Doug and I had our july thesis meeting yesterday and many important issues were worked out. The paperwork was taken care of and a plan was setup for the practical work to come. It was agreed that august would be vacation month. However, I’m already in the process of downloading the UBUNTU Linux server distribution, and I expect to be playing around with this in preparation for the work to come. Work will be carried out from the month of september to december, the development of the website itself will probably take at least a month, so the plan in the thesis proposal is very ambitious, but the plan so far is to try to follow it for now and possibly extended the deadline to spring next year if it is found that it cannot be met. Furthermore, it was agree that I should send Doug feedback on the status of my thesis on a regular basis from now on. My I suggest once a week?
The set task will be to create the IUM community site acadMC.net, which will function as an online meeting center for the IUM community. It will be created using drupal, which I also have to learn first. Two versions of this site will be built, one which is design to meet the standards of good usability ant the other will not take usibility in to account. Both sites will then be tested by a relatively small number of ordinary users, who will be shown both sites and then asked to do a few spicific tasks while thinking out loud. Thier comments and thier performance will be noted down and used for my thesis.
A number of questions were asked about the thesis. Doug explained social interfaces, and reviewed the report and it’s structure at this point in time. He also guides the discussion more the direction of ecommerce, which I so far have not looked into.
A number of good books were recommended:
Persuasive Technology, Ch7 B.J. Fog
Information Rule, Networks and positive feedback
the anarkist in the library
the cathedral and the bazaa
The Mythical Man-Month, Frederick P. Brooks 1975
Thats all. I hope I haven’t forgotten anything. Untill next time…
