Meeting Overview + Next Steps

[Sheikh Shuvo]

Friends,

Below is an overview of yesterday's intimate team meeting (Mike and I), including some high level goals and actionable next steps. If you only have a second to read this email, just skip to "Conclusions":

Team Management

1. Team Meeting 

Meeting as a group will be helpful early on to discuss priorities/commitments/big picture items, and to make it easier to work as a distributed team down the line. Can everyone make it to a group meeting on Tuesday, January, 31, 2012 at 5:30pm at Startpad? We'll try to keep the meeting under an hour. If not, we can stick with Wednesdays. 

2. Project Management Tool

I set up a Basecamp for us - it seems like the easiest/quickest way to keep track of what we're all up to. Look out for an invitation later this afternoon. 

3. Defining Project Timeline

For planning purposes, it would be helpful to have a date to shoot for initial implementation. How about we target to have things up and running by March 1st?

4. The Hub

As Andre mentioned in his email this morning, I'd like to start using the Hub as well.  Noon on February 2 seems like a good start date. More than office space, the Hub hosts a lot of socially-minded startups that I think can give us some good feedback and idea sharing. They have tons of social/networking events. I'm planning on going to their protoLaunch party on February3 if anyone wants to join in!

Validation

As Mike mentioned in his previous email, we have a bunch of assumptions that need to be tested and validated for our idea to succeed. They are:

1. Homeless people will ask for donations via QR Code.

2. Homeless people will share some personal information with strangers in order to promote donations.

3. Donors will give to homeless people (or their sponsoring organizations) via a QR-Code phone donations.

4. Partner organizations will provision homeless people with StreetCodes accounts, profiles and kits.

5. Partner organizations will fulfill the donated items to the homeless that donors have purchased.

For the first 2, we some have anecdotal feedback from our field research that a base interest is there. Building each of these items into a mini-project and brainstorming tasks for each seems like a good way to get the ball rolling. Please let the group know if you have any particular ideas/suggestions. I'll create a task for each one in Basecamp. 

Pilot Testing

For item # 3, expanding on the demo we built for SW and field testing will be very valuable for validating the concept. This would involve building out our mobile UI more into a system that we can use to test and gather analytics on if/how people are scanning QR codes. We don't need to have the payment system set up at this point. 

The workflow that Mike and I brainstormed (whiteboard picture attached) is:

If user is a first-timer:

1. User uses phone to scan QR code.

2. Landing page pops up. 

3. Select "Give."

4. Choose a $ amount/item.

5. Options: 

    A. Pay Now.

    B. Remind Me Later. 

6. If "Pay Now," taken to page "feature coming soon." If "Remind Me Later," email sent to user.

7. Reminder email sent to user.

8. Follow Up: email newsletter, updates about homeless individual, Street Code updates, etc. 

This is all pretty rough. We should hash through things and see what minimum amount of work would give us some helpful metrics to move forward. 

Partner Orgs

Items # 4 and # 5 will be the trickiest parts. I'm planning on starting to reach out to potential partner orgs soon to explain our ideas and get some feedback/advice. Let me know if anyone wants to help set up meetings.

 In preparation for this, developing some collateral and presentation materials would be super useful. Taking some time to mock up the admin module in more detail would be helpful, too. 

Conclusions

Lots of work to do! Tons of fun to be had! I'm excited to move forward.

Hooyah, 

Sheikh

P.S.: Feel better, Kristine!

P.P.S.: I hope you rocked the movie roll, Ryan!

[schmidt]

Thanks for the thorough update, Sheikh!


Team Meeting:

Tuesday Jan 31 works for me. (Unless I suddenly get cast in another
movie!!). I'm supposing that we're not meeting that Wednesday
(February 1st) then?


Validation:

I'm meeting with Ronni of the Urban Rest Stop tomorrow afternoon.
I'll run our enumerated assumptions by her for feedback. She has
experience with outreach programs and mentioned that she might be able
to provide some resources. If you guys think of any other questions
to ask her, let me know by tomorrow afternoon.


Talking to Partner Orgs:

I'm interested in helping gather info from partner orgs.
I set up a gdocs spreadsheet we can use to keep our partner orgs
info. If basecamp has a similar functionality, we can migrate it
over.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlLNvxdsxUC1dDRZMTNRWnlJTlJNUlg5dzZvVmpTZUE

Thanks again, Sheikh and Mike for making the meeting happen despite
traffic, movies, and food allergies.

Woohai,
Ryan

[Danielle Fillmore-Storlie]

Thanks Sheikh and Team,

Sorry again for not making it :( Really bummed out that I couldn't be there, but excited about the progress you and Mike made. In terms of our next meeting, I can't make Tuesdays. Sean and I have a small study group that we've been host for the last few years every week on Tuesday evenings. Wednesday is still best for me, but please do what is most convenient for the group :)

I had lunch the other day with a user reseacher that works here at Ubermind. He gave me some great insight on how to validate and/or disprove our assumptions. It requires more extensive field work than we had time to do over SW, in addition to interviews with people that run/organize the nonprofits we are hoping to gather more information from and/or form partnerships with. I could start us off by developing a user research plan from a template he gave me. It would be best to have this plan approved by the team and ready to use before we have deep one on ones with street people and nonprofit workers/volunteers (but don't let lack of a research plan keep you from reaching out and talking to people). That way we will have structure questions that will help us avoid getting answers that are all over the place and allow us to glean the most relevant information from these meetings. Does that sound good to you guys?

For pilot and testing, I will draft low-fi wireframes and the information architecture map based on the first time uses case Mike and Sheihk drafted out for the mobile website by Tues or Weds. It should be pretty quick since it is not a complicated mobile site. After that gets approved by the team we can start making it pretty; maybe get Kristine to do her awesome design magic :) Or get us off the griund by developing a rough build and start testing it.

I think I just tasked myself with things to do in this email :) If you guys think this is a good order of things for me to take care of before the meeting, let me know. If not, feel free to offer other tasks up that need to be completed.


Mike and Shiehk - you guys rock! Thanks for all the info and work last night.
Ryan - thanks for the speadsheet! And can I have your autograph, since you are a movie star :)
Kristine - hope you are feeling better :(

Yahoo!
Dani

[Andre Huertas]

Hey guys,

Where do we stand on the meeting date? Personally, Tuesdays would be ideal.

- Andre

[Ryan Schmidt]

5:30pm on Wednesday 2/1 @ Startpad.

[Dani Fillmore]

The link is hilarious! :) 

Sent from my iPhone

[Ryan Schmidt]

That actually me.  That's my goin'-out outfit.

Sent from my mobile device.

[Mike Koss]

Sorry for not weighing in on this.  Kristine just showed up - but no one else - so it's officially WEDNESDAY at 5:30pm. 

First order of business - pick a better regular meeting time?  If you can't make it tomorrow in person, send me a list of your top 3 times you CAN meet regularly.

Thanks!

Mike Koss
StartPad.org
Seattle Software Development Offices
(206) 388-3466
Twitter: @mckoss @startpad

[Mike Koss]

Thanks again for sending great minutes!

Mike Koss
StartPad.org
Seattle Software Development Offices
(206) 388-3466
Twitter: @mckoss @startpad

[Mike Koss]

BTW - as "Friends of Startpad" any of you have a free desk to work at Startpad any time you want...not to discourage you from The Hub, which has a great social vibe; but just to give you more options.

Mike Koss
StartPad.org
Seattle Software Development Offices
(206) 388-3466
Twitter: @mckoss @startpad

On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 10:50 AM, Sheikh Shuvo <sheik...@gmail.com> wrote: