Week 11
From this week’s tutorial I received Feedback from Coursework Component 2a. My feedback was good, but one of the team members, Simon was not contributing to the work. What is more, some questions were missed out; as a team we thought that the question was not relevance to the assignment which was a blog.
This will be of use to my future studies at LSBU or elsewhere as I would need to read the specification carefully and understand what the specification is about.
If I have to do similar coursework to component 2a again, I will answer all the questions below, even the questions not relevant to the assignment as this will help me overcome the initial difficulties I faced.
What is the Purpose? What is the purpose of your project and what draws people to your community? (E.g. want information or support, interact with others, have fun, meet new people, or voice their own ideas.)
Who is your audience?
What is the value proposition in your idea for your target audience?
What is your go to the market plan?
What will be your key activities?
What are the resources you have on hand to launch your project?
Who are you competitors and what is your comparative advantage?
What is your financial plan for sustainability in the next three years; please explain your revenue generation model e.g. advertisements, registration, consultancy etc.
What are the moderation policies for the community? This is to ensure people behave reasonably and help to direct activity in the community. The community needs policies to direct online behavior.
Do you need Professionals? Some communities like the hosted chats in drkoop.com and amazon.com invite experts to lead discussions and answer questions.
How will you handle Lurkers? Lurkers is the term to describe someone who does not participate; he observes what is going on but remains silent, sometimes it is taken positively and sometimes lurking is considered as threatening to the well-being of the community that they question how communities can organize and govern themselves to prevent lurking, which is seen as lack of commitment to the community.
What are your plans to attract Participants? Dominant characters, those set themselves up as Stars in the community.
What Community size have you targeted? The size of the community can strongly influence its activities.
How would you govern your Community? This directs what people can or should do and what they should not or cannot do, it is intended to help prevent problems.
What are your Joining or leaving policies?
What are your policies to abide by the Laws: e.g. for some communities has policies for user to tell them, you own your own words, the aim there is to assign responsibility to participants for their own words and to protect the community’s developers from legal liability. Please explore other policies.
What are your Policies for privacy, security and copyright protection?
How would you access community needs based on the Design usability? E.g. Interaction dialog, navigation, registration forms, feedback, representations of users, message format, archives, and support tools etc.
How are you going to assess community needs and analyze user tasks? E.g. what kind of public and private discussions spaces are needed and how does the user actually read or send a message.
How are you going to select a technology and planning sociability? This involves selecting software available via the internet and tailoring it to provide usability for the intended community. Sociability planning is done in parallel and policies and social structures are planned.
How you plan to design, implement and test your prototype? In this you are required to map the community needs with the features of the possible software and the overall conceptual design is determined. E.g. having identified a particular bulletin board, it has to be incorporated into the community and linked with web pages and other software, as appropriate, interfaces are developed and sociability is planned. This can involve many interactions of design-and-test, with the community in small projects.
How have you planned to refine and tune sociability and usability? This involves formal, larger scale usability and sociability testing with the community to resolve problems, further, testing may be done to refine specific solutions e.g. perfecting a dialog box, ensuring consistent use of capital letters in the website or clarifying the readability of membership instructions based on user feedback.
How you plan to welcome and nurture the community? and what will entice people to keep coming back? This involves “seeding” the community and publicizing it, and, later welcoming and supporting new members.