Team

The 6th week already!

16-20 March

This week went by very fast! Our team is currently in such a good flow of energy, that time flies. This monday, we started wrapping up all the user stories that were already finished. We also decided this week would be important for Javier, the programmer of our team. We agreed he would use this week to program our prototype (the interactive timeline). Since he was at a conference in Hannover last monday, he was happy to finally start doing what he’s really good at: coding! For the first time, we’ve seen Javier in his natural habitat: focussing on 0’s and 1’s practically the whole day. We helped him by feeding him tea and fruit (yeah, he’s a healthy Spanish boy who doesn’t like coffee and really likes fruit). We’re very happy to see the great progress he makes on the prototype!

On tuesday, we met Margreet again, who wasn’t there last week because she went on a holiday. We were happy to tell her the progress we made in the week before. Luckily, Miriam and Felipe provided us with some great feedback last week, so despite the fact we missed Margreet around us, the quality of our work was able to stay at the same level as before. On wednesday morning, we had a translate session with Margreet. We showed Margreet all the visualisations of the user stories that were both finished as in progress. She provided us with some great feedback, which we adapted that afternoon. An important insight was that we should always provide a visualisation with a good introduction or context, because just a visualisation of something cannot explain why something is visualised or what the motivations of it are. You can see some examples below:

Story/Article

Stakeholders Map

Michelle and Anne also did a cross-case analysis for user story 1 and 3, which are about the interviews with both the professional journalists as the journalism students. One of the windows at MediaLAB was covered by sticky notes that day:

Cross-Case Analysis – tools

Cross-Case Analysis – sticky notes everywhere…

On Thursday, Javier spent the whole day programming. At the end of the day, he looked like this:

Javier programming..

A few hours later…

Michelle en Nikki did some great job in making visualizations of all the user stories. Michelle spent a lot of time on visualizing the outcomes of the cross-case analysis, about which we can say we are quite proud of!

Cross-case Analysis

Michelle designing the visualization of the cross-case analysis

Nikki finished the personas of both the contemporary investigative journalist as the future investigative journalist, which helps us to better understand our user. She did a great job!

Persona contemporary investigative journalist

Persona future investigative journalist

Anne spent time on wrapping up all the different stories in the insights document, from which you can see a preview below:

Insights Sprint 2 preview

Next week, we’ll focus on the peer pitch on Wednesday, where we’ll pitch our first prototype to our peers. On friday, we’ll have a meeting with the Persgroep again, where we will show them all the outcomes of this sprint and of course the prototype too. Also, our team has to prepare lunch on monday, so we can use our creativity on a different level than connected to the future of journalism. We’ll keep you up-to-date!

16-20 February

Another week has passed by, and we all agreed this week went so quickly! On Monday, we started with a workshop ‘Define Goals & Intentions’ from Charlie Mulholland. We found this one of the most inspiring and useful workshops so far. Especially the brainstorm session was a real eye-opener. First of all, we learned the correct way how to use sticky notes: you should always tear them from left to right instead from down to up. When you do it this way, the sticky note won’t curl up. We started the workshop with defining our problem in one sentence. Then, we had to write down the 5 W’s and 1 H: Who, What, Where, When, Why and How. By doing this, we realized that we couldn’t answer the question why our problem needs to be solved yet in one concrete sentence. This is an important insight and we will do some research in the coming weeks to see if we are able to answer this challenging question. Afterwards, we did a brainstorm session where we all had to come up with different stakeholders, which we categorized in four different groups: project, users, third parties and future. After the workshop, we had to prepare lunch with our team. It was nice to prepare a lunch all together for a big group of people. After lunch, we had a meeting with Margreet, which was about Ideation and Sprint Planning. This meeting was very important, because we had to organize our Scrum Board in order to get a clear overview of all the different User Stories. The Friday before, we ended the week with the meeting with Alexander about the User Stories, so it was quite important for our team to really know how SCRUM works.

On Tuesday, we started working according these user stories, and our team worked like a Well-Oiled Machine, doing tasks for the first three user stories during the whole day. On Wednesday, we started the day with a workshop Visual Thinking from Agnes and Ilaria. Afterwards, we had a meeting with Margreet and Felipe, where we discussed everything we did so far. For example, we got some great feedback for interviewing journalists, adapted some of the questions and talked about general thing concerning Scrum. On Thursday, we worked on the User Stories and send all the relevant information to the Persgroep. We also got in touch with a Journalism teacher at the University of Amsterdam. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to talk to us next week. He did give us some very interesting information that we are researching right now. Next week, we’ll hopefully have interviews with different journalists from the Persgroep and finish some user stories.

medialab.publishingtools@gmail.com