First Week of Our Project

As expected, the progress of our project is slower than we would have liked but we are slowly making headway. We spent most of our week collecting electronic equipment and speaking with people from the Deshpande Foundation on the expected deliverable of this project. We have also developed a mock-up of our websites and came to a consensus of how we want proposals to be submitted and edited. One of the biggest challenges in developing our web platform was the structure of web site. We struggled with how open we should be in allowing for contribution, edits, and proposal. Initially, we wanted to model our website after Quirky with the idea that people can influence proposals. We were attracted to the Quirky model because it recognizes the contribution from other people though the structure (we know) would be challenging to implement. On the other end of the spectrum is the Wikipedia model which allows for a lot more freedom. Instead of adding comments and influencing the the proposals separately, the wiki model would allow for direct edits to the proposal. We also added tabs for history and discussion similar to Wikipedia.

The challenge of a very open platform is the management of the information. For the sake of sustainability, we wanted to limit the needs for oversight by the administrator. Ideally, we hope to have a critical mass of people and there would be individuals who would self-regulate the proposals' wikis. The crowdsourcing concept behind our web platform is very much centered on the goodwill of others. The intrinsic desire for people to help humanity in some way; that is a big assumption to make. I don't think there was any doubt that our project centered around the relationship between people as we are trying to bridge the gap between people with expertises and specialized knowledge and people who could leverage the knowledge. However, after this week, we are discovering a web of relationships we can utilize in our project. We are excited to have the opportunity to speak to NGOs, villagers, political leaders, community leaders, and even the media in gathering information for our project. It would an investigative journey that would lead to multiple 3-5 minutes videos that give context to the challenges faced by the Hubli-Dharwad region.