Tag : collaboration

Two weekends ago, Andrew and I went along to the third Good for Nothing hack weekend, appropriately titled Occupy Blue Monday. It was as inspirational and invigorating as ever. I've written before about what it's like to do a Good for Nothing. I love the way they take new, collaborative ways of working and hack culture to support the true innovators in social enterprise. As a participant, it's amazing to be able to use your skills to provide real value - a new kind of volunteering with tangible results.

In collaboration with my husband (@johnnybennett), I launched the Kids Draw for East Africa project last Friday on the 5050.gd platform. Utterly moved by the 50/50 call to arms, I wanted to do something to help, and our own daughter inspired the idea behind the solution. 

A child is dying of hunger every six minutes in Somalia. In six minutes, a well-fed British child can paint or draw a picture that can mean the difference between life and death for someone else’s child. Kids Draw for East Africa is an online auction of kids' art.

The crisis in East Africa isn’t getting better. Sadly, it’s likely to get much worse unless the world starts doing more very urgently. 

We’ve teamed up with Tom and friends at Good for Nothing to see if we can make some digital things to raise cash. We wanted to share some of the ideas that have been proposed, and to ask for more support - particularly from other teams of makers.

Made by Many is partnering with ethical innovators Good for Nothing in a rapid and collaborative response to the East Africa crisis. One child is dying every six minutes, and fundraising efforts are struggling to keep up to fund the relief effort. 

We’re working on a side project, the details of which can wait for another post, and the very nature of it has prompted us to devise new methods for team collaboration.

Without giving too much away (I’m a bit over-excited and secretive about it) the service we’re designing consists of two parts: a website and an iPhone app strung together with an API. There are dependencies between each part of the service. Things that happen on the iPhone app need to be reflected on the site and vice versa. There are other nuances but at that’s the core of it, a simultaneous broadcast / receive from app to site and back.

We use Basecamp to manage projects. It’s great for creating tasks and milestones that can be assigned to those responsible. It keeps conversations neatly organized in threads while you can attach documents/screen shots to these.

There’s loads of similar web based services out there. But although they might be easy to use, this is in no way a guarantee that people stay on top of recording (or even completing!) their tasks.  A few weeks into the project you often find that the whole group, previously collaborating in one space, have moved the whole thing offline, into their separate in-boxes and what have you. Now things have turned a little bit Texas.