Cogito ergo sum.
Just as we started to go deeper and refine our offerings, we stepped back. We thought.
Why did we do it? Who would it help? What made it deserved to exist?
We simplified. We started over. We’ve made it better.
And this is it.
Category: Story boarding
Posts relating to the development of a story board for your proposition.
Walkers: Designing Storyboards (week 6)
Week 6
While we have settled on the function of the webpage, we will be focusing to demonstrate the voting system and the volunteer point system in the storyboard.
The voting system is a function for basic members to create their event on their own via Notice board. When they choose the ‘event’ categories in the notice board, they may be able to uphold their own event concerning no matter what. For example, in the above picture, a resident may be unsatisfied with a dirty park. He may send a post recruiting volunteers to clean it up. By inserting a number of minimum participants need (e.g. 20 people need here), the event will be created automatically on the calendar when 20 interested participates click ‘yes’ in the post. This save works in administering and can allow people to have a first try in participating in volunteering without processing a lot of registering process that gives pressure on them.
Another storyboard showing is one demonstrating how the volunteer point system works.
Volunteer points can be earned through holding and participating events. We try to make the online points to have an actual benefit in real life so as to encourage the community to involve in it. There are three major ways to use it:
- It can act as a counter for organization to know how active a participate in the community. It somehow works as an online cv, but more informal one to show some organization in the site who are potential volunteers or employee.
- When the points continuously add on, participates may unlock achievement and level up as higher level members to have higher authority (like admin) to edit post etc. Achievement may include exchanging for volunteer hours on CV in certain rate. (1 :1 may do also).
- By cooperating with business we can offer discounts through exchange points. (may involve another unit for exchange since the volunteer hours should not be gone when you purchase anything)
Both story boards are just showing the basic concept and may not be complete and thorough enough. We will continue to try editing for the final output.
We still have a lot to cover.
Allow us to introduce ourselves
Hello, Tobias here signing into the Blog. Here in our team we have also Julian, Manveer, Sam and Yilin. Ultimately, we are going to seek a digital solution for our project partner, namely North Tyneside Council, to try to get the youngsters to tell the Council what they want in their own community so that the Council can craft around it for the future. We’re still very much newbies on WordPress, so please go easy on us!
On the first week, we’re glad to have already met our project partner and we’ve had a very constructive conversation to start off with.
We’ve brainstormed a little and have identified some long term goals. In fact, we only had one initially – we wanted the final outcome to be engaging amongst the younger generation. This is at the heart of our project. Simple.
But when the project partner come to us, what they really want from us is “how”. To answer this question, first we need to know more about what’s actually going on; why it’s not working at the moment.
Claire, the representative of our lovely project partner that day was very kind and analysed with us patiently the links and relationships between different parties involved in the planning processes. With the help of Sharpies, we’ve produced a diagram shewing exactly what is happening currently in the real world as Claire shared her experiences on urban planning, having worked at this industry for over a decade already. It’s all complicated, so the easiest way might be just to let you have a look at the diagram yourself:
No, unlike the maps on Local Plans, we don’t have a legend for the diagram. Sorry! But we believe it actually speaks for itself.
So obviously, developers are also very important stakeholders in the processes. Even if the youngsters have a jolly good plan, if the developers don’t want to build it, it’s just no point of doing anything at all while the young people might also end up disappointed. As a result, we went back to our long term goals and added one more item: how to get the developers to build?
Although the meeting was only an hour long, we still attempted to get some short answers – and questions – for these two long term goals. For engaging with young people, we’ve came up with a few sub-categories: how do we grab their attention? Do we want to make it real fun? How do we make it not too childish to appeal to the older-young people and at the same time not be overly-fledged to appeal to the younger-young people? And if we make an app as the final outcome, do all young people have access to mobile devices?
On the other hand, commercial institutions perhaps have another sets of values that differ from the general public’s in order to sustain their businesses and profits. Okay, that’s fair enough, but if we’re gonna have to work with them to materialise the community in the end, do we have to look at their values in the business world and lead the (even) younger generation to give their input with that in mind, or would that be limiting ourselves to the developers’ world? It really is a tricky business.
Anyways, this pretty much sums up the first week in the office. If you have any dandy ideas on our project, please drop us a few words below – we’re all ears!