Week 2 - Team Work is Underway

Source; http://project-management.com/

This week in Social Computing and Media we spoke about communication.

There are traditional, semi-traditional and modern ways of communicating.
Traditional means of communication include face to face communication, the telephone and communication through writing e.g. letters.
Semi-traditional communication methods include emails, online chat and broadcasting and the mobile phone. However recently these means are starting to become traditional as more modern methods exist.
Modern forms of communication involve using the internet. Examples include social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and also web conferencing.

Source: www.cite.co.uk

There are many forms of social media types:

• Publish 
• Share
• Discuss
• Social Networks
• Micro-blogging
• Live Stream
• Live-cast
• Virtual Worlds
• Social Gaming
• MMO

Gatekeepers:In human communication,in journalism and organisation etc. gatekeeping concerns the process through which ideas and information are filtered for publication.

"The fundamental battle fought in society is the battle over the minds of the people...Because communication, provides the support for the social production of meaning, the battle of the human mind is largely played out in the processes of communication. And this is more so in the network society, characterised by the pervasiveness of communication networks."- Castells: Communication Power

Team Work

A screenshot from very early development.

This week my group began making our app. Our idea for this app is finalised. What we are doing is making an app that will allow students in UCD to see all society event information in one place. This is solving the problem of information overload when searching for information about events. Usually a student would search Facebook and their emails to find this information. However the emails always contain information about promotions and what the societies did that week. The information about events is sometimes buried. We believe that this app will make event information much easier to find and because of this, increase numbers of students attending society events. 

This week we met up and designed the basics of the app and we gave each other homework. Two members are finding all the society emails so that we can contact them. One member is designing an app logo and other app visuals. One member is creating an email account that we can all use to contact societies. My homework was to start building the application, and so far I have done quite a bit. I guess you could say I have completed the beta. 

How it works:

Originally the app was going to operate using RSS feeds for information, however because RSS is raw data, the information was not visually appealing and confusing to read. I have however found an alternative way of presenting the information, but for now, that's classified!