New Media Concepts for the Third Sector

Juho took some notes, which I copy-pasted from the email to here (thank you Juho!):

Here are some notes from our meeting. Action points for the next meeting are at the end.

1. Course blog. The communication during the course would be done using whichever platforms and channels we see fit, but the primary hub for the coursework would be the (public) blog. Everyone will have admin rights to the blog to rearrange it and submit content as they see best.

2. Design consulting vs. brief-based contract design work. We discussed that this project would be more about practicing design consulting, rather than the traditional brief-based contract design work. This would entail having a close dialogue with the client in defining what the work should focus on.

3. Aidbrella. Ilona gave us an excellent presentation on the current state and goals of Aidbrella. She also agreed to share the presentation file with us for further reference. The presentation also included Ilona’s views on design requirements, focus areas and possible ‘separate projects’ to work on. These were discussed.

4. What are the important questions to address? We discussed the different approaches we could and would like to take to the design consulting project and what questions would be the most important to consider. Questions that were brought up were:

• Who are the users? What are their motivations and needs regarding the service?
• What kind of information can users share through the service and how is it structured?
• How can users interact with the information?
• How is time considered (i.e. how does the service recognize that some information may be out of date)?
• How can the service motivate users to share/contribute information?
• How does the service integrate with other services or social media platforms?
• What are the assumptions that we (aidbrella) make in our design choices? Have they been verified?
• What would the minimum viable product be? How could it fail?
• What’s the value we (aidbrella) provide?

5. We agreed that we should think about which methods we should plan to use to develop the service further (hint: check book). These were discussed briefly as options:

• paper prototypes
• business model canvas
• user-oriented models
• co-creation
• service canvas
• benchmarking

6. Action points for everyone participating in the project, due next Monday or sooner*.
Think of three questions about Aidbrella and send them to Ilona (*)before Sunday. She’ll answer them in Monday’s meeting.

Think of what the next steps should be for the project (e.g methods?). What would you like to do and focus on?

Add your details on the blog’s “People” section. If would rather not appear under your own name, choose a pseudonym/avatar but let us know what it is.

Thanks for a good meeting. Let me know if I missed something.

See you next Monday!

Nest meeting will be on Monday October 24th, 5th floor, the room next to the Meccala cafe.

The course teams have visited the CMI office to present their work in an brown bag lunch on Tuesday 24.5.. CMI staff was impressed by the work delivered and both Media Lab and CMI are now looking into how these concepts could be applied in practice. CMI staff would like to thank all course participants for their hard work and congratulate the teams for producing relevant and feasible concepts in a short time frame.

Yesterday we made the first presentation of the two concepts. It is a time to start discussion on how we could elaborate, improve and put them forward. Design process like this should always be iterative and experimental.

Keep a Green Tree Concept. Dynamic real-time visualizations of progress are important and powerful way of communicating in any process where there are fast and surprising changes. The Keep a Green Tree can be compared to weather report maps: they can be used to predict the future, but also to give confidence for the people. With weather it is good to know if it is raining even if you do not like rain. Also an expectation of a good weather effects on your behavior. The importance of good news is often underestimated. We need them.

There are some open questions related to the concept, although. It is possible that you already have thought these and at least in the stage of building of a demo these will become crucial:

1. How the categorization of the messages is done?

• I think asking people to categorize their SMS is too clumsy UI.
• Should there be an editor checking the messages before they go live?
• Could there be Facebook / Twitter application where one could crowdsource the task for many people? 3 replies with the word “agree” and it goes live with the tag: “Things we agree”, etc.

2. How one should categorize the messages in the case of news?

• Would there be again some algorithm automatically categorizing the messages / news or should this be editorial work?
• Could this task be also crowdsourced in some social media service?

The Peace Pack Concept. Muriel Rukeyser has famously said “the universe is made up of stories, not atoms“. The Peace Pack concepts aims to provide platform for people to tell stories to each other. For this purpose one could use video. I think the point of the concept is not the gadgets (smartphone with video camera and video editing, mini projector, speakers etc.) but the idea of:

1. using video to collect stories related to the conflict, and
2. organizing “story nights” to watch them together in the communities to facilitate dialogue.

These are also the most challenging part of the concept. These tasks requires a lot of competences from the “Peacepacker”. The competences of using the smart phone to shot the video and to use projector to organize the movie night is not a problem, but to facilitate discussion on them is a demanding soft skill. To do this there should be good instruction for the “Peacepackers”, some training materials and program, too.

There are some open questions related to the concept, too.

1. Should the format of the videos be strict and limiting?

• We discussed quite a lot about what would be the questions people are asked in the video interview. To find meaningful questions we probably should do some testing.
• Could the format of the video and the clips of the people be standard and limiting? From the experience of status updates (Twitter) and SMS we know that limiting communications often provides new affordances. Maybe there could be standard and ready-made questions that are also automatically texted to the video and limit of 30 seconds for each response.

2. How we could test the concepts to improve it?

• I think we should just take one Peace Pack, go to some close community with a minor conflict, such as an apartment building with conflict among the residents.
• By trying out the video shooting and “story night” we probably could make the decisions related to the form and limitations of the format.

We also discussed yesterday with several CMI staff members that we should organize another lunch meeting were you are presenting the concepts for the staff members.

We presented our two concepts today at CMI’s Every Peace Matters Seminar, celebrating the 10 years of existence of the organisation.

The Peace Pack Concept was designed for the collection and sharing of uniting stories in post-conflict settings. We’ve made some videos both before the Seminar and at the event. We asked people what peace meant for them as well as about their hopes and dreams for the future. The videos will be made available at a later stage – so watch this space!

The other concept on the Momentum of Peace Map is briefly presented in the post below.

Both concepts will now be finalised and a final presentation for CMI will be made in May.

Many people stopped by our stand and asked questions about our work. It was great talking to you all! If you would like to know more about the people behind these ideas, you can find us here, on the People page. Please, let us know what you thought.

Presenting the concept to a visitor (photo credit: Juha Kronqvist)

Hi – last week we agreed to meet on the 8.4 in the evening at 17pm.. could we change the date to Thurdsay 7.4 from 17pm – 19 pm, we could meet at Siltanen on Hämeentie 13.  Sorry about the change!