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Posted in Community, Group 1, Students

I work with floating people

This course made me reflect about the relationships between the elements involved in the system of the online communities for innovation. I specified "for innovation" because the goal changes the structure of our web constructions. Let me explain this better;


Online communities are generally a subjective system (this is also important, each person has a different online community) created by an individual and a bunch of weird people floating in the air. I know it is a creepy description but it works. Well, I can interact with these people through different means: social networks, blogs, wikipedia, crowdfunding websites, etc… nothing difficult here. Now, think to this structure, it misses something. It’s the goal. Without a goal it is pointless to use it! Different goals will change the shape of the community involved. If I am feeling alone and I want to find new friends I will use different networks to reach a selected number of floating people (I am alone, not desperate) and then I will change the relationship into a face-to-face one. On the other hand if I want to chat with a friend I just need to reach her/him and communicate (or her/his mother, father, sister, dog if she/he is not answering.. No, I am not desperate).

Now, let’s change this goal with a "design goal". Our project is a perfect example. Yes, I have a NGO but I can just take its purpose and translate it as my goal, it will make things quicker. Well let’s analyse what I learned about this love triangle: me, the online community and the project/purpose.



First, very important part is the need. Floating people have to express a need that could involve my project, my service. There are two different ways to approach this element. You can “feel the need” and design a solution or, and that’s our case, create/adapt the need to your project.

That could sound deceitful, but it is not (if it is not done by Apple). Look at our NGO, few people really think a Tiny House Community is a solution to a need, however the space on this world is decreasing and we are overusing our resources and that’s a problem, that’s a need. Money is also decreasing and we are living over our possibilities, that’s a problem too! "Creating the need" means to make these people aware that there is a different way of living!

To study the need we can use our marketing strategies. I love the Purple Goldfish Strategy (not only because of its name). It is all about what can you give that others can’t. In an ocean of red goldfish ( or orange or yellow, that’s the colour anyway!) what makes you “purple”? Merging it with the need you get something to make your difference even more powerful! Indeed if you have something the others don’t and it is something that people really need (or think they need or discover they need) you have a huge potential.


This is the base of every interaction me-community, without it everything becomes useless, it is the crowdsourcing part of our course. Unfortunately we don’t live in a world where investors just knock at your door (or if they do they do it when you are in the bathroom), people won’t help you in your project if they don’t know it. Here we have many different way to make people aware. I continue to say that Twitter is one of the best one, but also Youtube (why not? Make a video and spread it through Twitter, Facebook, etc..). You could also think to more traditional tools. Why don’t use the “creative guerrilla strategy”? It’s a old (but not that old) marketing strategy that involves strong graphic works. In these works there is something that excites your curiosity (the color, a shape, a huge written like “BOOBS” or “SEX"(you see it worked?)), then if you look at them closer you will find all the informations or a message with a website, etc… It is a manual thing but you can use stickers with this kind of messages and spread them around, in a zone or a city easily and it’s very enjoyable to create these kind of graphic works. Returning to web awareness system we also chose to create events for our NGO, to make people understand that these tiny houses are very cozy and clean, not like in TV shows! In this case, probably Facebook is the best events spreading system.

Example of Guerrilla style campaign by Benetton (that in the meanwhile is exploiting chinese children to make clothes. Here it is another important thing for a project, consistency)


Financing is an action that you (aware) community does with your project. An important rule in this topic is “nothing is for nothing”. You have always to remember that people don’t give money for free, you have to give them something. On the other hand you have to give them something that doesn’t make you lose money, it could seem obvious but it is not. Fundraising is something precise, you should fix a goal, a number, you starting money, what can you offer, its cost… It is complicated, you have to be very careful when you organise a fundraising campaign and collect/use numerical data and measurements for it if you want to earn money. I have already talked about many other details in crowdfunding/microfinancing in my previous post. I actually didn’t know anything about it before I did this course (really, I was thinking to bag-snatches as fundraising tool before that) so, I think this is a great achievement!


It could happen that you have an idea but you can’t do it by yourself. Let’s think about a videogame, maybe you have ideas about the story, the effects and you can draw 3D characters for it (you lucky girl/boy, I am not able to use Photoshop properly!) but you don’t know how to link the commands to movements, you have not any experience about computer programming! Well, here you can use again your online community! You can find partners that will help you in it. We learned how to manage a group in our course. For example for a videogame I would recommend you to work in group of three, so you can have a better control of the progress and, as Chris Corrigan said, you are more creative and that’s important for a videogame even if you lose “diversity” but, if you start with a clear idea of what you want to do you only need people who can help you in completing it (creativity). (I thought that a practical example would be the best way to express what I learned)

MAKE IT BETTER (BETTER, BETTER, BETTER…ok it is not about Beatles)

This is something I would like to explore. It is about those networks created to share a design idea and to use gathered feedback to make it better. It would be anyway a personal creation because the “deep style” is characteristic of the designer, but functions and shapes are modified by other future users or designers. Many web design competitions work like that, involving the customer/user in the creation of the final object. However the customer/user will give some tips but is the designer that has to translate them in a visual form. It could be very interesting to understand how to use it in the future to create a sort of “crowdesigning" and anyway, it is very challenging. I think that the best way to learn it is to participate or look to design competitions and analyse reactions to each work to understand if they could be valuable in the final elaboration. I would also like to see on the web if someone has already created something like that (we are in 2014, when you create something it is already created… except an easy way to go to gym).




Well, this course taught me all these things above about managing a project in an online environment and dealing with online communities. Obviously these are terribly important in our future, people are digitalising their lives (take a train and look around you, how many people do you see with the mobile in their hands? Probably a lot), if we will be able to meet those people on the web and to understand their needs and their thoughts we will be able to create new products that will totally change the world. Old ways of designing are slowly fading away except the strongest ones (that’s why i mentioned guerrilla). We have to find a new space to extend our networks and to link ourselves. The web gives us the possibility to do it remembering to not exaggerate using it. Our lives are here in the real world, not with floating people :) Well, stay connected for next post! I think I added enough pictures on this post, moreover I have in my mind an artistic representation of a floating person but I don’t remember the artist or the name, do you have some idea? See you next time!! :)

Posted in Community, Group 1, Students

A future without memories

I decided to make a second post this week because there is a topic that deserves at least an entire discussion. It is also about questions asked in our “syllabus”: what did you learn about technology? how do you research technology? The last question in my opinion deals with our ability to look forward and anticipate what a technology will create and cause in our society.

So, first, probably the most important thing we learnt about technology is that is not only science. It is not immediate, it won’t show itself right away, at once, so we need to research, to reflect about it. Actually this is something most people forget and we make big mistakes. We take and use a software, a system because “it is easier, it is user friendly” and other stuff big companies think we need (or make we think we need) but actually we are wrong. I think that developing the wrong means we are losing a part of our richness (cultural richness).

For example I started this reasoning thinking to the digital photos, we could print them, but we don’t, Why? Because we developed most the digital storages for them then fast printing systems. If I want to print them at HEMA I have to go there, try to upload them (and it is not easy thanks to their crappy machines), wait for some time and go to take them after a while. Why we didn’t developed a cheap, easy and fast way to print them? (I should buy an EXPENSIVE photo printer, the EXPENSIVE photos paper, etc…) We didn’t because it was easier to store them in a Hard Disk. However how many times we lose some of these photos when we move them from an HD to another? Or we think we won’t need them anymore because we need more space, etc etc… And what’s the result? We are developing a future without memories. I can still watch pictures (printed) I have at home taken 15 years ago but it is hard to find pictures of 4-5 years ago!

So that’s another thing I learned about technology, don’t take the easy way, often it is not the best one! Think! Think before deciding how to do something, before deciding software, computer, system, etc… We would have so much more if we would have thought about what we were doing.

Another personal example? Ok, when I was a child (like 20 years ago) I used to listen to my grandpa’s old vinyls. They were really old and the authors of these songs were not famous, I can’t find them on Youtube. Well, I lost part of my memories because we changed through cassettes, discs, etc… without thinking to a cheap and easy way to transfer data, we just thought about an easy way to use them, spreading products that required them. Only in the last transition disc-USB we had computers that could transfer music (but I am almost sure it was a coincidence).

Here is the second answer to "how do you research?". Well, there are many means but the most basic and important one is reflecting. Just reflect. Use Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo answers, whatever you want but after you have enough information just stop and reflect: “is that the best way? What will happen if I use it? Can I use other means?”.

We had many generations just acting without thinking and now we have environmental pollution, Israel and Palestine, economic crisis. Each of these generations destroyed part of our culture in a different way (also improved it but we need to start to think improvements that are not devouring our world). Our generation, is struggling to clean our planet, to fight wars but is creating another problem: we created technology addictions, we erased and gave part of our life and our brain to computers (that are not reliable, did you see Windows 8? Would you really trust it?).

On the other hand we was born in a society that changed quickly and easily, we adapt, we know how to change. Well, let’s change, let’s think about what are we doing, let’s think not only to opportunities of technology but also to its limits. Here is the final thing I learned from this course, I will write it and just finish like that the post, because it is resuming everything and it is better to reflect on it.

I learned that technology is powerful, that it can completely change the world for the better and the worse and I learned that is humankind that will lead this change. 

Posted in Community, Group 1, Students

(Don’t) Look back (in anger)

We are almost there, that’s the seventh week and the project is going to end. It’s difficult to have a resume of what I learned without having a resume of what I and we did and what I felt. That’s why my blog post will be about the whole path during this course and it will be pretty serious (at least I will try to do my best) and not whimsical (discovered new word, I don’t know if it is right, english dictionaries are generic) and funny as usual. I promise I will do a comedy-style post with the last one.


That’s the first point, it is about the link between us, our NGOs and our four themes, a link expressed often as “confusiastic”. It is a general idea that tries to define a feeling that should occur in our progress, however it is very difficult to accept it. In fact the themes can provide different reactions in different people. Somebody can be very sure and enthusiastic about crowdsourcing and confused about work teams, somebody else can be very interested in marketing and doubtful about crowdfunding. What I am trying to say is that is not possible to define with one only word the whole course and all the topics. That’s a first lesson about media and network technologies and knowledge, they are different, deeply different and the common mean (the computer) is not enough to link them in their complexity.

Now, things are becoming more difficult. I think that some themes with some NGOs can cause fear, anger and confusion, not confusiasm. Let me explain it better with our (group 1) example: our NGO is difficultly reachable by an effective crowdfunding campaign. People involved are not “rich” and it is tough to make people donate because you can’t give back something with crowdfunding average donations. On the other hand you can give back something really “tiny” but donations would be too small to reach their goal. They want to build a stable and enduring community so they need a continuous amount of money. Now the theme “crowdfunding” was narrow for us, we needed to enlarge our horizon, our view and we needed to include big companies in our project. However that is not anymore crowdfunding as intended in the theme, we explored “microventure” and startups world. It wasn’t a real problem but it was obviously difficult to understand the exclusivity of that topic. That’s why I think that a theme as “fundraising" could fit the course better. You can include in it crowdfunding but not as only option.


Big danger in marketing zone. Three strategies: value proposition (ok!), purple goldfish (great, I love this one) and “what can we learn from Cocacola” (and here is the problem). Even if the example of Cocacola could be, reflecting a lot on it and stretching it, useful there is fundamental contradiction (and I think that’s why in group 1 nobody choosed it). That’s something really similar to philosophical disprove; even if you could use it in NGOs (and it is difficult) the big problem is that we are trying basically to compare a HUGE multinational company with a small, local NGO. It is a big generalisation in terms of dimensions and goals, are we sure that we can do this step (even if Melinda Gates says that is possible) and are we sure that there are not strategies that can be more suitable for our NGOs?Moreover watching at the video of Melinda Gates I think that it wouldn’t work;

1- Many NGOs are acting with single events, single initiatives. That makes completely impossible the real time data. Cocacola is continuing to sell bottles every day, they can have precise data and know the flexions of their market. For a NGO is more realistic to collect and analyse data at the end of an event but that is completely different.

2- Local entrepreneurial talent. That’s just obvious, many NGOs (as Tiny Houses) are local. Dealing with local entrepreneurial market is the first thing you have to do.

3- Marketing. Sure, saying it so generally it seems right but can we really compare the marketing actions of a NGO with marketing actions of Cocacola? I hope no! That would spoil NGO goals and existences.

On the other hand the Purple Goldfish Strategy is kinder, is more general, from the small store to, why not, a NGO! I hope that you understand what I mean, we need more adaptable strategies like this one, not the ones tested only by big companies. Here is another important lesson, adaptability over big results. They are obviously welcome but adaptability will allow you to create networks and systems that can be used by more people and help them in a proper way.


Now we can introduce another important lesson about all your work. There is a specific mean for each work you have to do. Passing through the complexity of social media you will have to recognise the useful tools from the fancy but useless stuff (*cough!*… facebook hashtags… *cough!*).


Now, what I would like to learn more? I would like to deepen my knowledge about fundraising, about startups creation and the ways to start your own business. Also, I would be very interested in the world of online design contests and related community valuation of projects. 

Anyway, now we are finishing our lessons and, even if I gave just some advice about what, in my opinion, was too confused and less enthusiastic, I am happy about this course. It helped us to know how to contact and to deal with a client and we started to understand how are groups working, these are probably the main results and I think that are the best results we could have. 

Well guys, see you next week, stay connected for the last post for Project Community! Bye bye! :)

Posted in Community, Group 1, Students

An alternative to a bank robbery


Fellow designer, the new century has just begun to show us its modernity and its progress with an impressive rate. We just discovered computer viruses that could destroy technology, islamic fundamentalism that could destroy western technology, bird flu that could destroy human society, swine flu that could destroy human society, Apple iPhone that could destroy human society, etc… By the way, I predict that this year’s flu will be caterpillar flu, just to keep you informed.


Now, in a world in which huge companies, viruses and groups are fighting each other how can we imagine to stand out with our tiny, nice product? Well, a bank robbery could seem a great idea but there are definitively easier and softer ways. One of them is crowdfunding, that for designers is very simple. You have a product, you need to create your company to build and commercialize it, you go on internet and you gather money from people donating giving them back, maybe, that product. They pay it less and have it before all the others and you get enough money to start your business. It seems heaven isn’t it? Well there are some limits, and they are really important.

First, it is not enough to create your campaign on Kickstarter. People need to know about it, you will have to use all your cyber-power: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, “Friends”, “Relatives” (important social networks), you have to spread the word. You know, it is not like making people aware of your ideas. If you write a status about the next caterpillar flu and 1000 people read it, well, you did it, 1000 people know what you think about it. If you make 1000 people know that you are gathering money for something, you will have a final effect of 30-40 people donating, that is a good achievement but is not enough, so you will need to reach 10.000 people and you will have great possibilities (well, if you find a cure for caterpillar flu you would probably reach 10.000 people donating, scared by newspapers and TV shows).

Second, you have to be sure of your results. You can’t make people donate for something you have to develop and you are not sure to achieve. If you want to design a flying chair be sure you can do it! Otherwise you will have lots of cyber-addicteds really angry with you.


There are other ways to gather money, similar to crowdfunding but deeply different. When I write “Develop Yourself” I mean to change your perspective. While with crowdfunding you develop your product with startups you can develop yourself and then your product creating a stronger result! There are a lot of websites as microventures that can make startups and investors meet. Here you can create your own small and wonderful company in order to come out with a lot of new products and ideas. Sure, the limit is that you will have investors but in “normal” crowdfunding is not that different. Moreover governments are investing a lot of money in financing startups and you have special spaces like “hubs” where you can increase your awareness about this new magical world. In Italy we have some great experiences in Piemonte and in Veneto regions in which these hubs are working very well, not being affected by the economic crisis (and that’s an unbelievable result in Italy!). That’s way I think that this investors finding system for startups is the best mean to stand up in design world. After that entering a startups hub is another way to "stand up together" that is easier than trying to do it individually.


That is why we suggested our NGO to create a startup, to think itself as a startup. It can give a service: providing new environmentally and socially sustainable spaces for companies and people. In the Tiny Houses community we can create a great opportunity for individuals and companies to make each other better. People can join this community to learn and try new experiences both on the working and on the living side. The workers of that companies would work in a relaxed green place, with trees and fresh air. Inhabitants of this community would gather money and experiences from companies. Moreover a startup won’t have any legal problem with the government that would be able to finance it. For them it is easier to start on Microventures than on crowdfunding campaigns.


As a group we defined the economic part of “having a real community”. Now it is time to define how can this NGO/Startup make people aware and how they can develop their calendar and activities to make the community work. We are thinking to a sort of internal regulation for the Tiny Houses hub, internet cafè and events. Stay connected for the next week post, now I have to see the first episode of American Horror Story 4, so I will leave you with a picture of your worst enemy this year! Bye!


Posted in Community, Group 1, Students

A democratic expression for small communities

I started this reflection with several perplexities. If you think to our NGO it is difficult to define a team who could fairly lead it. We are talking about a different kind of organisation, an organisation that wants to build a real community, a group of people who is going to live together. How can we imagine a fair leader group if we do not involve the whole community in the common choices and more important how can we take advantage of the small size of this community to create a new decision-making model? We have here a great opportunity to create a harmonised society able to deal quickly with difficult situations.


First, we need to think to what the community needs, to the personalities who are going to operate in some topics to manage the challenged they will face.

The technician: Stone Age is gone and we need someone who can take care of our Wi-Fi, our TV’s, our electric system. It can be a prototype of the technology stewart, but just in the most technical sense.

The Head of facilities: the pool won’t dig itself, we need someone who could manage and create facilities like the bar, the pool, the reception, etc.. Don’t worry, he won’t start to dig the pool, he will call and contact someone who can build it.

The communicator: someone who is able to communicate with administrations, government, city hall, people, etc.. He will think about flyers, participation at events outside the community and he will fix the community’s meetings. He is another kind of technology stewart (it seems I am writing about incarnations of Buddha). He should be extrovert, don’t send to the city hall someone who can’t speak because is too shy, it could be a disaster.

The events organiser: someone who doesn’t suffer from heart attacks, this is the most stressful role. He has to think and to set up events inside the community, the camp, the Easter egg hunt (you thought I’d forgotten it? No, if the White House organises it we will do it too), etc..

The Treasurer: the killjoy, someone who will remember the others that the money is limited. The grey, cold and annoying character, the Angela Merkel of our NGO.

The Judge: diplomatic, handsome, kind and reasonable. This role will help members of the community to solve disputes in the most fair way possible, he will check that everybody is respecting laws.

The Leader: obvious, the frontman, he will manage all the other roles, he will give suggestions in every topic and he decides what is truly needed and what is not. 

We have our great team who will manage the community, now second problem: how to make it fair? How to make it democratic? We are talking about people’s lives, houses (even if tiny), we have to create a mechanism with which they can deal if they want to express their opinion.


Democratic governments around the world can be a model (as long as the model is not the italian one). Let’s start to think to our team as a government, we have different ministers and we have prime minister. Now let’s create a parliament, the community itself, a perfect, direct and total assembly that will express the needs and the ideas of each member. Here is our decision-making system! The “team” will propose idea to the assembly and the assembly will vote.

Last thing, we need an election system, something that will help us to create a “team”. I propose a simple one. We have candidate teams, we an election day, the assembly votes and we have a new leading team! (I won’t make a drawing of this one, come on!)


There is still a small step missing. How can our ministers do what they have to do? I mean, if we want to build this famous pool we need another team that can work on this pool. We can’t suppose that one person can do it all! Well, thinking about the number of people in a team I do agree with Chris Corrigan, smaller teams (2-3 people) are more creative. While our assembly approved something we need a team that can decide how to do it. Do we want a heart-shaped pool? A star-shaped? A normal one? (Yes, build a normal one, it is better). So let’s think to a team of 3 people, one of them is the “minister” and two of them are members of the assembly. It would be a temporary team, created to build the pool and the pool only.

As you can see, with a right set of rules this model can be very fast, perfect to make fair and quick decisions and to represent the community, to protect it and to improve it. With that our NGO will be able to create a great and functioning reality, where people can represent themselves and share beliefs and impressions in an assembly. They will be able to decide and to change the concept of their small society making it suits better to their ideas.


Changing topic we can talk about my work group. Well, this will be a lot faster and shorter than the first one, don’t worry. Our team is completely different from the NGO-democratic model, we are just seven people and we created a “hourglass system”. At first, we have several topics, we research about them in group of one. Then, with a meeting we resume and share what we know, the group will be a filter that will translate and change with the others’ individual experiences the informations. After that we can decide what to do, how to proceed, what to check as a group. When we are in the “operative” phase we can split again in small group (1-2 people) to work and technically complete parts of our task (one can make the video, the other one the report, etc..) in the best, precise and fastest way and we will put everything together with the experience of the whole group in it.

Posted in Community, Group 1, Students

Shouting as loud as you can

There is not a big difference between the real interactions and those of the web. You can find big similarities in the way you talk with other people in the world and our “Me, We, Networks” model. While in your life you can modulate the tone of your voice in the internet environment you can change network, while you can choose where and in which geographical and social context you can speak in the internet environment you change your community and your tools to define the audience (my loved and passionate relationship with hashtags is an example). Let me explain this better.

We can imagine our web uses and informations sharing as a normal dialogue in real life: we can whisper with one person because we are talking behind someone’s back (do not do the “goody-goody”, I know you did it about that annoying and overwhelming person that continues to bother you each single day in your existence), we can mumble loudly alone and if someone else hears us even better or we can take a soap box and start a tirade on the deviant costumes of our years (that was the favourite way of latin people but, be careful, Cicero was beheaded).

Our model follows this sequence, “me" is when we put online informations  without a direct reader (or listener, it depends on your network) but we know that we can be "read" by someone or we don’t really matter. That can be a good way to reflect, writing let us organise our ideas and let us remember them because they are saved on the web, on the other hand people can anyway help us, answering to our posts even if that is not really needed.

We" is built with all the interactions we make with people we know or that is working with us. It is like speaking with a person we know but nobody else is supposed to hear us. It is about organisation of activities, sharing infos or feelings we don’t want to give to others (or we don’t need to) or building relationships. It is a weird mix of works and feelings but that is probably the weird nature of the “human groups”.

The Network is completely different, it is not about human individual nature like the previous two, it is about the human behavior and how we can as individuals affect it. With networks we share ideas, we share thoughts and we want that everyone knows them, we want that people agree with us or give us suggestions to improve our ideas, to make them stronger. An ideal network would be able to build a common human idea by sharing and modifying a previous one. Obviously that is not possible, the essence of the mankind is the man, the individual, the one and her/his different values, we can link people with same values but we can’t create a unique common values set able to regulate our whole knowledge, we can’t create a unique common consciousness (the ones who tried to actually developed the worst errors in our history).

The tools of me, we and network can be similar, however the use and the usefulness can provide a grade for each tool in each “category" (that’s a good way to define them). Let me make an example, Facebook’s notes are a good way to reflect as "me" but Tumblr will let me store all my thoughts in  one page and people that share my same interests can help me to improve my reflections.

On the other hand Facebook is the best and the fastest mean for the “group” category, I can easily share everything with a limited group of people, or with one people through the chat, I don’t think there is a better way to quickly share our status to our whole friends.

However Facebook is terrible as a network, I can make people know my ideals with FB, the hashtags system is something still unknown even if now I can use them (that is really stupid considered the normal privacy settings we have). Facebook gather too many private informations, they can’t be shared by reasonable people. Twitter, I will repeat it till my death, Twitter is the best way to share infos to a huge audience.

That can be broaden using hashtags (specialists audience uses hashtags to immediately see what they need). I mean, every category can be broaden using hashtags, even the “me” (but not Facebook, I tried to use them, they don’t work, it is just weird!!!). Tumblr can easily switch from “me” to network using these and other systems.

Our NGO in particular should shift from the exclusive use of Facebook to the use of real network’s means: Twitter, Tumblr with pictures and a personal regional website! Participating at events around Florida with flyers for example is a good “real way” to increase awareness! Let’s leave FB for group meetings and internal, private stuff!

Now, I have a lot more to say and to tell but I think my teachers wouldn’t appreciate, probably they are feeling really sleepy at the moment so, it is better to stop here. Stay connected and wait for the next post if this one didn’t bore you to death! Bye!

Posted in Community, Group 1, Students

The man is a social animal

This title is a short answer to the question about my online technology skills. I am not able to use complex technologies or codes to deeply manage my online world. I have never studied Computer Sciences and I grew up in what I call the “Bridge generation”, the generation that saw the rising of Internet but that was not born in an Internet environment. I can notice it with my younger brother: he is able to replicate my moves when using technological objects, I learned to do these “moves” in many years.

However I have different skills, maybe not technical skills but still useful. I have a good knowledge of social networking, I know how to make people read my posts using hashtags and I know how to connect and use different social networks. That could seem actually stupid, I know, but even if anyone can post on Facebook, it’s difficult to make people really read what you posted.

I have to admit that FB is a great communication tool between people you really know but it’s not the best advertising way for NGOs or organisations in general. I definitively prefer Twitter, you can spam your thoughts and everybody can read them, using the right hashtag you will spread your ideas easily. Tumblr is a good mean but with a different purpose, it is perfect if you want to share pictures or complex “orations” or music. Another important tool is Instagram, it is completely useless alone but, if linked with Twitter it will give you the pictures’ strength like Tumblr and the spam rate.

I think that personal preferences are only partially involved in choosing an online tool. Let me make an example, if in my work team someone suggests a different idea we just have to choose the one that is best suitable for the situation and it is very difficult that they can be considered both valuable in the same way. If we are working for a political party and we have to spread their values, well, Twitter! You can also use Facebook and whatever you want but you need to use Twitter as main network. If you have to sponsor an artist you have to use Tumblr! That’s what I think about social networks, actually for me is really difficult to think about other more complex ideas like “create a web platform/hub”, etc.. because I really don’t know how to create or how to manage them.

About the so called Technology Stewardship, well, it is difficult. First, I am not a technology steward, as you can read above I can be a communicator, an “advertising agent” but not a technology stewart, I am not skilled enough. With our NGO this is a problem, we have to try to provide great solutions that we are not able to build like a “web platform” or we just need to use what we know? What is their technological level? These are important questions we will ask them. I don’t really know yet where we should “stop” with technological solutions or where we should explore new ways.

Posted in Community, Group 1, Students

A boat in the woods

That’s something weird to say, I know. Let me explain. “Being like a boat in the woods” is the translation of an italian proverb that indicates something that is growing up in the wrong or without context. When you find yourself in this situation you feel that everything you want to do is possible but not sure and you live in a situation of deep uncertainty.

That is today’s topic for me, the need of a context. In our situation it can be clear only after having talked with the NGO that has not answered yet. Why we need it? Well, we worked a lot and found great ideas and solutions, even detailed ideas like renting Tiny Houses to increase the NGO income and gather supporters all around the world, creating events in the camp and a web platform that can connect different communities, organize builders and certifiers, etc… We thought also to a eggs’ hunt for Easter (that is too much, I know but when you start it is difficult to stop). However we miss the context: what are they already doing as activities? What can they do and what they can’t? What is their technology level and competence? Without these informations our work is stuck.

On the other hand we can see positive facts. First of all we had our first Hangout with Nancy, we managed to make Google Hangouts work (that wasn’t so obvious) and we got a lot of suggestions about how to proceed so thank you very much Nancy (probably we are going to call you maaany times). 

The second important thing is that we have tons and tons of ideas and my group is able to produce them with an impressive rate.

So, how can I resume our position? Well, we are stuck, yes and we miss the context because we need to call the NGO. However we are involved, we are collecting informations from websites and facebook (I love the website with all the tiny houses and their interiors, they are so cozy!) and the most important thing is that when we will have the context we will be ready to provide great solutions and a complete plan to make this organization bigger and trendy (Laura suggested us this word and I think it is great to make people being involved in the Tiny Houses community)!

Now I will go back to my homework for Personal Branding course and I leave you with a picture of my motivation and productivity provider. Stay connected and wait for the next posts!

Posted in Community, Group 1, Students