Reporting Failure, Being Refused

Last week in class I reported to Malte that my project was sort of failing and that I would be talking a different approach from now on, as previously mentioned on this blog. Later in the week I also told Soumitri the same thing. In both cases however the disagreed, on at least some level. This was no surprise really, I think calling it a failure was asking to be told I was wrong, there is a lot of other stuff for me to do and a lot of work still to be done.

Malte suggested I do a few things:

1. Get involved with lots of competitions - He thinks this is interesting because it will evoke design results as part of a large system. Something that I suppose is quite important part of what is done in this project
   
2. As he has previously said, I should take part of collaboration projects lead by others - As explained earlier, this would help me understand the positions of people taking part in my project. My response was of course that I am sort of doing this already with a few things I am working on.
   
3. Treat competitions as short run projects - I think the idea here was to do a competition as a short run project with some other members, local and or remote, to get a quick incentive driven team. He feels that the lack of developed incentive might be what caused some of the failed issues in this project.
   
4. From there we talked abstractly about why people want to take part in collaborative systems - This is something I have addressed on numerous occasions however I think revisiting it may be quite important. We talked about the incentive as a context centric asset as opposed to an absolute value thing. That is to say, working for passion as a commodity as opposed to working for money or, a lack there of, which seems to have been a problem for the system.
   
5. In particular, Malte suggested time swapping with colleagues to get collaborators - This is quite an interesting suggestion. I am not sure how well it will work because I traditionally have no faith in how other people value their contributions to a project. I think I would happily stay up 3 days to help people finish projects but most people would not do that for me. I am not sure why, perhaps because I love this kind of work or because I treat it as a form of social interaction, and others do this less so. In any case, I am not sure how this work swap system will work but I am going to give it a shot.
   

Soumitri also gave me a few comments however I had no pen and pencil in had at the time so I think I have forgotten them all. In this case I am just going to write a few things that he might have said.

1. Not a failed project just a failed group - This was a good point that I did not want to admit might be the case. It is highly likely that making interest driven social design systems is not impossible it may just be that most people in the world do not want to take part, or moreover, the people I chose are not the right people to take part. Obviously open source development works but I sort of wanted to stay clear of these parties, as I mentioned earlier. I think Soumitri's mentioning of this fact made me thing about what could be called the rules of engagement. There is something more that I need to have, than a group of people who say "I am really interested"
   
2. Give some incentive - I seem to recall he was interested in my re angeling my approach to the participants so that people would have more reason to be involved.
   
3. Use the same popularity that leads people to use computers, the internet, and facebook - We talked a little about this and I think the outcome was that some sort of "fun" needs to be had for people to be involved. This concept of fun is pretty vague as in some cases it is not really fun at all but just useful. With no other incentive mechanism, I think this is a decent goal, applying it may be more difficult though. I think this may even be associated with the concept of social interaction. For some reason I want to engage with people to work and I do not care who that much. Other people however, do not seem to see the same thing as good.

Ok I think that is it. If Soumitri or Malte read this blog it would be nice if they could correct any misunderstandings I have from their critiques in the comments.