sunday chat

Last things first - the next chat is tentatively scheduled for monday night at 8:30pm instead of Sunday because of everybody moving and getting ready for the start of school. Let me know right away if that doesn't work for you.

With the people preesent at the chat we seem to have narrowed it down to 2 demographics - little girls and politically interested types like the ones who watch the daily show. Interesting ideas were presented for both groups - more on the locker stocker idea and 2 for politics (current event contest on the cellphone and a debate on issues idea with digg features)

For next week they're going to more fully develop the ideas, flesh out the role of the news organization, of the user. Specifics. Examples. List of features, what the user will do. During hte week, they'll post ideas and developments. Look hard for competition or things similar to what they're proposing. Think about hwat makes it innovative. Then before the end of hte day on Friday, each group will post a summary, a final write up of the idea - with all the specifics and details ordered to make the idea as clear as possible for us. We'll all read and post our last round of comments on the idea. On monday we'll go over them again. Ideally we'd pick one idea to develop. If we end up with 2 ideas that are really innovative and well-developed, we'll go forward with two ideas.

The more work ya do now - the easier it will be to make the owrking model and put toegether the presentation.

* We definintely have to make sure there's no competition.
* And we have to identify the innovative angle
* And we have to make sure there's a news tie in, a way for the news organization to tie in. Someone posted about what kinds of news organizations. Think about local news - how could they tie in. Then think about a national organization - would they tie in any way differently? There's more local news organizations so more individual groups would pick it up. The national groups might have more resources but there are few of them. So take time to think at both levels.

If you weren't at the chat, probably a good idea at this point to get into one of the two demographics that seem to have emerged. Or make a really good case right away for something different. The two demos discussed had some good research done about them, the ideas are developing, and features from one project could easily fit in with the other so there's cross over possibilities.

Thanks for all the hard work so far - keep it up.