Post by Phil on Apr 30, 2012 16:59:09 GMT -5
Hey guys so quite a few of you were super awesome and responded to my email about restarting the project, and even better some of you suggested you'd be interested in becoming admins for the project!
Thank you for the support and I'd love to have you guys on board in fact the more help the better.
That being said we have to decide how were going to run the project, what were going to change and how to change it so that no one gets overwhelmed with the level of work that has to be put in.
_______
Routes (how big should they be)
_______
Over email three school of thoughts emerged.
1. keep it the same.
2. go bigger.
3. cut the numbers.
I want to talk about option 2 first because I think it'll provide some context to the debate.
So it was suggested that we create a route that limits the participants to just one photo, the feeling was (and I kind of agree) that by dramatically limiting people it would force them to be more creative with their photos.
Whilst I like the idea, from a practical point of view I don't think it will work.
Way back in the day when the travelling camera club was called pic it forward being run on the threadless.com messageboard we tried to do that exact same thing, we had 27 people (one photo per person), everyone was excited, promising to get it done, everything looked great.
It failed, hard.
I'm pretty sure it only made it to person two.
In fact our original routes had 10 people in them and all of them failed too (technically one worked, the photos got developed but the photos were never uploaded).
The normal routes usually made it to person five or six and then the cameras would disappear never to be seen again.
Once we cut the routes down to 5 people our success rate went up dramatically.
The problem with the project is also its greatest strength, people.
If everyone's quick and stays motivated it works well but if there's a weak link then everyone's hard work is wasted.
Now hopefully we catch the weak links at the start of the project so we can make the appropriate changes but the reality is we dont always have that kind of luck.
What I've found from experience is that the longer a project goes on people tend to loose motivation and forget about it.
At its quickest a route takes five/six weeks to complete and that's assuming everyone has the camera for one week, posts it straight away and the camera arrives at the next person the next day.
Sometimes a quick route can take over two months (international postage).
A one photo per person route would take 6 months to complete (at its quickest).
----
So that leads us to option 1, keep it the same.
We know five people routes work, the reason they failed was a lack of organisation.
It was suggested that we have several admins working on organising the routes and that we cut the routes to a manageable number like 3.
In her own words:
"If you were to ask me, there should be a few Google Docs that the admins can edit. Three routes running at one time, and people who sign up later are put on a waitlist. Five people per route as before.
One of the three of us is in charge of setting up routes-- deciding from whom to whom the camera will go, and fixing routes that don't work.
Another one is in charge of keeping track of where the cameras are at any given moment. Tallies are kept about when someone was last contacted, etc., in one Google Doc. This person would have to work very closely with Admin 1. "
I like elements of this idea but I'm not sure about cutting the amount of active routes, how long would people wait to take part in the project?
I dont know, what I do like is using googledocs and the concept of dividing the work between the admins having them do very specific roles. (I'll expand on this in another post).
----
this leads on the option 3, cut the number of participants.
I have to admit this is the option I like to most for the obvious reasons, it will take a much shorter period of time to get a route done, your only organising a limited number of people (so its easier to keep track) and its less likely someone will turn into a weak link.
I actually want to cut a route down to just two people but doing so changes the project dramatically.
I think having just two people on a camera would be far more personal, we could encourage people to talk to each other to come up with themes for their routes and they could do some really creative things like trying to show extreme contrasts.
E.g one person could do love whilst the other does hate, night and day that type of thing.
we could do profiles on each of the people on that camera and they could talk about their process, hell they could even send each other letters.
I kind of think it would be awesome.
But the camera would only really be travelling to two destinations (more if they take it somewhere) and it would only be interacting with three people (one or more admins as an uploader) so it wouldnt really be a route.
It would be a very different project to the one we started out on.
Anyway I'd love to hear all of your thoughts on the subject of route lengths.
Thank you for the support and I'd love to have you guys on board in fact the more help the better.
That being said we have to decide how were going to run the project, what were going to change and how to change it so that no one gets overwhelmed with the level of work that has to be put in.
_______
Routes (how big should they be)
_______
Over email three school of thoughts emerged.
1. keep it the same.
2. go bigger.
3. cut the numbers.
I want to talk about option 2 first because I think it'll provide some context to the debate.
So it was suggested that we create a route that limits the participants to just one photo, the feeling was (and I kind of agree) that by dramatically limiting people it would force them to be more creative with their photos.
Whilst I like the idea, from a practical point of view I don't think it will work.
Way back in the day when the travelling camera club was called pic it forward being run on the threadless.com messageboard we tried to do that exact same thing, we had 27 people (one photo per person), everyone was excited, promising to get it done, everything looked great.
It failed, hard.
I'm pretty sure it only made it to person two.
In fact our original routes had 10 people in them and all of them failed too (technically one worked, the photos got developed but the photos were never uploaded).
The normal routes usually made it to person five or six and then the cameras would disappear never to be seen again.
Once we cut the routes down to 5 people our success rate went up dramatically.
The problem with the project is also its greatest strength, people.
If everyone's quick and stays motivated it works well but if there's a weak link then everyone's hard work is wasted.
Now hopefully we catch the weak links at the start of the project so we can make the appropriate changes but the reality is we dont always have that kind of luck.
What I've found from experience is that the longer a project goes on people tend to loose motivation and forget about it.
At its quickest a route takes five/six weeks to complete and that's assuming everyone has the camera for one week, posts it straight away and the camera arrives at the next person the next day.
Sometimes a quick route can take over two months (international postage).
A one photo per person route would take 6 months to complete (at its quickest).
----
So that leads us to option 1, keep it the same.
We know five people routes work, the reason they failed was a lack of organisation.
It was suggested that we have several admins working on organising the routes and that we cut the routes to a manageable number like 3.
In her own words:
"If you were to ask me, there should be a few Google Docs that the admins can edit. Three routes running at one time, and people who sign up later are put on a waitlist. Five people per route as before.
One of the three of us is in charge of setting up routes-- deciding from whom to whom the camera will go, and fixing routes that don't work.
Another one is in charge of keeping track of where the cameras are at any given moment. Tallies are kept about when someone was last contacted, etc., in one Google Doc. This person would have to work very closely with Admin 1. "
I like elements of this idea but I'm not sure about cutting the amount of active routes, how long would people wait to take part in the project?
I dont know, what I do like is using googledocs and the concept of dividing the work between the admins having them do very specific roles. (I'll expand on this in another post).
----
this leads on the option 3, cut the number of participants.
I have to admit this is the option I like to most for the obvious reasons, it will take a much shorter period of time to get a route done, your only organising a limited number of people (so its easier to keep track) and its less likely someone will turn into a weak link.
I actually want to cut a route down to just two people but doing so changes the project dramatically.
I think having just two people on a camera would be far more personal, we could encourage people to talk to each other to come up with themes for their routes and they could do some really creative things like trying to show extreme contrasts.
E.g one person could do love whilst the other does hate, night and day that type of thing.
we could do profiles on each of the people on that camera and they could talk about their process, hell they could even send each other letters.
I kind of think it would be awesome.
But the camera would only really be travelling to two destinations (more if they take it somewhere) and it would only be interacting with three people (one or more admins as an uploader) so it wouldnt really be a route.
It would be a very different project to the one we started out on.
Anyway I'd love to hear all of your thoughts on the subject of route lengths.