#projcomm12

Happy feedbacking

I was a quite sometimes ‘dat tech guy’ in the group who held the responsibility to gather all the knowledge in digital so we could share it easier within and outside the group. Of course I have preferences like using ‘skype’ for a messenger, but people from different background use different messengers and sometimes skype is the rare one in the group so you got to adjust and find a sweet spot for the group communication. So you take a look for other preferences and even sometimes adjust your own as soon as you find something relevant for yourself. That’s innovation, but just in your tools for working with software. I always try to find better newer software, because some of it becomes outdated and then being overtaken by more advanced technology. In other words to say to be competitive you have to follow trends all the time. Doesn’t it apply for most of today’s competiveness in our world?

First of all we need to think about the user's needs, because he is the most important client for the whole project like this. So it must be very user friendly, which every company usually knows nowadays but not everyone can permute that. In my opinion user friendly means always simple and clear which is very important in web design as I hate web pages that you open and you basically get overfilled with thousands of information so for instance you don't know if you can order the nice feet massage machine from the first page or if the just expect you to donate for this product. Here we are already coming to the next important issue the age of the user what means that the whole design must be orientated on the target group we are searching for. For a fund raising page like Indiegogo.com where we were working with it is more than necessary to think about a design which should nearly appeal to every age as they need as much people as possible to get into the funding community. I just imagine my father read an article about for example 'Kickstarter' - the new way of donating and supporting ideas and he may gets interested by an article about the new feet massage machine which needs some funding. Then he may opens the web page and just want to get more information about this product but in fact he can't find it during a few minutes he will definitely quit and swear the next time he sees me about technology. In conclusion we need a simple overview on the first window where you can choose different categories. I believe that Indiegogo found a nice design for this as you can select between the three main actions 'browse', 'learn' and 'create'. For the last point 'create' I would try to give the community as much freedom as possible so if someone wants to create there a whole blog about his product or project he should be able doing that. Same for the comment function where I would like to give the freedom to the users to comment on everything of the presented projects/products or even the whole page for suggestions. All in all I would design a page based on those issues with the main priority of user-friendliness and the goal of getting a huge community to fund.

If there would be a design challenge I would definitely use one of the online communities that we were researching on. In our case we were researching indiegogo.com which is a very good page to fund money for a project like this but I personally would prefer using kickstarter.com just because of the fact that there is bigger community which means there are simply more people who could see and fund my project. I think it is a very good thing that you can find investors for a simple idea just on the internet these days. Moreover there is nothing that I could lose so for me there is nothing against the idea of using those online communities. Furthermore the advantages are very useful for instance you can have a free market research by starting a project on a funding platform as if there are thousands of people who are funding my project I could be nearly sure that it is something what people were waiting for. All in all if I would have a finished idea, which only needs some money to get started I would definitely participate in one of these online communities to make my idea reality.

Moreover I would evaluate my learnings as good so far because when someone is asking me about what we are doing here in this course I keep on responding that we are doing a research on Fundraising online network platforms, which I were never looking up before actually so for me it is really interesting to see how easy it can be – the way from the idea to the final product or the place where it is needed. Because of that I already started thinking a lot about starting something on one of those platforms like Kickstart.com but at the moment it is not finished ;) I would put the learnings of my team or the whole class together as I can’t say exactly what the others are learning new for themselves but I think the weekly blogposts of everyone are giving a nice insight about what each student is learning in this course. 

The online facilitation program works really well for me, my classmates and my teachers. It works just as the teacher manages discussions and learning activities in the traditional classrooms, as it is online. It also gives us an access for a bigger and more interactive structure that recognizes the social and interactive elements of knowledge and construction.  So far the facilitation structures such as Google+Hangouts, Google Docs, Facebook, etc., have been useful for our individual and group project (online discussions with tutors,..) serving us in one very effective way. The online facilitation could be a powerful source for us if we understand the dynamics of online communication and interactions and learn more effective ways of facilitating, teaching and learning online. In the next few weeks i want to design the right mix of online and off-line activities for me that will help me to create my own online facilitation process. I think that's really important for everyone to have his own skills and techniques of facilitating.

To being a peer facilitator, I think what I should do is participate actively and share more with others. It is impossible to keep the entire group motivated by a single person. To my opinion, the key for facilitating each other is that everybody hold active attitude to involve in.