Polishing Words

Today I finish my part of the group report. I had two main objectives on the writing, show the client the benefits of our approach, and make thoughtful comparisons against the client-server solution. By showing the weaknesses, and specially the statement that our proposition is cost efficient, it will give our team competitive advantage. I don’t believe the other group is going to think about this.
On the other hand, it has been quite difficult to squeeze two weeks research, in a short document, plus I tried to focus my writing in showing solutions rather than how much I have researched, but it hasn’t been an easy task.

From Strategy to Implementation

Last days have been occupied to ensure that content and features that are going to be implemented in the website fits with our overall strategy. Furthermore research shows that using peer to peer technology on online communities is the real challenge, since bring not just economical benefits, but helps to stabilize the social network. Ill explain this thoroughly in the document that we will hand to the client.

God and Multimedia

Yesterday I posted to the group blog the Fishbone for the Short Ends Film Festival Website

FISHBONE FOR SHORT ENDS FILMS FESTIVAL COMMUNITY WEBSITE
(THE BRIEF)

Purpose

To enrich the world of new filmakers

Vision

A world where novel filmmakers and fans of new cinema learn from each other and by sharing experiences understand better other cultures enhancing their work.

Values, Culture and Expression

Trustworthiness, authenticity, quality, learning, cross- pollination of cultures, efficiency, usefulness…

Mission

To allow new filmmakers to show their work to the world and be able to contact and share information and resources to and from each other.


Strategies

To create an online social environment where new filmmakers have a shared purpose, trust each other, share resources, have common values, share goals, interests, needs, common rules and engage in repeated active interaction to fully extract their potential.

Objectives

Achieve a steady growth in terms of users and valuable content.

Plans

Implement useful services for users, improving the successful ones and avoiding those not exploited. Improve the offering of our competitors. Make participants comfortable. Make visitors become participants.

Day to Day Operations

Observe their activity, explore new resources, hand control over users

Eating my words

William and Wil did a great job, they have found a solution called “Kontiki”. It is based on grid computing technology, and overcome any problems related to peer to peer.
Congratulations we have just won the pitch.

Result on research

I uploaded to the server under the documents folder, SEFWConceptual.doc. On this document must be based our strategy and the foundations for our decisions. It is also a checklist for the features and services that the product must and must not include. Contents will be based in what these documents consider crucial for the success in the implementation and long run of the community part of the website.

Gluing ideas

We had a meeting today, and in order to support my idea of creating value and use the client/server technology as opposed to peer to peer I proposed to the group to use a computer simulation program called Stella, that we used in E-Commerce as a tool to express systems dynamics. They really like it and they think it is going to be very effective in the presentation.
I also presented a brief of my research so far:

Virtual communities

A virtual community is a Web site which sells some product or service. In this respect
there is no difference from an e-shop. The feature which distinguishes a virtual community
is that the operator of the Web site provides facilities whereby the customers
for a product or a service interact with each other (“We want students of the world to ‘own’ the site’), for example by pointing out ways
a product can be improved. Technologies used for this interaction include mailing
lists, bulletin boards and FAQ lists. The theory behind virtual communities is that
they build customer loyalty and enable the company running the Web site to receive
large amounts of feedback on the product or service they sell. A typical company that
might run a virtual community would be a software supplier. Customers for software
products manufactured by the company might post bug reports, bug fixes and
work-arounds on a set of FAQ pages. Staff from the company would participate in
the bulletin boards and also organise the FAQ lists.
Customers are often attracted to companies associated with virtual communities,
particularly those that are maintained by companies that sell complex products, in
that they see them as readily accessible stores of experience and unbiased advice.
A company can make profits from virtual communities in a number of ways. They
can charge for participation in the community, and they can beneft from increased
sales to customers attracted by the knowledge base held by the company and from a
reduction in support costs.
The virtual community model is usually associated with another Internet business
model, for example the Amazon Web site is primarily an e-shop; however, the fact
that it contains facilities for users to submit reviews and questions to authors and
artists gives it the favour of a virtual community.

On the other hand, they came up with the idea of using Java Applets as interface to upload and download films from client computers. This cannot be accomplished since the Java specification for creating applets is explicitly restricted to realize this kind of operations due to security concerns. Anyway….they will carry on.

Roads without exit

They are still looking for solutions bitTorrent alike. They are even thinking of creating a custom solution. I believe this is going to be too difficult. bitTorrent is a protocol rather than a program, and I think that finding the right programmers to create something similar is going to be very very time wasting/consuming.
I am carry on my research in trying to model the community web site

Creating Value

Undoubtedly the main ongoing costs for the organization are to maintain a web site where users can upload and download movies. The equation to be solved is that every user has to bring to the web site as much value as he gets from it. There are two approaches to solve this: I propose that we have to base our strategy in convincing the client that if we provide the right services and content to engage our audience, we can evaluate the ROI to the sponsors for each user. In other words, each user has to generate enough traffic (hits, visits, transactions….) to pay for its part of the resources he/she uses. The other option that Wil and William proposed was file sharing using bitTorrent, but I discarded that since first , not all but most of our target audience will access the website their colleges, because bandwidth is faster there and therefore easier for them to upload and download movies. There are firewall restrictions at colleges to use bitTorrent. Secondly file sharing is infamous for several reasons and the client might seems this solution as inappropriate to find sponsorship.

Managing people

Before meeting with the client we were thinking that the best solution would be to get colleges actively involved in the web site. The idea was that since we can centrally provide the resources and the principal costs are design and implement the system (once is created its dynamism is able to replicate and customise at almost no cost), the colleges can provide their own servers and support data bandwidth and storage, plus the internationalization issue will be solved. The client refuse this idea since are not just students the target audience, but also fans of filming, so the platform to be delivered has to reach anyone who has an interest in filming and has access to the Internet.

“Give a fish to someone hungry ….

And you will keep him alive for one day, teach him how to fish and he will manage to eat his whole life.

A business model is a high-level description of
an application type which contains all the common features which can be found
in specifc examples of the model. For example, one of the most popular business
models is the e-shop which describes a Web site that sells products. The model is
general in that it does not describe the item that is sold or the mechanisms that are
used to carry out the sales process.

E-Commerce Bits

Yesterday we had our first group meeting, I showed to the group an overview of what we are ending doing in this project, whatever track we take. A three tier architecture will be choose for the final implementation for sure, which is made up of database layer, business layer and an interface layer. Having done e-commerce I already know the technology involved so my secondary role would be to support William in this aspect. My main role would be to provide contents.

From Art to Benefits

The projects that we have been doing so far had the main aim of communicate information using the Internet as the medium. The one starting now has to fulfil the business requirements of an organization. The concern behind Short Ends Film Festival is to facilitate film students their learning and give them the opportunity to show their work.
Despite that they can be classified as a non profit organization, they are ambitious in their purpose and they already know that a huge investment is going to be necessary to reach their objectives. They believe that the resources needed to carry out their idea are going to be supported by sponsorship, and sponsorship thinks profits. Therefore there are two kind of organizations that are willing to invest in the project. Two main stakeholders looking for benefits. Short Ends will appreciate their Return On Investment(ROI) if the website becomes useful to students, sponsorship will consider to invest in the project if the website can serve to their marketing purposes.

Day 0. What is involved.

The project is about gaining and practising skills in different areas of project management and development.

As individual YOU are going to be assesed in the following:

- Keep an activity diary or log(This blog will do)
-Defining the aims , scope and objectives of a project
- Determining the stakeholders, resources and risks
- implementing project planning, control, closure and evaluation;
- identifying strategies for effective team management

The assesment will be based both on the pitch presentation (document and oral) and on the demostration of your individual role in the project