What is the current status?

[James Sugrue]

Hi

I'm new to HelpMatch, and have spent the last while reading the
contents on the groups/wiki/blog.
I find it very interesting what other organisations, like
ChangingThePresent, are doing, but would agree with Ruth's conclusions
from June 14, that HelpMatch is still a worthwhile project.

So, I guess what I'm wondering now is where to go from here?
Have we got agreement on collaboration tools so that we can get
designing/thinking?

I'd be interested to hear any updates.

Thanks
James

[Craig]

I'm under the impression that the team is waiting for Ruth to drive
things.

Perhaps others of us can attempt to further the initial artifacts
along with drafts and then let Ruth react \ correct \ add \ modify
them.

If this makes sense, this Google group supports the storage of files,
but probably not versioning. For that, we can look to the other tools
like MindQuarry. I don't think we should wait until we get another
tool established though.

Does this make sense to anyone?

- Craig.

[James Sugrue]

Makes sense to me.
Maybe we can setup MindQuarry for our use and get to work on a set of
artifacts.
Do we have a list of what documents are required for our initial
stages?

James

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[Ruth Malan]

Hi all,

Indeed, HelpMatch has to keep moving independent of specific individuals; we
are all on different work rhythms due to our day jobs so there'll be ebb and
flow in when any of us can contribute significantly. We should all feel
empowered to contribute wherever and however we see fit.

We're in the ideation stage. We have a mission, we have the seeds of a
vision. But we need to make the vision tangible. At our last meeting, Barry
Crist suggested a "vision jam" to work on what HelpMatch will look like. I
think that is still a good thing to do.

But I agree with James--we have to get to work. If we don't start to rough
this up, we'll continue to have nothing other than a warm fuzzy sense of
this being a good right thing to do.

So, what are some ideas on where to go from here? In addition to the vision
jam, that is.

One suggestion has been to interview helpers like Lucious Newsome, to better
understand how they create their personal help networks and match help to
need, and get ideas on how to support them with information + social
networking technology.

The important thing, I believe, is to get ideas on the table--doing that
will stimulate more creative juices.

Here's a set of placeholders for some of the investigations/work we could
start to dig into:

Strategy
- Vision

- Identity
-- Mission
-- Core values

- Differentiating value propositions
-- stakeholder needs analysis/value modeling
--- stakeholder profiles
-- competitive analysis/"competitor" value propositions

- Capabilities
-- capability model
-- challenges
-- constraints

Architectural requirements
- capabilities exploration
-- use case diagram(s) (exploring different use contexts)
--- use case descriptions
-- qualities
--- quality attribute scenarios
- system constraints
- architectural challenges

Architecture strategy
- principles, style/patterns
- approaches/sketch mechanisms

Conceptual architecture

There is no magical starting point. Someone (or a sub-team) could pick
"help-needs match" and start to explore how that could work. Someone could
pick "scam prevention" and start to explore there. In Indy group meetings,
we started to chew on the notion of "sponsored networks" or trust networks,
but much more needs to be done. We can interview people like Newsome and
others. We could assess how far one could go using MySpace or Community
Server in setting up a "help project."

The point is that by opening up to ideas, we'll both figure out what this
should _not_ be, and what it should be. We don't know where all the pieces
of the solution are going to come from, so we don't have perfect answers on
where to look for them. But once we put some stakes in the ground, we can
assess which stakes need to be moved; where we need to focus more work.

In some ways, this is incremental, leveraging existing ideas. And in many
ways this can and should be quite novel. We should be open to invention, to
innovation. So we should look where a "wheel could be and where it could not
possibly be." (This is an allusion to "A Wheel on the School.")

I've been reading "The Great Deluge" and I'm reminded again that we need to
give people ways to help:

"Ordinary citizens can't do much about a 150-mph wind or a 30-foot wave,
other than get out of the way. But the Internet revolution teaches us that
ordinary citizens can play a crucial role in creating nimble new channels of
information that are more resilient than official channels."

- Johnson, quoted in Dion Hinchcliffe's Finding the Real Web 2.0, 11/15/05

And not just channels of information, but channels of help.

Other ideas???

Warm regards,

Ruth Malan

[James Sugrue]

Hi Ruth

Sounds like a good start there anyway.
Maybe if we added a list of things to do to the Wiki and put names to
each of the task, we'd have some structure?

Also, for the interviews it would be good to put together a list of
questions, again storing the list (and answers we get back) on the
Wiki. I know every interviews will take different paths, but a core
set of questions is always a good thing.
I presume these interviews could be done over the phone/web rather
than having to be face to face?

If everyone agrees with this approach, I can start adding those pages
to the Wiki and we could contribute to the pages in our own time?

Regards
James

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[Ruth Malan at Bredemeyer Consulting]

Hi :)

Sounds great! I was just thinking we need a "what we know now"
representation of the state of our thinking. Starting to fill out these
various areas on the wiki will give us a sense that we're not at step 1,
we're at step -2, which is far better! We've learned a lot already! :)

We need to get to the point where we decide on focus and scope. We need to
open up to ideas first, yet have something to get our teeth into.

I'd like to propose we focus our attention with some quick "theme cycles"
for initial exploration.

This week is the 2nd anniversary of Katrina, and I propose we do a cycle
with just Katrina as a focus--do it quick, do it rough and sketchy, but get
a slew of ideas on the table.

Theme cycle 1: KATRINA
If Katrina struck this week, rather than this week two years ago, what would
we want to have in place? If that was the only problem we wanted to address,
how would we go about it?

Now, we can interview anyone who would _want_ to do anything to help
post-Katrina; and anyone who _did_ help (e.g. Katrina's Angels).

We can drill into "how would this work" on the use side, and on the
architectural design side--a sketch of "sponsored networks" or "help
projects," and the issues of raising awareness of needs, addressing the
possibility of fraud, addressing logistics and (in)efficiencies, and so
forth.

I'm over-committed for the next day or so, but should have bandwidth towards
the end of the week and over the weekend.

Warm regards,

Ruth

[James Sugrue]

Hi Ruth

This sounds like the way to go.

I'll throw up a wiki page later today/tomorrow, unless someone else
does before me.
I'm new to HelpMatch, so I'm bound to make some mistakes/
misinterpretations, but I'm happy to be corrected as we go along, in
the interests of progress :-)

So maybe we could have a page covering a list of Theme Cycles and just
add the various theme's we cover there, as their own seperate pages?

Thanks
James

On Aug 27, 3:48 pm, "Ruth Malan at Bredemeyer Consulting"