FreshFresher

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Design principles for online communities

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.

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Design Challenge & Funding Platforms

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.

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What did we learn so far?

Now we are already in week 6 of our projectcommunity and when I look back I think I contributed at least a satisfactory amount as I am always participating the class as long as I am not on a wedding of a friend like last week. Even then I felt I need to contribute something afterwards so as I came back from the wedding I directly checked our facebook group where I could see that our team leader Tsvetelina is searching for some volunteers and I in a situation like this I feel responsible for doing something for my team so I promptly said I will do it. Further some weeks ago we had to present our teamwork in a two minutes presentation to the class and our teamleader was mainly preparing the powerpoint so I said I can present at least a part, which I finally did with Laura. I believe our team work is going well so far because when there is a lot to do we split the work and an example for that was at the beginning of this work where we divided the tasks and finally I was doing a research on FirstGiving.com and summarized it in a wordfile. So we always get the things done so far in our group and right now we are all working on some ideas how our final presentation cloud look like.

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. 

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Week 5 - Online facilitation

As you think about the learning you are embarking upon here at the university, reflect on the role that your instructors and fellow students play in facilitating yours and their learning. What are they doing? After more than one month I would say that the role of our instructors at the university is definitely different to the role of my teachers at the school I went to before. Before for every move for instance speaking up in class at school I was graded for and now it's more up to myself to do something. Now the instructors have a kind of 'guider' role, what means that they are helping us to find the way to the goals. Best example for that is Wednesday when we have the projectcommunity course, because when our group doesn't know how to continue as of some misunderstandings, our tutor is explaining the assignment in different clear words. Afterwards the tasks for us as a team are more clear and we are getting easier to our goal. My fellow students are facilitating my learning a lot because I am the type of a bad 'classroom learner', what means that I am better in learning at home. So it happens sometimes that after a course I have no clue what to do and then it's time for the friendly help of my fellow students which I really appreciate. With regard to the teamwork it is really motivating for me to see my group mates working hard so that I am getting motivated by them as well. It is also helpful taking the role in a group in which you are good in so the belbin test is a nice orientation though. In the group work it could be sometimes interesting to share the separate results of everyone in a better way during the work to the group result. Sometimes I only have a well knowledge about my own work, even at the end of the group work. At this point we could maybe concentrate more on the interaction of the group work, so working more together. As there is probably a way to share our separate results in a better way. All in all my instructors and fellow students are taking a very important role on my way to my goals at the university. For your commenting on others’ blogs this week, maybe you notice where another colleague has contributed to your learning through their facilitation and let them know when/where it happened and how it was of value to you. Are you game for that? For sure that!

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Influenced by others preferences?

My personal preference plays of course the biggest role when choosing the tools. But looking back I can see for my own that there is a big influence by my environment for choosing a social network. First it started all with a simple Chat page where people had nicknames and entered a digital room to chat with friends or random people. Then it started that people where moving more and more to social networks where you could present yourself with a profile picture and everything else about your interesting life.I experienced that everyone for instance of my class or friends where moving at the same time to a different social network like right now facebook, a kind of a 'Moving' I would say. People who are not registrated are missing a lot of things and everybody is forced in a way to join this community, otherwise for example in our class I couldn’t join the facebook innovators group. So in that case today I can see that my personal preference was forced to change as I preferred the social network I was using before. That was a reason why I was one of the last followers who joined facebook and here I would say that looking at other preferences not really influenced me. It is more the fact that you would miss a lot of things if you are not registrated. Looking at others preferences can be very interesting and helpful as well for choosing for instance a design software. When I ask around and most of the people are mentioning the same software except a few, then I will try the most mentioned software pretty sure. But if I found out after a while that I couldn't work with this software I will try the other one too and finally my personal preference will take the decision. So all in all looking at others preferences can be interesting but at the end my personal preference has mostly the biggest influence on my tool choices.

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Efficient Balance

Well after three weeks of working in my group I can say that the group size really matters. Right now we are about seven group members in my group and its working out well, because in the beginning we found out really fast who is going to take which role. So after we finished that work the tasks were nearly easy to split, because everyone had his own talent in something. But for my own I found out that a group which is bigger than 4-5 members is not so efficient like a smaller group of 3-4 people. As a group is going to be to big the people all sit around and everyone is expecting the others to work, but in fact no one is really working. So in this case the team leader has a difficult position as he has to get the attention of everyone to motivate the group. In a smaller group it’s also easier to get started with the work because if there are more people coming together its more likely that everyone wants to talk about interesting things like the party of last night which have mostly nothing to do with the main group assignment. I am not saying that we are talking all the time about weekend activities in my group which is quite big with 7 members but I would say that it is one of the biggest challenges to keep on focusing on the work. So that is one of the things which is working out well in our group, for instance this week we were asked to prepare a short presentation in a short time. The tasks were split and while some were working on the presentation others were perhaps chatting about private things but finally those were holding the presentation. So at the end everyone is working and if there is the time we still can talk about other things here and there - a healthy efficient balance!   One thing I need to change is just my time management. Right now its again Friday afternoon and I need to finish my blog post and some other tasks, so in future I will try to get things done earlier. But changing this is actually my plan since a long time…

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Offline is the real social life

Certainly I am using online spaces on one hand just to get information about actual topics and things.  I’m browsing nearly everything on the internet like videos, downloading music, writing emails or just interacting with friends on social networks. On the other hand for instance Facebook is interesting for me to follow friends, in general seeing what’s going on in my hometown or what are my friends doing who live far away. Like this it’s easy to stay in touch even if I don’t see those people for a long time I can communicate with those whenever I want. So the main reason for me using social networks like facebook, which is the only one at the moment, is to interact with others from all over the world. Further I tried out the TouchGraph Facebook visualizer and I’m just impressed by the result. There it is easy to see the spreading of the different networks all over the world:

(The small green part in the right corner on top is The Hague network by the way ;)) But for me it’s important to keep the social life in the real life and I couldn’t imagine sitting the whole day at home by following my friends on facebook when I could visit them easily. So the online communication with my friends depends on where they are from, that means preferentially I’m just interacting online with the people I can’t meet up every day (like the purple network in top of the picture which is from Australia). I’m also joining specific groups, but just with people that I know. In fact there is a group right now on facebook where we try to arrange a meeting with my old class from my primary school. But I’m not a member in groups where I don’t know the people to discuss about different topics, as I’m not interested in online discussions with random people. I believe that people feeling stronger online than in real life and are more likely to start swearing or offending people so that’s one reason why I don’t like to interact online with strangers.  

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Presenting your product on a social network?

So first I need to say that I didn’t post on a social network to find out about how social communities in the Internet can be useful, for instance for a company to market themselves. I talked to some people about this topic and finally one of my most interesting questions was ‘If it is significant/useful these days for a company being presented on a social network?!’ One of the most interesting answers was, that it really depends on the company and what kind of product they are selling. So the person I was talking to mentioned the car brand ‘Rolls Royce’ and said that it is not really interesting for the company to be presented for example on facebook, because in average the typical customer is not on facebook, supposed to be quiet old and sitting with his pipe between the lips in his old expensive leather chair. He heard about all the technical development out there in the world but in fact he is not interested at all to tweed that he is going for a golf session.   So I agree in a way with this opinion but further I think that even if there are still people from this generation who don’t use the internet are very rarely. Especially the new young generation like us students are no potential customers for the moment for those high class brands but when I look up the profiles of my friends I can see that they follow those kind of brands too. In the end some of us will be (hopefully) one day a potential customer for those companies…   So to find out what it all means getting back to the question ‘What do we learn from social networks?’ In this case I think it is really important to be presented on social networks with any kind of product. Another interesting point is that once you presented your new innovation on an social network, you’ll probably get a feedback – if it is a positive feedback people will maybe share it and other people will do so! Furthermore in a way we have a free market research what is a huge advantage compared to an expensive analysis.   All in all if you want to compete these days, you have to be presented with your company on a social network because the generation of today is the customer of the future!

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DRINK AT THE EDGE OF THE SKY

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Success is living the life you want...Happiness is wanting the life you live