also fellow students, I receive input and comments which will surely be useful for self-development; I discover new ways of working together by trying to understand others’ culture and way of thinking in my group; I learn about some new useful platforms and tools, either online or offline, asynchronous or synchronous, that will facilitate me in working such as Basecamp, Asana, or even offline tool like meeting. So far, facilitating learning and teamwork based on what I have experienced, is, really constructing, we all teach and also learn from each other.

“Technology stewards are people with enough experience of the workings of a community to understand its technology needs, and enough experience with technology to take leadership in addressing those needs. […]” (Wenger, E., White, N., Smith, J.D., 2009, Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities” CPSquare)

     The Chapter 10 of Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities takes us through the steps of stewarding technology. The first step is: ‘Understanding your community’ and its circumstances. So, in order to do that, I think that the aim of today’s class was to approach students into this step, to analyze the characteristic and the orientation of the platforms chosen in previous weeks. My group had decided to deepen our research on Facebook and Basecamp. I was absent today, but I tried to understand the Basecamp Spidergram which is posted by my group today on ProjectCommunity website, combined with the explanation of some chapters taken from Digital Habitats.

(I wanted to make the photo looks better by putting Instagram’s effect on it, but unfortunately couldn’t decide for one. Oh, this is so trivial. Back to work.)

     First of all, what I can analyze from that gorgeous Spidergram is that the platform that we chose called Basecamp is a real Project- and Individual Participation-oriented platform. These two activities describe the functioning of Basecamp the most, since this platform is dedicated to organize bunch of projects at the same time with individual participation in it as well such as uploading individual document, updating to-do lists…

     Then, we can see, for example, that the ‘Relationship’ aspect is one of the most insignificant activities that may develop on this platform because this platform doesn’t really focus on relationship building among members, they don’t have to know each other personally to work on Basecamp, contrary to Facebook, where members can deepen their relationship with each other.

     Finally, I think that this Spidergram helps a community to recognize better what and where they’re working on, and to detect which tools are missing or which ones are working well in order to perfectionize the mechanism of the three fundamental dimensions of community of practice: domain, practice and community. (Chapter 1)

     Speaking about tools, on Basecamp, I admire the To-Do list system, where everyone's tasks are visible by other members. It helps me to see which task is done by who in the group. And also the group member messaging on Facebook (facebook is emerging from being a platform to a tool), easy-to-use tool to keep everyone up-to-date. Otherwise, we are also fond of using text messaging as tools. 

     If everyone else in my group had different preferences, I think that’s not a significant problem as long as we all can handle it: switching from Facebook to Basecamp as project management platform is not easy, but it’s still manageable. Members in my group start to become accustomed to posting the individual work on Basecamp, but when it comes to communicating with each other, we end up talking to each other on Facebook, and it’s doesn’t really matter.

     Wow. Time flies quite fast, we’re now already in our third week! This week, the students are asked to dive into a “closer to the ground” practices group size and its impact on open and innovative design. Personally, I think that this topic speaks more to me rather than the other topics since it’s related to my group’s theme: Work Team. So, this is my reflection about this week.

What is working well for you in your group? The first thing that works well, for me, in the group 3 will be our division of labour. After having read our weekly team activity together, we equally divide the task and also decide the deadline for the final group assignment between us. Usually, we first make some research personally and then share and stabilize our idea with someone who does this research in the same area and finally give the end result of the research to our co-ordinator. (similar to what Chris shared in the week 3 video! :p) Up until now, I think that this method operates well. Then, the communication is the second thing that makes the functioning of this group runs smoothly. I’m always up-to-date about the task, about other members’ questions, about new tasks, etc. Personally, I think that Facebook is a great tool for communicating between group members BUT not necessarily a good platform since it also provides personal communication between the user, their friends, their family... We slowly believe that this could become more and more distracting and... we finally decided to opt for a new platform called Basecamp! *finger crossing*

The last significant aspect from this group is our group size. In my opinion, this size of group of 5 is the best, every member is reachable and can easily speak up. As Christopher said in his website: “In my opinion it is at 5 that the feeling of "team" really starts. At 5 to 8 people, you can have a meeting where everyone can speak out about what the entire group is doing, and everyone feels highly empowered. However, at 9 to 12 people this begins to break down -- not enough "attention" is given to everyone and meetings risk becoming either too noisy, too boring, too long, or some combination thereof. Although I've been unable to find the source, I've heard of some references to a study from the 1950s that says that the optimum size for a committee is 7. Likewise, it's fairly easy for us to see and agree that a dinner party starts to break down somewhere above 7 or 8 people, as do also tabletop games of both the strategic (I prefer 5) and role-playing varieties (I prefer 7). These size limits can be overcome, but require increased amounts of "grooming". What is challenging you? What is challenging about group work, for me, is the idea of collecting ideas from other people and how to bring those ideas all together to finally come up with single idea that will embody every member’s idea, not merely one’s idea. What is one thing you might do differently in the coming weeks? If I have to think about one thing that I may do differently in the coming weeks to improve my experience and group’s work is trying to perfectionize my personal research and to maximize the use of tools that might be helpful to the group work such as Basecamp.

(I’m apologize for the late post, problem with OBA’s WiFi connection.)

"Think about your own networks."

Wait… what? Which networks? Well, I have Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, DeviantArt, Skype, WhatsApp, Viber.. But wait, can we also consider Skype or Viber as ‘network’? (They’re officially software or application, but since I use them to interact with people, not only family but also, friends, colleagues etc., they can also be called MY network, can’t they?)

     Nowadays, it’s hard to define a ‘network’. It can be everything as long as it involves interactions between its users. In my opinion, I used to consider Skype or WhatsApp as informal networks in regard to social learning. Categorizing them as ‘real’ networks seems to be a bad idea. But after doing some research about the real definition of ‘network’, and also what differentiates it with ‘community’, I came up to the conclusion that applications such as Skype or WhatsApp connect the users and therefore can be called ‘network’.

·  The network aspect refers to the set of relationships, personal interactions, and connections among participants, viewed as a set of nodes and links, with its affordances for information flows and helpful linkages.

·  The community aspect refers to the development of a shared identity around a topic that represents a collective intention—however tacit and distributed—to steward a domain of knowledge and to sustain learning about it.

(source: http://wenger-trayner.com/resources/communities-versus-networks/)

     No one can deny the importance of these networks. They can be used either for individual usage (for example: research, self-study, harvest information), either for collaborative usage (group research, interaction with group members, document sharing).

     Personally, I equally use them for both usages. I used Facebook as one of my personal network and also belong to some groups on Facebook, mostly used for updating group works and adding some group files. It’s even harder to set the limit between individual and collaborative usage since the most influential social networks like Facebook or Twitter are emerging to become a ‘new’ tool for collaborative work thanks to its easy-to-reach, useful aspect (for example, file uploading files on Facebook). So, it might be a really good idea to merely work on one online space like Asana or Basecamp for the group work.

     Speaking about the most valuable, I would say that the usage of networks for collaborative works is way more valuable than individual usage. We can’t really call it ‘network’ if it’s limited to personal information harvesting, if there’s no linkage between people, if it provides no interaction between users. 

     Finally, the new area that I would like to explore by experiencing with my online networks is Business. I would really love to use my online networks for the business usage. But since I couldn’t currently ‘jump’ into this, I did some research about tools that might be helpful for my future plan to explore this new area. This is also one of my group tasks: doing a research about an application called Zoho. This application looks great for the business intention: it provides the website building and is useful to run our own business processes, manage the information and be more productive!

I’m looking forward to exploring this platform in the future; it is unfortunately not free for now!

First of all, I honestly have to admit that the first Project Community class with Nancy White was quiet confusing. We talked about mixed things: social networks, international development… I was puzzled about what are we going to learn. Later on, I read Nancy’s post about “the power of confusion in learning” and it’s relieving to know that it’s actually normal to be confused, to know that I’m on the right track. I think the aim of this first class is to guide us to be confused about what we’re going to learn in order to trigger our sense of curiosity about the exploration of communities and networks in open design engineering.

To answer to this question, I started to collect people’s suggestion about websites that could be useful in service of innovative and open design engineering, and also in online collaborative works: - Basecamp (thanks Bart Hoekstra!), useful to organize group collaboration in ONE single page. But unfortunately we need to pay for this. ;( - Asana, same mechanism as Basecamp, but free for up to 30 members! Yay!