We are pleased to announce we’ve agreed on our project for “Get Creative”.
After an ideas and scoping exercise we’re going to create an application to help students network to find accommodation that suits them in the right area.
We have recognised we don’t have a way to do this currently. We have noticeboards and third party sites that do part of the job but how does it all come together? It doesn’t.
So we’re creating Flat Out – a Facebook application that can connect to existing networks, pull in data from those third party sites and post details directly out to the individual.
We made our decision based on a number of factors.
Firstly Facebook ONLY. As a University our ‘real’ projects need to consider a lot of things; barriers to entry, integration with our systems, the way we work. We decided to throw out the rule book and see whether we could build an app purely in Facebook and whether that would mean success or failure. Do we have to consider all the options or could we create a lightweight app and see how it’s used?
We thought it would be good to do something related to our students. We rarely get an opportunity to think about what it is our students would actually want from us – and not something we want to convey as a University. So we want to establish whether we should make the time to do this. How much value does it add? Do we have any idea what students actually want?
And finally…
We wanted to choose something that could get us all enthused. We need to develop, design, research, promote, write, manage and reflect on this project. It has enough scope to keep us all busy.
If you can think of anything we should consider or have any ideas for cool features let us know.
Interested in our project? Follow us on Twitter.
Craig Loftus
I think you need to reconsider the notion of developing an application which requires students to have an account with a proprietary 3rd party website.
This work would strength the dominance of a commercial website which I would argue is not a valid (legitimate?) expenditure of the University’s time and money. It also seems at odds with the current trend of your work… Why not do something genuinely interesting which builds off existing projects such as the single sign-on or the jabber server?
How about giving everyone an OpenID, using the single sign-on mechanism? At the same time make a final push to extend the single sign into the few remaining relics like webmail?
Or try implementing your accommodation idea using some innovative mix of the jabber server and a map mash-up?
Or how about you all get out of the office with some GPS devices and map the campus for use on OpenStreetMap which you could then use for map features all of the university websites without any licensing or lock-in problems?
August 14, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Alison Wildish
Hi Craig,
Thanks for your comment.
Get Creative is a team development exercise. Its primary aim is to explore how we work together as a team and to hopefully uncover news ways we can develop projects and work together.
The application we create is a mere by-product of this so I do argue that the exercise itself is a valid “expenditure of the University’s time and money”.
With regard to Facebook. We wouldn’t normally develop something purely for a third party website but that is part of our experiment. As a University we always consider integration and plugging things into existing systems – we want to investigate what happens if/when we put something in the place where a large number of people are and see what happens.
We purposely chose something different from our current trends because we want to push ourselves to think differently and ultimately get the most out of the exercise.
August 15, 2008 at 8:39 am
Brian Kelly
I would agree that there can be a number of benefits to be gained for experimenting with the development of Facebook applications, even though there also legitimate concerns, as Craig has mentioned.
As well as the benefits in team=building which you describe I think there is a need for our sector to have a better understanding of what we hope to gain from FB applications and what can be done in the Fb environment.
Note that a number of these issues were discussed recently in response to my blog post, although as yet we don’t have answers to these questions. It would be good if your work could help to answer some of these questions.
See
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2008/08/13/revisiting-development-of-facebook-applications/
August 15, 2008 at 3:42 pm