Brainstorm II

Today we had another brainstorm, this time focusing on problems we ourselves encountered. This was because we decided it would be best for use to design something for us and people like our ‘generation Y’ selves. We ended up focusing on ‘time saving’. I’ve decided to do my research project on ‘information overload’ with particular reference to the internet as a source of news. Better get a move on…

Brainstorm

Yesterday we had a big brainstorming session. We began by writing down just about everything we were individually slightly interested in doing as a major project, including values and principles, then writing it down on post-it notes and sticking it one the wall. We then discussed each idea/value in turn and each voted on it on a scale of 0-4 in terms of how interested we were in doing it as a major project. We then compiled this data in an excel table and identified the most popular collective ideas.

I thought this was very useful as it ensured that each member had a definite equal voice in determining which ideas emerged as the most popular, and ensured that the ideas that emerged were the ones we were all definitely interested in to some extent.

The results can be viewed here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pN2txgqxw5J464IchG4CDfg&hl=en

A new word! “social media curator”

I looked into yahoo pipes and now have a basic handle on what it does: “mash-up” different web applications that filter information. So for example, something that does a specific search on multiple shops and then aggregates it into an rss feed. This isn’t what I had in mind for the personalized meme tracker project idea. However I did find a yahoo! pipe that filtered (according to keywords) through posts on existing ‘meme-tracker’ websites, such as techmeme. So… memetracker site + yahoo! pipe = personalized memetracker? To work out if this was the case I re-investigated meme-trackers, starting with techmeme, which seems to be the most-mentioned one.

I came across the following excerpt in a blog entry:

For years, I’ve been using curators to filter my web experience. I can’t and won’t subscribe to the hundreds (maybe thousands) of blogs I want to stay on top of. I realize that everything I write here, or on fredwilson.vc, unionsquareventures, or at newcritics, won’t be read by every reader/subscriber. I know that all of you are doing the same thing as I am. We are relying on the world of social media curators to surface up the things that are interesting and we read that… Techmeme has been the killer social media curator for my world of tech blogs – http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/11/techmeme-a-caut.html

So what I’m look for is an easily-customizable ’social media curator’. The key mystery at the moment is how sites like techmeme works. Here’s everything techmeme has to say about itself:

At this moment, the next big story in technology may reside on a blog you’ve never heard of or a news site you don’t have time to scan.

So I built a software agent to surface these links in real time and the result is Techmeme, the site you’re visiting now.

Coverage is driven by a mix of industry insiders, passionate independents, and established journalists. So Techmeme gets the story no matter where it appears, and often days before it hits major sites.

So no clue as to how it works. Techmeme is too general and too techie to be of use to me and most other people. I want the big stories on the particular subjects of interest to me. It seems this is not currently available, even with yahoo! pipes, so the “personalized meme-tracker/intelligent web searches” project is still feasible I think.

Brainstorming progress

We’ve been having intermittent meetings trying to come up with a focus for our major project. I’m waiting until we decide upon something before starting the research project.

One thing that came up in our discussions was that Yahoo have something called yahoo pipes which apparently more or less what I had in mind for the intelligent-web-searches idea. I will have to investigate this and make sure. Had a look at it but it’s not the kind of thing you can pick up just like that. I will have to put aside some time for it.

We have been using the wetpaint wiki/forum/project management tool to manage our project: http://mainnovation.wetpaint.com . So far I’m finding this to be a great website which has everything we need.

We are meeting in Monday and will do a more focussed brainstorming session. I’m going to take a look at my IDEO-research notes so that we can imitate their brainstorming method.

My interests

Summarized the stuff I’m most interested in doing the major project on:

Efficient education
Having spent so long as a student I’ve found that oftentimes 90% of the learning is from self-study, or from communication with other students, which makes spending huge amounts of money on educational institutions seem very wasteful. Other times, it seems lectures and tutorials are not the best way to teach things, and that they can be learnt more effectively and much more cheaply from books/videos etc. So this would make me interested in a project about distance learning and other ways of improving education

Educational games
I don’t know if any of you know the game ‘Sid Meier’s Civilization’ but for me that was the game that sparked my interest in history and politics, more than anything I learnt at school at the time. I think there’s a lot of potential for making education more fun and effective through the use of games.

‘Ground-floor’ views
Maybe it’s just England, but I know a lot of people who complain an awful lot about their workplace. I’m always hearing about workplaces with incompetent, lazy or biased work colleagues and bosses, or about people working within bureaucratic system that they can see just does not work the way it is supposed to and which makes it impossible for them to do their jobs effectively. Unfortunately these people are generally resigned to passively accepting the situation because their bosses have so much power over them (e.g. they might give them a bad reference) or because it’s very difficult for the ‘little people’ to make their voices heard in a vast bureaucratic system. So I’m interested in anything which makes decision-making more based on the honest experiences of people working on the ‘ground floor’.

Being better informed
With most political issues, I always feel that I don’t know enough to have a fully-informed opinion. When you read an article, you’re only hearing one point of view and even if it seems very convincing, you don’t know what you’re not being told. If you’re really obsessed with politics you can spend time searching for opposing views and making sure you know all the key arguments surrounding an issue. But most people don’t have the time or dedication to do this. So I wonder if it would be possible to create a website dedicated to repeatedly providing opposing perspectives on every issue, so that people had a convenient way of understanding all the relevant arguments for a given topic.

Co-operativism
I’ve never studied economics so my views on economics are probably very ignorant; but for me, the big problem with capitalism is that it tends to encourage corporations motivated only by the profit-motive, so that profit is always put before human needs. Meanwhile the big problem with nationalisation seems to be that it tends towards inefficiency, a lack of innovation and slowness in responding to people’s needs. What I favour are employee or consumer owned businesses — co-operatives. They have to compete in a market economy with normal businesses, but because they are owned by employees or consumers, they balance profit with human needs. So an employee co-operative is never going to fire a third of its workforce just to save money, because the only reason it makes money is to help its workforce. I think co-operatives offer the potential for peacefully creating a much more human-centered, democratic economy. I’d love to do anything that helps spread co-operative ideas and makes existing co-operatives more effective.

Ethical social networking website
The purpose of this website would be to help people share information about how can they live a more ethical lifestyle. So for example, if someone knows a shoe company that makes all their shoes from recycled material, they can add that to their profile under the ’shopping’ category (or something like that). Other people can then browse their profiles and copy other peoples ideas, adding it to their own profile to remind them to act on it. Over time you have a bank of information that helps people share ideas. It would also act as a wikipedia for ethical issues, so people could quickly find out information about a specific company and see how ethical they are (what rights workers in their factories have, how environmental their materials are etc).

Stronger communities
I was really inspired to read this article recently: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7318556.stm . It’s about a stereotypical downtrodden housing estate where all the residents were too isolated and intimidated to do anything about all the problems with ‘anti-social behaviour’ but then managed to get together and transform things through collective action. I’d be interested in anything that helps encourage this sort of thing.

Semantic web and avoiding information overload
During the social networking project I did a lot of research on bookmarking and websites that try to use the wisdom of crowds. I think there’s a lot of potential for improvement in this area. For example, take meme-trackers: these are website that allow people to see the most popular blog posts on the internet. For me, that’s too general to be of any use. I would much rather use something that tracks the most popular blog posts for a particular subject. What would be even better would be something which tracks the most blog posts for a particular subject and also tracks the most popular bookmarks tagged in all social bookmarking websites for the same particular subject. That way you could get a constant summary of all the important new information relating to your favoured subject. If this could be done in a convenient way (complete with little extras like making it easy to print-out the latest stories so you can read it over a breakfast) I think it would fill a big need which hasn’t been met yet.
That’s a very specific idea but I’m also interested in anything that makes digesting information on the internet easier and more effective.

Group organisation
Since we’ve been spending a while searching for a decent free group-organisation web application I was wondering if there was a market for making a better one – something very intuitive and easy to set up. Or maybe we could take Gavin O’Caroll’s idea of a group-centred facebook type thing and run with that. I think Gavin was right that facebook doesn’t cater effectively for groups and events. During the social networking project, I think we all came up with some really nice ideas that we could take further.

Interactive narrative
I’m interested in the whole interactive narrative thing and making games with a better focus on stories and the imaginary worlds themselves, rather than prioritizing problem-solving and sport-style challenges. However I don’t think there’s time to do anything decent in this area and I know the most of the group isn’t interested in this.

Lecture on research methodologies

Today was taken up by a lecture on research methodologies. I thought Liz made lots of good points that I completely agree with. However, having already done a BA I realised I was already aware of all the issues she came up with.

The priority for me is sorting out with my group a priority for research. We need to do this so we can progress with the research module.

Group decision day

Today we were told we needed to get into groups. Liz made lots of very good points about the importance of not procrastinating. However I would have much preferred a few days forewarning. Today got quite tense but our group seemed to happily removed the fray. It was interesting to see how all the other groups were interested in doing something ‘tangible’ and moving away from the computer screen. We were the only group happily focussed on the intangible, the internet and the good old mouse and keyboard.

Everyone is similarly focussed on productivity and social networking websites and we’re all keen to do something that people would actually use in the ‘real world’, rather than something that people would come and admire for 10 minutes in an exhibition. For me, this is because I find it so much easier to focus and come up with the ideas when the product has a specific purpose. While I’m in art and entertainment, the only interactive art I found personally worthwhile is computer games, and I don’t think we have the time or resources to do anything innovative in that field

My group: Andreas, Gail, Michele, Rocky