Karoliina Luoto

How open can you be in your web project?

by Janus Boye
September 20, 2011
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Comments: 2 Comments

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To some, “open” is just another buzzword. To us it is an often overlooked success factor in web projects. Today, technology still steals much of the the limelight. This makes it difficult to strategically use the web presence to achieve change and innovation.

We have a session focusing on openness and we’ve invited Karoliina Luoto, development manager and self-proclaimed openness spokesperson working for the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, to present on the web content management conference track. In her talk, Karoliina will share her experiences with running an open, collaborative web project for cultural change.

This year, she has been working on the Sitra.fi project, which aims to renew the website, so that it provides tools for collaborative development work around Sitra’s fields of work. The project also aims to summarize and visualize knowledge around Sitra’s themes (that are often hard to grasp).

Unlike most others, this web project has been open, so that main outcomes (source code, learnings, tools like document templates) have been shared for anybody to utilize. During the project, a publicly available project blog has covered topics such as:

Is this taking openness a step too far? Attend the session and get new perspectives on the potential of more openness.

Comments

Graham Oakes September 20th, 2011 9:59

I’d love to hear more about what overheads the team experienced with Scrum, and about how Lean UX worked in practice. Sounds like the UX team was separate to the tech team? Or were they working in cross-functional teams? (The latter would more closely align to agile principles.) I think some of the stuff coming out of the Kanban community makes more sense in this situation than traditional Scrum — be good to talk about this.

Re. getting things done with the servers — this is an area where a “cloud” infrastructure can make a big difference. It opens up a lot of flexibility for development. Will try to talk about this in our Oxfam case study.

See you in Aarhus.

Graham

Karoliina September 20th, 2011 12:54

Great points, Graham, and to-the-point observetions!

One of our central weak points in the project has been that even though we aimed at one unified team, the design and development parts of the team have not worked together as seamlessly as they could have. Even though we tried to look into different possible methodological and practical ways of solving the problem, we could not get it totally solved during the project. I think our conclusive blog posting for the development project will handle this question too.

I’ll need to definitely try to participate your Oxfam session. Looking forward to talking to you more in Aarhus.

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