#projcomm14

Why The ____ Would I Wake Up at 4am for a Hangout? Project Community – CogDogBlog

Why The ____ Would I Wake Up at 4am for a Hangout? Project Community 

Alan shared a great blog post about the final Project Community Hangout – it is wonderful so I’m being a lazy blogger and pointing you towards it. I’ll have a final reflective blog on this… but later! I need to catch up on my sleep first!

Of course, I also have to share the great pic Alan found…

Hello everyone!

It is the end of the module which means the end of projectcommunity :,( but i shouldn't start saying farewell already as me and our group are leaving a 'never forgetting solution'. 

Our group's theme was both crowdfunding ad crowdsourcing but at the end we decided taking into account CoM's needs that crowdsourcing will be most ideal for them however we still have some solution in terms of crowdfunding for them. 

The main issue

The main issue our NGO had was the amount of volunteers or the board members as there were only 5 people. The problem is that none of them do their jobs seriously, theirs only one person who almost does everything because the other people aren't serious. After a lot of hangouts the solution we came up with was that they need a lot of volunteers so they need to have as many volunteers they can for various things such as updating their website, organizing events, helping in any other way. Also taking into account that these volunteers also includes students from universities and schools.

But first they need to advertise them not only through social media but also differently. And also they first need to target people in Holland to join the NGO.                                                                                          

As a solution our group found an ideal website for solving this problem, we contacted these people and got all the information and it is a very good way of promoting as a NGO in Holland and also getting volunteers.As to get the best volunteers you need to advertise you NGO in a way that even students would want to volunteers. Also this website has a time period for how long one can volunteer for a particular event which is also very essential.

Corwdfunding

The other issue that the NGO has is they aren't getting enough funds. So after a lot research we found a website where again the NGO can promote and advertise themselves by putting up a video which can be done after they have enough volunteers so it can be seen as a 'after result' of crowdsourcing.

Final Video

Our video is actually structured as metaphor of a growing tree and it is divided as the 'Me,We and Many' network which is done in the presentation software Prezi. So the video starts with the roots which is where the NGO is with its problems and it moves up to the stems to the solution and then at the end towards the leaves and the fruits to the after effects or what happens next. 

The End

This experience has been amazing because I remember i started off with knowing nothing i had a slight idea of crowdfunding and crowdsourcing but now i actually learned a lot of things and to be honest I felt like everything was going to fast but I learned a lot of things not only about NGOs and how to approach them but also how to write blogs and how to make people actually read your stuff. How to say promote yourself and the things you want the other person to see.

Also most important group work, decision making, listening to others, tolerating each other, coming up with different ideas and putting it up together and meeting up even during holidays yes that was a big challenge for me but you have to play your part as well because everyone is doing it!

WISH US LUCK!

Peace!

Hello my potential readers!

The module is about to end. So this is the high time to deliver our presentations with problem solutions. 

Since last two weeks I am really into the topic of reciting audiovisual expressions. Also for my other – Personal Branding I need to make a movie. For me this is just the beginning of the journey.

The most challenging part about audiovisual presentations is a fact that we are designer and we always have to go one step ahead, we have to constantly challenge ourselves. The presentations is just not simply a content.

So, what has to be there in a good presentation?

Explain your content in easy to understand way

Take care of a nice look

Make it interesting. Use examples!

For designers: Make it special!

No, designer doesn’t have such an easy life. So, I will try to practice it by making my day and people in my surroundings a bit more special every day. 

* * *

We are done with the project now, the presentation is ready and solution described. I hope the it would useful for CoM. 

I want to also add that I learnt a lot during these two months. I learned not only about social networks and NGOs, but also about myself, my skills and how to work in a group. I understood that a crowd can be a really powrfull tool if you want to achieve your goal. The methods such as crowdfunding and crowdsoarcing show that ou jsut need to have a good idea and desribe it well, and then easily you will find your supporters. It is not only beneficial for orgnaisations, but also for designers and promotion of their prodcuts or ideas.

  At the ned, I want also to thank my team for working well together. I think that everybody tried to contribute it and share skills and knowledge they have. Thank you, guys! We made it till the end.

                Now that everything is coming to an end, this last few days we use to put all the pieces together, the challenge, solution, and of course the final deliverable assignment of this course, the video. Yap we have to make a five minutes long video contains of:

Introduction of our NGO

Our NGO challenge

The solution based on research with our own argument

And our learning reflection (minor or side content)

This video will be watched together by the student, the teacher, and the NGO on the final presentation day (which is next Wednesday).

                Basically I’m not the whose in charge for the video making process, its Stefan and Claire jobs as the tech-stewards but we as a whole team also help them with it. We start to making the video this week by brainstorming the style of the video, is it going be animation, stop motion, over voice video or something else. After arguing for a couple hour we agree to use animation as the general style, but then we decide that this should be one serious, formal animated video rather than a goofy one due to the personality of our client (Carl Peter is a bit serious working type person). The next meeting is the hardest one, we try to brainstorm again, this time to make (rough)story board but we completely stuck. Everyone seems tired because of the piling up assignment with a tight deadline and limited time available. Then Ezter play her role as a good tea manager, she told Stefan and Claire to talks about some technical stuff and the rest of us get a paper and put our ideas on it and later on we combine it together. This method proof to be working because after that we get our main line of the story board.

                In the last class thanks to Laura and Mathias we can improved our story board that sums up everything in general. This is or story board

We know that this is still so general but we believes it is enough for the group because for the complete line (frame by frame) Stefan and Claire already have something in their mind, besides if we have to decide it as a group it will take so much time, and time is something we don’t have right now. So while the tech-steward busy with their stuff the rest of the group help them by providing all the content they asked for. We really looking forward for the finalization of the video!

Finally, week 8! Now, everybody is stressed and busy with finishing all the assignements, portofolios and movies. The word of the week is panic. My team is doing it's best to have a professional presentation. The time pressure actually managed to put our brains in function together, like never before! We split in 3 groups of 2 people. We found this structure works best for us. First group was working on the storyboard, the second on narration and the third group was editting the video presentation.

I am part of the third group and Kiki is my colleague. Our job is to basically edit and put everything together. For the first part, we are going to use Prezi. It's simple, fun, very effective and it's for free. We chose Prezi because it offers dynamism when changing from frame to frame and also because we can easily work with pop-ups, key words and visuals while Kareem narrates. Oh yeah! I almost forgot; we decided that Kareem has the best voice for narrating. He has a pleasent, relaxing voice tone which fits perfectly in this kind of video. The second part will consist in screen capturing the Prezi animation and work it through iMovie. The background music will be some instrumental jazz or funk. The final adjustments like brightness, volume of the voice-over and some video effects will make everything to look nice and catchy. One thing I noticed is that by dividing the tasks into small teams, we lost the sense of unity and complementary. Sometimes things wouldn't correspond, like Kareem's speech with the storyboard and frames of the video. We should somehow work together, but separately, in the same time. The movie process takes time. We have to go back through the whole research and highlight only the most important points. The order of the information is also of great importance for having a coherent and flowing presentation.

In 7 weeks I learnt more than I could imagine. Actually, I can't believe this! It's not only about Project Communities, but all of the courses, the entire IDE programme. My bag of knowledge is getting rapidly filled up with loads of information. Everyday I gain more and more experience. I can see that thigs are building up, step by step, day by day.

It has been a hard week. We are getting close to deadline and our final assignement, the video presentation of the advice for our partener, Maarten van Leeuwen and his NGO, CNCPTMNKR. During the whole course I learnt how to make use of the online space in my favour and how to work in a team, efficiantly. Now, I have some basic notions about marketing, how to organize working groups, how to use crowdfunding to help develop my ideas or why is important to follow a theory of change when starting a project. This is all about making the right connections between people, ideas and money. One thing I find really useful about networks is that today we are no more limited by distance. Once you go online, you are connected with everyone. Also you can make use of all the awesome tools, computers and other devices can provide you with.

Nowadays, Internet holds a significant role in our lifes, especially in the working enviroment. Can you imagine a company doing business without having a website, eployees without e-mail or mobile phone? This can only go in one direction: BANKRUPTCY. It may be sad but true. We rely on digital technology. This is the future. Online networks and communities just make things easier for everybody. They are the answer for many "unmet needs". A good example can be the crowdsourcing. the process of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.

As people tend to say, time passes fast when you’re having fun. I wholeheartedly agree with this saying, although might I also add that time passes even faster when you’re in distress in getting all the assignments completed before the deadline! Just like this rollercoaster ride we have all been on, my experience is this; it felt like this ride took a split second to reach the end. One lesson I have learnt is not to underestimate the great experiences even the smallest amount of time can bring us.

A successful and enjoyable roller coaster ride is not just about how many loops or drops there are; it’s about the order of the ride, where the highs and lows are, and how they all flow together as one whole ride. This ensures the building up of excitement, the time it gives you to take in that last drop take a breath to soak in all the adrenaline, while the last and final obstacle before the end of the ride is to give you the last bit of excitement before you have to take in all the dizziness and stumble down the stairs.

This is process is just like how this project went. Although it seems as though time went by so fast, we started off by being slowly mounted onto the first drop, followed with more loops and obstacles to go through. Each obstacle represents the themes of each week. It felt like these themes were being thrown at us time after time, and barely did we feel like we had time to stop and take that breath. Of course, there are obstacles in the ride that tend to not give you that rush that you desire but yet you are forced to sit through it and make the best of it; in my case this would be the weeks in which the topics were of less ability to be of help to our NGO.  This doesn’t mean there was nothing to gain out of that week. Instead, it just challenged us to try think of that specific theme, in our case this would be crowdfunding and crowdsourcing, and see how we could look at it from a different perspective and change the context a bit for it to apply to our NGO. All in all, the order in which these themes were covered each helped us understand the following theme even better. Most importantly for our team, the most important one to us was our final theme of marketing. This enabled us to cleverly use of the things we learned from online communities in the past weeks to aid us in brainstorming marketing ideas for Carl-Peter.

Now we have finally reached the last part of this roller coaster ride. We have soaked in all the information, and have come up with some results. This is the time where we get off of this ride, stumble dizzily down the stairs towards the last destination of this ride: the picture booth. Now, the picture any ride will take captures the whole ride into a picture. Our final destination would be where everything we have learnt, captured into that one video. Although we are currently stressed about the creation of the video, where peoples minds are shaky from all the stress,  this is the time when asa team we would have to help and motivate each other. This is the time where I come back to my first blog and to show the team player I thrive to be; commitment to my team, to show team support, empathy to understand and motivate each one in their own unique ways, and lastly flexible, to helping each other out and having their backs when you expect it least and when they need it most.

I enjoyed this ride, and I hope you did too.

It is the last week of this module and I have to say I am very very very tired to the point that I'm stupid.

If you want to know what I am like in this very moment, this gif is on point.

(Source: originally Photobucket, found on Google)

I think I disconnected my brain with the rest of my anatomy and my grammar is going to be really bad starting from this sentence as a result.

 And I laugh at pretty much everything tonight, like this gif I casually found on google.

(Source: Google)

Alright, time to get serious, I chose the original prompt rather than the alternative one. For me personally the most relevant theme for our NGO and for our project is the 4th theme which was: 

Week 7: Theme 4 – Marketing/User/Customer Support Communities

First of all, the theme implies a marketing strategy and the strategy is about gaining access to potential users. Our project is about having people gathered to share their ideas and stories to each other and in order to do that one needs to be experienced and is actually committed to the website itself. So it is really important to find the right users for this project.

Secondly, it talks about users' feedbacks, feedbacks are really good for every aspect in life (here's why!) and it plays an important role as well in our project, in fact we have to do some experiments with the webpage and select the right approach for our users (this is a long term to do list for our NGO). In this particular case we need feedbacks and comments, whether the approach works or not, is the webpage good enough or needs some improvements.

Lastly, because our NGO has been busy for the past three weeks it's really important for us to research about customer support communities and see if we could implement the ideas we have in our mind to real life.

"Who or what you think will play a key role towards success during the process?"

Us.

(Source: ign)

I think as long as we go together as a group and respect each other and each other's opinions we're going to solve this and go through all of the problems, I learnt so much from this group work and I even improved on certain things especially I learnt to just say my thoughts even if it sounds stupid. Back in my country (at least where I grew up) if we ask "stupid" questions they'd yell "Do you know how to think before you open your mouth?" at us so I'm so used to shut my mouth although my thoughts are screaming around, but because of this experience I realised that every idea, every question, and every thought is relevant to be said out loud.

We came to a conclusion that we are still going to assume things for Maarten because he has been busy but we do know that he is a man with a big vision and we are assuming things about what he would like based mainly on his vision. We talked to him thrice and we actually could grasp what he wants for this project and we finally formed our advises which you all are going to watch it on the video :] <--- that is a smirk, just so you know.