Summary Week 6

The Saturday meeting down at the SDOF HQ at the bay went well. We managed to get more data in the areas where we were lacking and and kept the conversation topic accordingly. Although the initial meeting was more real-world productive, we now had a chance to reach a deeper understanding on the organization and their domain. There is a major difference in the way a non profit voluntary based organization works compared to one in the commercial sector. First and foremost, people tend to sit on multiple chairs and perform a wide range of duties. The processes that are based on volunteers happens as they do since everyone has to sacrifice their spare time in between job and family. These differences puts our team in a somewhat sticky situation when applying the Contextual Design method. It is, for example, hard for us to observe certain events/processes, when they only take place every second month or so. From my understanding the Contextual Design method works best when you have the opportunity to be on location and observe a role/task/duty that's being performed on a regular (daily) basis. To address this issue we directed questions concerning the different programs, events, sponsors, volunteers, education, public relationship etc.

Unfortunately, there were no volunteers present at the Saturday meeting. We hope to perform a few interview with them on Tuesday. There is a scheduled training session on next Saturday which will be most important for our understanding.

I think for everyone on the team there is a vision and a understanding of what the needs from the PR/HR/management side are. During the upcoming week we will see it all from the volunteers perspective. There has been a few ideas discussed that most certainly will make it to the prototypes.. just have to be careful not to lead them into those or to just collect wish lists. Something we all have learned from..

Additional thoughts,
We need to be more flexible in regards to sharing the workload. Last week generated 22 emails mainly regarding when all of us could get together, the individual schedules are a given fact. Likewise, scheduling appointments with volunteers is hard (Sat. training session is great!)
Maybe it could be more efficient doing the interviews, drawing models, writing the paper etc etc. in pairs or hand out responsibilities. Hopefully we all have some more space now that the midterms are done, but we all know the UC quarter system.. =)) Just a few more weeks guys, lets do it!

/ Martin Tall