We’ve come to the point in our project where a lot of the heavy decision making is done, and we’re shifting our focus to processing our student submissions and making the final tweaks to our site. (It’s looking really great, BTW: https://corona-chronicles.world/)

On Thursday we walked through our submission intake process to clear up confusion and ensure everyone is on the same page. When students upload their submission with parent/guardian supervision, it has to make its way through a few steps before ending up in the public gallery space. We think the process should now be smoother and speedier as we all support each other in getting edited submissions up on the site. It’ll be all hands on deck as we’ll probably be ambushed with many new pieces soon—certainly not a terrible problem. But we want to be respectful of how the work responsibilities fall.

Generally, the team is feeling excited about the submissions we’ve received so far. Anytime a new, creative piece is shared in our group meetings we all get big grins on our faces. There’s a real sense of honor I think we all share that these students are willing to share their honest experiences with us and the world.

In our breakout room, Bret reminded us of all the tough obstacles we’ve had to work through this semester: legal documentation, student and parent/guardian consent, working with student consultants, design aesthetics, and ethics of care. Not to mention working through differences in opinion and bandwidth. And along the way, we’ve made many changes to our original project scope, including but not limited to the following:

• Changing our name from an archive to a collection
• Not using social media for recruitment
• Color palette and site design
• Coming up with a student compensation plan

We’ve been thinking about the $200 stipend, and we all agree that the best use of it will be to reimburse one of the groups of students we’ve been working closely with. We plan to treat them to a pizza party celebration as a thank you for the time and effort they put into the project for us. We also want to give back to the school staff member who offered to translate our student submission form into Spanish. Both myself and other teammates have mentioned in previous posts that over the past couple of weeks we focused a lot on ethics of care and the importance of recognizing the hard work these students are putting in to this. While we of course want students to jump at the chance to create and share with us through their submissions, we know they’re juggling school work and other interests. Elise, our wonderful student consultant, was messaging with Karyn on Thursday evening because she’s been helping us with our logo. She asked if it was OK to get back to us after she wrapped up some homework. We of course would never push back and interfere with that, but it was just a funny moment that continues to make us think about the full context of working with students.

All that to say, I think the team feels comfortable with the milestones we’ve hit, but we know we still have a lot to do to intake the rest of the submissions we have in the queue for publishing. Over the next week you’ll be seeing a handful of new student submissions coming to the site, joining the 3 currently posted ones. Watch this space… we’ve settled into our groove and are making meaningful progress.

This week, the FOS* team managed to complete a lot of the milestones that we’d set before spring break. Joanne and Eva completed the dataset, Kevin finished mid-fi wireframes, and Martin has been consistently keeping up our social media platforms. Additionally, we’ve finished selecting and purchasing a domain for our site, as well as completed our branding (logos, color scheme, fonts). We’ve also, of course, been creating and sharing memes with each other as well. As of now, we’re just fleshing out the details on both the data and design side of things.

Once again, we’re not particularly concerned about time, given the amount of leeway we baked into our schedule. As things are becoming completed, we’re now at a stage where we simply need to flesh out nits and details, and pull everything (dataset, designs, external resources) together into a cohesive whole. The fact that we’ve selected our domain and completed our branding helps in doing this work of making things feel put together. 

We’re also still meeting on Sundays for the most part, though we’ve found that scheduling things on a weekly basis based on our ever-changing personal schedules has been good. We also amp up the amount of meetings per week based on what we need to get done, which hasn’t been a problem either. We’ve also found it helpful to even just work independently on our own tasks in the Discord space together, and ask for feedback or ideas as we go.

By the end of the week, we are aiming to:

• complete high-fidelity wireframes for the website
• finish our topic modeling and get started on code scaffolding
• plan outreach strategy for next week
• Get started on writing web copy

We were all productive in different ways over the break, so it was great to regroup yesterday and check in on what we accomplished so far and what’s still to come. One great benefit of meeting virtually is that it’s easy for us to invite our student consultants to meet with us. Of course one disadvantage is having to navigate wifi and audio issues. After some troubleshooting we were able to connect with Elise and Sarah who have been working with us and giving their very insightful feedback on our working prototype. Their contributions were our first to intake, so they’re truly essential colleagues of ours and we’re all thankful to be able to work with them.

This week we really wanted to make a decision on our new color scheme for the site and we successfully voted on a single choice! It was great to hear different opinions around our options, and I think we’re all happy with the final outcome. Phil will start to experiment with it and plug it into our Adobe Portfolio site. He agreed to record himself doing this while sharing his screen on Zoom so that we can learn how to make these kind of updates in the future. Thanks for that tip, Elena! Next we’ll be finalizing our logo and font option. It’s interesting that making these design choices can be one of the most difficult parts of the whole project.

We also have a few things to iron out around process flow and standardization. This includes creating documentation around: which Google sheet is the one to pick up student entries from (we’ve had challenges with permissions and version control of shared documents); how to handle different media submission types (video, still photo, artwork, audio, poem/text, etc.) during the intake and editing processes. If Phil’s screenshare recording goes well, perhaps we can have Maggi also record herself while she edits the submissions so we can assist with these activities. These kind of documentation improvements will help everyone work efficiently and on the same page.

Lastly, we ended yesterday’s meeting with a wonderful discussion around how to care for all of the students taking the time to participate in our project. We’re so grateful to them for sharing their thoughts and artwork with us, and we recognize that this is actually a lot of work that we’re asking from them. Vallerie brought up the important point that some students might be triggered while following one of our prompts and digging up a traumatic memory from surviving the pandemic. We also need to remember that not all students have access to the technology and equipment needed to upload media files. While we briefly touched on versions of this earlier on in the semester, we came to the conclusion that not fully realizing all of this until now isn’t a failure. It’s really good and important that this is coming up and we shouldn’t beat ourselves up for not better clueing in and solutioning this earlier. In our meeting this weekend, we’re going to dig more into what Karyn and Vallerie have heard from students and educators during their outreach activities. We’re also going to explore how to use the generous $200 to give back and return our thanks to these groups of participants.

Lots more to come…

This week, the FOS* team got our website and our two social media sites up and running. Joanne put in some crucial legwork on our dataset, Kevin designed our landing page and starter style guide, Eva built the landing page, and Martin sorted out our social media posting schedule and organizational software. All of us also made and/or critiqued each others’ memes as we worked on bulking up the content we have to share.

We set some very ambitious goals for making a complete, clean dataset, as well as for finishing the website’s midi-fi wireframes; this is obviously the best way to lead up to saying those aren’t done yet, but they’re being done properly. As a group, we’re not concerned with being behind on those deadlines, since 1. We baked in enough time to be “behind”, 2. There is no way of rushing quality data here and 3. More time on the data means more time available for designing. 

We’ll meet, as usual, on Sunday. This week, Joanne outlined some QC and data-sorting tasks that are best done manually, so we’ll apply an hour of our time together towards that. We like to work in a Discord voice channel, which has a great coworking vibe and relevant tech capabilities without the complication and screen fatigue of videoconferencing. 

By the end of Spring Break, we’ll aim to have:

• our dataset finished
• Observable prototypes for visualizations
• Mid-fi wireframes complete for the website
• 2-3 posts per week on our social media + engagement with other relevant accounts
• Outreach to CUNY law students (and others, potentially)