Samstag, 18. Mai 2013

'In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king'

When you are working on a project you must be aware of so many things. You consider this and that, take care of different point of views. No matter how aware you want to be at some point you get blind for your own project. Its essential to take this a fact, a process that you can hardly stop but find a solution for in through getting feedback from outside. In our case we had the advantage to have an audience that gave us interesting points to think about. All were skilled and had a different background and also working and project experience in the cultural sector.

We all appreciated their critique and suggestions a lot and so I decided to write a bit about it.

Why should people use our app and how we can introduce it on the market? 
There are already tons of apps available so what a new app needs to be suggestful is a "twist" something that distinguishs it from all the other apps. We thought that for our project the "social aspect" would already be enough twist but maybe there has to be more extra features to make it attractive. I liked the idea of a competition and contest to make people not fighting against each other but having a little challenge that they can solve also with each other and share their results with their friends. Its also a nice idea to inlcude such competitions in real events. In this way the app is no longer just a technical gimmick but also becomes more real for the people because its part of a real social event. When we want to make people start using our app and adding their content we have to take care on some basic informations - content that is already there. i liked Nanas suggestion for getting people on board as content producer. This is my frist blog I write myself and I am not so used to the blogger-scene. But I know that there are several people around blogging about their life and their surrounding out of an very different personal angle or with an quite artistic touch. In this case it would be awesome if such people share their impressions with others and as Nana explained further: They are used to express themselves in the internet and you dont have to push them to post something. The same system of including local people as contributors could work with local institutions, communites etc.

Back to Business
When we talk about business I always feel a bit unformtable maybe because business and management is always so connected to suit up people and I dont know most of the time how to dress myself. But its sure part of a project and all administration stuff which makes a project become a project out of a simple idea is necessary and I'm used to it. Im less used to think about concrete plans to create a real business strategy out of a project in this way. We developped a product in theory and now the next step is to think about the necessary steps to make it become real. 
Money, Money...must be funny in a rich mans world. We had focussed on founding possibilities before but never really considered to contact a company to support us. I like the idea of the guy in the audience to have a look for people with an already done technical solution which can easily be transformed to fulfill the needs of our tracker. To raise attention social networks seem obligatory in our days. Most of the companies have a site on facebook before they set up an own website.

What was one of the key sentences from the feedback that really kept in mind was "You came up with the idea and when the plan is made everything else is just programming" Sounds true but I think as humanist you often forget about the value of your work. Your environment is rating the theory far below the practical outcome and you start to feel less important then the technical crew. In this way its good to get feedback that confirms you in what you are doing and that your research is the essential thing in the project. 
Jaako mentioned student collaboration-networks in the end and that they have a system at the University of Tampere where they bring students together from different fields of study to help each other in realising projects. Great idea. I don't think that we have something similiar in Graz but I think never the less its able - maybe through social media - to get in touch with other people to make our project become real.

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