4/7 design briefs talked about a crowdsourced platform to help turn ideas into actions/things.
This platform is solving the same challenge ProjectEvolve is experiencing - no infrastructure.
We’re building a platform that sources good ideas and develops them by leveraging the skills, time, and knowledge of our internet community.
Platform diagram at bottom of PDF (thanks Mike Lai) and questions we need to answer to build it.
To-do: Divide responsibility and ask/research/answer questions associated with the proposed ‘platform.’
We’re going to be holding multiple info call sessions. Will schedule as needed.
So far, the best part about this project has been hearing other people’s ideas about how to move forward and weaving those ideas in with the project roadmap. There are two core concepts in this email that I’m going to borrow to describe 1) what went wrong with the idea of breaking into design teams, and 2) how we’re going to use that learning experience to develop a system or platform that crowdsources ideas and resources to turn ideas into realities.
What went wrong?
Here’s a simple analogy from Mike Ringland:
“Imagine we all have access to a grocery store and instead of someone saying as the doors open, “Make a vegan three course meal for 12” they say “meet me back here in a hour.”
There is little direction, a dysfunctional infrastructure (Slack), and no well-formed goals with the current ProjectEvolve. I hoped that collectively we’d be able to develop a number of methods and systems to serve as vehicles for turning an idea into an actual thing, but unfortunately the environment wasn’t nurturing enough for those structures to form.
What we learned from the Design Briefs?
First of all, thank you to everyone who completed a design brief. It was a bit weird and I’m sure to some it felt unnatural, but that is by design. There were 7 design briefs and 4 of them talked nearly about the exact same idea.
What is the problem you’re trying to solve?
Ingrid Wong: Using the knowledge, drive, enthusiasm, brilliance, bright ideas of people I do not know personally. How can I contribute to smaller and larger projects that help the world in a positive, constructive way?
Mac: In its current format, the ListServe is primarily a one way communications tool for individuals to send a message of their choosing to thousands of people around the world. Some feedback is surely generated but it is also very likely that there are many individuals who would actively participate in activities that would promote the common good if given the right opportunity.
Mike Lai: Help people on Listserve turn good ideas into action(s) that can produce positive outcomes by leveraging the skills, time and knowledge of the Listserve community.
Chris: The Listserve is an awesome idea in principle, but I think the question - what would you say to 1 million people - distracts winners. I think there should be a better way to get good ideas from winners, and for there to be a platform that nurtures and extends these ideas. There have been a lot of interesting projects started by winners of the listserve that have eventually gotten lost because of the lack of a platform.
After reading all of these design briefs, it became clear to me that the problem expressed in a majority of the briefs is the EXACT same problem ProjectEvolve is suffering from - basically no infrastructure to turn an idea into a real thing. The other Design Brief’s themes touched on 1) better education about our environment, and 2) the issue of isolation in a connected world - these are real problems and need addressing. Unfortunately given it’s current state, ProjectEvolve is not able to do anything about these problems.
The next step is clear
Bulletpoints:
We’re building a platform that sources good ideas and develops them by leveraging the skills, time, and knowledge of our internet community.
We’re building a platform to help others turn their ideas into actions.
We’re building a platform for the exchange of ideas with the intent to develop them to better society.
I know it’s cliche to include a TED talk, but I want to create a literal platform for ‘Ideas to have sex’
No time to watch? What individual knows how to make a computer mouse? Literally nobody… We all know little bits, but nobody knows the whole. What we’ve done in society is created the ability to do things we literally don’t understand. By leveraging technology we’ve gone beyond the capacity of the human mind. What is now relevant is how well a society is communicating their ideas. What we’ve done is create a collective brain. Any one individual is just a node in the network of the collective brain.
Platform phases and accompanying questions:
Source ideas for projects
How do we get people to share their best ideas?
What types of projects (e.g. concept, software, hardware, local gatherings, other)?
What areas are projects targeting (e.g. environmental, social, political)?
Sort, filter, and prioritize ideas for projects
What criteria need to be considered for filtering ideas?
How do we ensure that there is adequate representation across demographics of project ideas?
How can we give feedback to the community improve the source of ideas?
Decide on projects
How do we decide the scope of the project?
How do we determine the outcome or deliverable for the project?
Assemble ‘fireteams’ for projects
How do we determine the project team(s)?
Are they self-determined?
How are time and resources allocated?
Build / deliver MVP
What methodologies and processes are used for deliver the project?
Thanks for participating. We are now 130 individuals strong and ready to start brainstorming!
How are we going to be organized?
We’ll be in 13 teams of 10, somewhat randomly built.
How were the teams picked?
From the surveys, I ordered the list of respondents based on your stated enthusiasm level. From there, I assigned everyone a number in order 1-13 so there’s an equal level of enthusiasm in each team.
How will we communicate with each other?
Each team will have their own Slack chat, there will be one group chat as well. You should be receiving an email inviting you to the chat right after this one.
What are we doing?
Each team is brainstorming on the topic
How might we use the internet and a global community of strangers to ____?
Or restated,
What are we doing? What does that look like?
Each team will produce at least one design brief. Please use this resource to inspire the creation of your design brief: Frame your design challenge (p.31-33)
How are we going to create our design briefs?
Each team is encouraged to devise their own methods of working based on who is in your group. Because each of us has a different background and differing expertise, it would be counterproductive for me to prescribe a working method we should each use. However, groups are strongly encouraged to use protocols which support the egalitarian nature of the list. Using inclusive language, limiting cross talk, and checking with everyone to make sure they have had a chance to be heard can be useful in supporting a positive and productive research/brainstorming environment.
In general, a team’s exercises should consist of brainstorming ideas, then researching potential contenders for the design briefs, then back to brainstorming. You are trying to discover interests and insight to drive your top ideas which make it into the design brief.
Here are some ideas for research activities: re-read Listserve emails, analyze our survey responses, text analysis of Listserve emails, social network analysis on The Listserve, research what’s our fascination with strangers, research what kind of cultural exchanges people are interested in, research why do people read The Listserve.
What are we going to do with our briefs?
On or around Jan 10th, each team will share their briefs with the group. After the presentations, each individual will have opportunity to pick one design brief that they would like to develop.
After we see how the group distributes itself among the ideas, we’ll choose which briefs to move forward with. As always, your thoughts are welcome about how to do that when we get there.
Then, we’ll jump into the first phase of design thinking - Empathize! (p.2)
A design brief is the document that gets a design project started. Let’s use an overly simplistic example from a professional setting. Imagine The Beer Company is losing market share to microbreweries and they need to design a new product. They write a design brief outlining their wants and goals for the design team. Several features make up a design brief, and it’s more of an art than a science, but consider The Beer Company simply asks a design team to create a new ‘authentic’ looking beer label. From the brief, the design team does research, brainstorms ideas, and designs a new beer label.
Having a good quality design brief is really important.
If it’s worth doing a design brief at all, it’s worth doing well. Because we’re all volunteering our time on this project, I think it’s important that we make sure we’re working on well-defined design briefs that we’re passionate about.
Thinking back to The Beer Company, there was a key stakeholder that wanted something - the beer company wanted an ‘authentic’ beer label designed for their product to reclaim a lost market. In ProjectEvolve, we have no key stakeholder, we have no market we’re trying to capture - our decision to create something is entirely autonomous, it’s whatever we want.
Our design briefs
This is a proposal, I’d love your input. If everyone is okay with it, I’ll send team arrangements and materials on Wednesday Dec 16th.
Because ProjectEvolve is a result of The Listserve, we inherit attributes that give us a certain architecture. This architecture helps suggest some constraints to apply to our design briefs. Consider this fill-in-the-blank, inspired by our collective survey responses:
How might we use the internet and a global community of strangers to ____?
From the survey responses, there seems to be many great, but nascent ideas around the blank. I’d love to explore this further in groups. To do this, our first exercise in randomly assigned teams (14 teams of 10 people) will be to create design briefs - to define what we want and our goals.
Each team will be asked to create two ‘How might we…’ statement inspired design briefs. You can simply fill in the blank above, or completely re-write the question. Let’s plan to have these done by Jan 10th. Afterwards, we’ll share the design briefs between teams, select ones to work on, and jump into design thinking.
Very unscientific findings from my analysis of the surveys:
Many people seemed interested in the “community of strangers” feature to The Listserve. Top results of a Google search for “community of strangers” shows news articles for the “Human of New York” project. Someone in our group is also doing a photo project called 100 Strangers.
Both The Listserve and Humans of New York are similar in that they are networks that feature a one-to-many interaction. That is, one person creates content and delivers it to many viewers.
It also seems like this group wants to design for growth. Like an organism that grows and adapts to its surroundings through evolutions. But how?
For this, I like to think of communication network features that could impact this - mainly, the frequency and quality and type of communications. Consider all the potential ways you could redesign how a network communicates. What if the frequency of The Listserve was once a week? What if you had a month to think about what to write rather than 48 hours? Would we get better content or would the writer wait until the last minute anyways? What if Mondays were reserved for emails from people in North America, and on Tuesdays people from Europe provided their own insights? Would that increase diversity of emails? What if communication wasn’t through wasn’t a mass email but instead you are paired at random with a group of 6 strangers? For just $15/year per person, every winner could also win $1,000 along with the option to write an email. There are limitless combinations.
What would these networks look like? How might they ‘grow’? How would the content change relative to the network structure? Which type of network would result in stronger connections? And, which would help us learn more about each other’s cultures?
Some (sort of) related materials that I found interesting:
Thanks to everyone that filled out the survey. We had 119 responses for a 59% participation rate, that’s pretty incredible. I assembled this website to make viewing and analyzing the data easy for everyone.
I’ve added Disqus comments to the bottom of every webpage so we can discuss our analysis of the survey questions. This is an open forum with no established rules, yet, so please remember to be respectful. I imagine most commenting will occur on the Question pages, and on occasion on an individual Responders page. CSV file of survey results is here.
It may not feel like it, but we’re in the first stage of design thinking - we’re learning about ourselves. Some trends emerge in the survey - more diversity, less frequent emails, fewer emails giving life advice. We will eventually brainstorm ideas that meet those needs, but first we really need to understand what we want.
I have been in contact with Alvin Chang, one of the founders of The Listserve, and he informed me that, by design, The Listserve did not capture any data on the emails. This means that we actually don’t know and probably will never know how many emails get opened everyday, what the most popular emails are etc…
At this point, we also don’t know how diverse The Listserve is (in terms of subscribers), but if ProjectEvolve is at all any indicator of the diversity of the overall listserve, it’s mostly 20-30 year olds living in the USA. But this doesn’t mean we’ll never know the diversity! If you receive that email and Win The Listserve, please run a demographics/diversity survey finding out who’s reading from where!
Next Steps
The next step is to split into teams so we can begin to tackle the project more independently. I have a few ideas, but if anyone has experience creating teams like this, a good idea, or a strong opinion, please email me.
I’m planning to have teams created and a better project roadmap built in the next two weeks (if you want to collaborate and help on this, please email me). Once the Holiday’s are over and we’re all making New Year’s resolutions - we’ll hit the ground running on ProjectEvolve - what a great resolution!
