RDVP Class: Mitra and Greg (3/7/2005)

Iranian Teacher's Network

Mitra gave an update on the Iranian Teachers' Network, showing a prototype and describing some of the recent thinking she'd done around content, the opportunity for teachers to earn money by selling lesson plans, and the challenges for fundraising. She got some pointers to potential corporate sponsors who might be interested.

Prototyping

Greg Wolff gave a talk about prototyping. The key insights were that:

1. You start with a period of observation, and record measurements of metrics that you will want to impact.
   
2. You create a few testable hypotheses (1 or 2 primary, and 2 to 3 dependent) about how to impact those metrics
   
3. Only then do you choose the technologies which will allow you to test those hypotheses as quickly as possible.
   

He encouraged the involvement of ethnographers in the first stage of observation, pointing out that simple questionnaires are insufficient, because people are bad at accurately reporting what they do. (I can corrobrate that from my experience at Vividence.)

The business people construct the hypotheses, though get the buy-in of key stakeholders from the research and technical teams.

The technical team is given the task of choosing technologies to test the hypotheses quickly. Since this is a prototype, the eventual production cost is irrelevant. You need to confirm that you are building the right thing.

Greg presented a simple graphical form to help enforce the division and clarity of thinking. Observations and measurements formed the left leg of an arch, the technologies to be used the right leg, and the bridge between them is the hypotheses.
It's a simple idea, but one I think will be effective for keeping conversations on track and reducing the scope of prototypes to the minimum required to test the hypothesis.