I’m going to start adding onto this thread each month and do a regular public summary of the major developments with the platform and what the current focus is. This will serve to document our progress and show where my head is at on current focus for sake of recruiting input and help. First a quick recap of major developments since launch in April to bring us up to speed. Everything is in the technical roadmap.
March
- Initial MVP of the Bubble app of the main site necessary to deliver the podcast
- setup Anchor
April
- Published first interview with Kimber on wealth inequality and 2nd interview with Julia on hunger & homelessness
- Setup this Discourse server
- made Discourse work with single sign-on and integrated it with the Bubble app so we can have a discussion layer on everything
- added Problem and Solution details pages
- submitted pod to all major pod directories
May
- Made the web app mobile-friendly with Bubble’s responsive UI engine
- Published interviews with Kyla and Rick on human trafficking and cancer industrial complex
- Setup various SEO and analytics plumbing
- refactored the app to use a more flexible data model
- Held our first in-person hackathon in Lisbon
June
- Added ability for users to create a profile and specify various structured data
- Added visual onboarding prompts to boost profile completion
- Setup Passbolt for secure password sharing amongst teams
- Tested the pre-hackathon dinner meet & greet change
- Published interview with Ben on what we’re doing with this project
- Held our second in-person hackathon in Lisbon
Which brings us to the present. It’s July (how the heck is the year already half over??) and I’ve already added a few things. My efforts at this point are split amongst platform dev, project success, event organization and producing content. Mainly this month my goals are:
- Project Success: Help secure a win with one of the projects (either Greenr or the anti-trafficking browser extension project). The best thing we can do now is to actually make a difference with a project and then celebrate that win. It will drive both visibility for the project and morale for current participants.
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Platform Dev:
- Test out the concept of the bounty program and being able to reward results.
- start on v1 of organizer tools and delegate so team leads can recruit volunteers amongst our community and manage projects
- figure out Meetup integration and having Bubble app be the central point for managing events and syndicating to channels like Meetup.
- Event Organization: Setup and recruit for the August hackathon. Try to get 20+ attendees at this one and have more of the ideation occur before the Saturday event so the hackathon is all about execution. Get t-shirts made for this one to grow sense of community amongst volunteers.
- Content Production: Interview one of the partners for Abolish Private Prisons on the problem of mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex. This is a gnarly problem I’ve been researching and it’s worthy of our attention.
Wins
- We held our 2nd hackathon event in Lisbon and people came back - yay!
- We have Pagley as a food sponsor and Le Wagon as a venue sponsor. Both committed to supporting us - super grateful for their faith in this project.
- We have a steady trickle of signups on the Meetup, the Discord and on the web app.
Challenges
- We have quite a bit of truancy at the physical events. It’s around 70% and I would like to see it more around 20%. This can be due to a number of reasons but ideally need to screen and onboard applicants better and make attendance a privilege rather than something of low-value that can easily be bailed on.
- Concerned about the way I implemented Discord. It’s wide open right now and unlike Discourse (this forums app) is not single sign-on meaning there will be fragmented sets of users. We already have this with the Meetup (people can sign up on the Meetup but not create an account on the site & vice versa) but now we have a 3rd silo of users… not sure the best way to handle but likely involves auto-generating Discord invite for those people who complete their profiles and having access governed by the Bubble app. Punting on this for now because solving it is not critical.
I’ll try to do a monthly recap post like this going forward as I think it’s a good way to #buildinpublic and keep priorities straight and everyone informed. My biggest needs at this point: I’m not a designer and I recognize this app is clunky. I would welcome any help from a designer who wants to take a crack at making cleaner UX for the Problemattic app and come up with some screens for how the organizer tools should work. Also we need a developer who has experience making a Chrome extension (or at a minimum javascript expertise) to try and develop the MVP of the anti-human trafficking browser extension project real. 