Crowdopolis w. 48

What we have done.

We continued to aggregate the focus-group survey data while writing our article for the book. As previous groups mentioned, it is a busy time at school, so everyone had other commitments, and we tried really hard to make a good text in short time. Work was separated into stages, as we outlined the initial content, added more analysis, scientific background, and developed few scenarios for the actual Crowdopolis’ users. Then we realised that our article must be less serious and more entertaining, so we deleted some research references and kept one scenario only.

We also decided not to describe too much, both in a functionality of Crowdopolis and its current predecessors, as we wanted to encourage the reader’s curiosity and imagination.

Also, we discussed the appropriateness of scientific terminology and quotes from media scholars and journalists, as some people are not familiar with this background and can find such details distracting. On the other side, we believe that the book will attract specialists or people interested in media theory, so our references will be useful for them.

Next, we shortened our discussions with experts, leaving only the most necessary comments, so in the end we basically have one quotation. We believe it will help to keep the reader’s attention on our project, instead of wishing to learn more about our experts’ activities.

In the meantime we worked on prototype concepts, creating the website’s elements.

What we will do.

We will continue to develop Crowdopolis’ visual design, as we want to demonstrate its usability in our video. As we realised, work on a real visual footage would be less time-consuming than a website design, so our goal is to create the whole pages and evaluate its functionality on potential users. Then we will create a video with both off screen and on screen elements.

Resources.

We continue to read The Nieman Journalism Lab (Harvard University’s blog) on citizen journalism that provides a lot of actual examples of crowdsourcing news websites.
We also took into account the recent Scandinavian research concentrated exactly on our subject: “Re-imagining crisis reporting: Professional ideology of journalists and citizen eyewitness images”; it helped us to even better formulate Crowdopolis’ tasks.