>Helping to Protect The Human
>There has been a distinct lack of blogging action here for quite sometime now. Just over two months ago myself and my fiance packed all our London possessions and moved to Bristol. Since then I’ve been shuttling backwards and forwards working on a very exciting agile project for Made by Many and Amnesty International UK.
The timescales for the project were very tight and there were many obstacles along the way, but two weeks (we’ve been tinkering and fiddling since then) ago Amnesty UK’s new site www.protectthehuman.com went into public beta. The site aims to give a place for people to engage with Amnesty and Amnesty’s aims. The site is socially focused allowing users to view Amnesty video and image content and encouraging users to contribute their own views, opinions and content. Woven into the fabric of the site are proactive actions which are becoming increasingly important to Amnesty. Critically, standard activities such as commenting and rating are also considered and displayed as ‘actions’. This helps increase engagement with Amnesty and shows that small actions when taken by many people can have important effects.
My role in the projects started in the spring (before the rainy season) when I was engaged to carry out an impact assessment for the client in order to assess the impact such a service would have on the organisation. This led to me writing a Service Definition Document. This fairly hefty document was essentially a loose spec describing the areas of the site and how everything would hold together. This service definition document basically collated all the ideas for the service and translated these into a top level definition or spec.
Once the project was commissioned my role became more of a Producer. Throughout the life of the project I switched hats regularly covering project management, business analysis and to some degree interaction design.
The project management role involved working very closely with both Amnesty and technical partner and Ruby on Rails specialists New Bamboo. The design aspects proved particularly time consuming which left us with a large amount of template integration towards the latter stages of the process.
The business analysis role involved assisting Amnesty and Made by Many to translate their vision, aims and expectations into a service which could actually be built in the timescales allowed. The agile approach meant we did not define the entire site before we started developing but broke it down into feature areas such as ‘creating content’ or ‘groups’ and defined these as we progressed through the build. It’s amazing to look back at features which we initially thought were critical but were superseded or became redundant as the project developed and evolved.
The project was highly agile, which meant that even if with the design difficulties we managed to the launch the project on time. I’m convinced that had this project been a traditional waterfall project we would probably still be weeks, if not months away from launch. Amnesty UK is a reasonably large organisation and the speed at which New Bamboo could develop forced decisions to be made in days rather than weeks. That’s not to say that we didn’t all learn a huge amount about how to run agile projects. I think agile puts a greater weight of responsibility onto the the individuals involved in the project, thankfully all those involved where highly skilled and produced great results. Well done to all those involved, in particular Max, Damien, Ismael, Paul and Rob from New Bamboo and Sara, David, Tom, Julia, Charlotte, Isaac and William from Made by Many.
Protect the Human is currently in public beta, and the site which is currently live is only the first release of what we hope will be a site which continues to develop and evolve new features and ideas.
Read More>The Stuff of Life from Amnesty
>I’ve been advising Amnesty International UK on some video matter recently. They wanted to get a newly commissioned video The Stuff of Life on the web so it could be easily distributed and embedded by activists across the web. The film imitates a glossy TV advert, and so the perception of production values was essential. The issue was getting it in as high a quality as possible, while allowing as many people as possible to watch it. The most important thing from my perspective was that the film played fully without buffering as I believe that had a terribly detrimental effect on the impact of the film.
The final file ended up at a bit rate of around 700 to 800 kbps, which was around 200kbps higher than I had originally expected. But as always with web video it’s essential to try a test file and see. I’m on a standard BT broadband wireless connection and this file has played consistently well for me – the proof is in the pudding it seems.
Incidentally, the production company did a lot of testing with Blip.tv. I’d suggested Blip originally, as their player comes with lots of distribution benefits and good tracking which was important for AIUK. Following testing they felt that Blip performance varied considerably and files which would play fine one day buffered a lot the next. They also felt that the same file while performing well enough through another set up was not served as well by Blip. I can’t verify this for myself, but it seems if a really glossy high production values are essential for you, Blip may not be the solution.
Watch the The Stuff of Life and spread the word.
http://unsubscribe-me.org/films/blipesque-sof-sml.swf
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