Information and Communication Technologies for Development

Another crazy week has flown by. It is funny, it seems like each week of work has been categorized by a slightly different theme, and the theme for this week has been "team". We had an all team get together last night with the founders, developers, Ventureships team, and the ICT4D team (14 people in total). It was great to get everyone together and meet the other members to hear what they are working on. I think it is really important for the ICT4D team to be able to coordinate with the Ventureships team on their market research, or with the core developers and the product.

Personally, I have been swimming with all the details of thinking about the product, planning field testing for Brazil, and helping with the prototype. I think our initial plans were a bit overambitious (rough prototype before spring break) but I realized that for user testing, it is not necessary that we have a functioning database and everything working on a cell phone. An easy way to test user experience would be to simply build an html page with all of the forms and fields we are anticipating, and to have a potential user (employer) try to sign up for the service or post a job. On the employee side, I wonder if we could just create a picture of a cellphone on a local database and then try to use Elena's initial Java logic to show a demo of how the SMS interactions would work. I think the headache of trying to work through real text messages, given the challenges and unknowns of carriers in Brazil. etc.. would make a local test on a laptop a more viable option. Any thoughts on this from the team?

By the way, the theme for next week is "prototype" :) I don't have Sloan classes so I am excited to be digging into this and getting something ready for Brazil.

- Joseph