Bamboostones Evaluating the Experiment

Bamboostones evaluating the experiment

February 2010

Hold on!

• Before you look at the following slides, take a few moments and try to answer the following question

When was your last visit to Bamboostones?

• Don’t click to the next slide yet. Just think about it.

And what is your answer to this question?

Why don’t you think it’s worthwhile coming back more often?

(maybe you can write it down, so that you can read it back later)

Topics

• Bamboostones: the purpose of the experiment

• Where are we now? • What’s happened in the meanwhile? • What are our options?• Discussion

The purpose of the experiment*Develop a web-tool that helps Philips…a) To invite new members b) To help network members jointly create an on-line ‘book’ that

subsequently gets physically published…a. along a structure of themes already known at the beginning (these

themes need to be managed by ‘theme owners’ who have special roles in the application – see scenario for theme driver below)

b. unstructured, establishing connections between contributions that people make (e.g. facilitated by tag clouds)

c) To share content (movies, presentations, reports), to enable other people to add content, to help the network identify common themes among the contributions and to help the emerging network rank content (in terms of quality-of-contribution)

* Source: the briefing

Additional purposes

• One central idea for Bamboostones was to ‘ask questions’

• Bamboostones was to be co-owned by the founding partners

• The idea of the website was to become the ‘home’ of ‘the movement’

• Another intention became to store the archive of what had been achieved and created

Topics

• Bamboostones: the purpose of the experiment

• Where are we now?– Let’s update from the statistics point of view– And in relation to the original objectives

• What’s happened in the meanwhile? • What are our options?• Discussion

In the beginning, it seemed to work…

1/May 1/Jun 1/Jul 1/Aug 1/Sep 1/Oct 1/Nov0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

67

103123

142 146 148 150

3562

7993 96 101 107

188

309

385

489

524

560

599

memberscontributionsmember logins

…then activity levels stabilized…

1/May 1/Jun 1/Jul 1/Aug 1/Sep 1/Oct 1/Nov0

200

400

600

800

1000

1200

invitationstimes 'plussed'total 'plusses'presentationsmoviesbig thoughts

…and fell still.

1/May 1/Jun 1/Jul 1/Aug 1/Sep 1/Oct 1/Nov 1/Dec 1/Jan 1/Feb0

200

400

600

800

1000

1200

invitationstimes 'plussed'total 'plusses'presentationsmoviesbig thoughts

The # of visitors is in decline

Jun 1, 2009 - Jun 30,

2009

Jul 1, 2009 - Jul 31, 2009

Aug 1, 2009 - Aug 31,

2009

Sep 1, 2009 - Sep 30,

2009

Oct 1, 2009 - Oct 31,

2009

Nov 1, 2009 - Nov 30,

2009

Dec 1, 2009 - Dec 31,

2009

Jan 1, 2010 - Jan 31, 2010

0

215

116139 141

160

122107

VisitorsVisitors

What may be causing the decline? 1/2Statistics & appearance

• The original enthusiasm was high– Where did that go? Why did it not continue after September?

• The website does not appear to be dynamic– A proposal for improvements has not been decided on

• There is little change in the content– The latest contributions are from months ago– Why come back if there is nothing to learn?

• There’s no energy – it’s static

What may be causing the decline? 2/2Purpose & return-on-investment

• The website ‘promised’ people they were contributing to a ‘book’ or ‘publication’– There has been no progress towards realizing this promise to date

• There is no activity on determining ‘themes’• There are no explicit questions asked

– There is no visible response on answers given• There is no perception of people joining a movement or

expanding a network• There is no perception of the founding partners being active

Topics

• Bamboostones: the purpose of the experiment

• Where are we now? • What’s happened in the meanwhile?

– co-do.net was built – What is that?

• What are our options?• Discussion

co-do =

• ‘the way’ (‘do’, like in judo or taekwondo) of ‘together’ (‘co’)

• Jointly working on real things

• With people like yourself

Screenshot from test environment

Screenshot from test environment

• An environment for you to connect with others

• Get inspired by them and in turn give them inspiration

What does co-do provide?

Screenshot from test environment

Screenshot from test environment

• An environment for you to connect with others

• Get inspired by them and in turn give them inspiration

• A community to collaboratively drive an innovation agenda with

What does co-do provide?

Screenshot from test environment

Screenshot from test environment

• An environment for you to connect with others

• Get inspired by them and in turn give them inspiration

• A community to collaboratively drive an innovation agenda with

• A resource for working on new solutions together with others

What does co-do provide?

Screenshot from test environment

Screenshot from test environment

Screenshot from test environment

• An environment for you to connect with others

• Get inspired by them and in turn give them inspiration

• A community to collaboratively drive an innovation agenda with

• A resource for working on new solutions together with others

• Enabling each member to enjoy their contributions

What does co-do provide?

Screenshot from test environment

• An environment for you to connect with others

• Get inspired by them and in turn give them inspiration

• A community to collaboratively drive an innovation agenda with

• A resource for working on new solutions together with others

• Enabling each member to enjoy his/her contributions

• Connected from your desktop

What does co-do provide?

Desktop-widget

Can I test it?

• We have given everyone in bamboostones a free preliminary membership of co-do – Your username/password is identical– Simply use it to log in

• To test the widget, go to http://simpleconceptstudio.com/uwidget/ and download it from there

How are they different?bamboostones co-do

Basic functionalities (register, upload embed codes, ‘plus contributions’) Updates everywhere make the application (appear to be more) dynamic Tagging is part of the navigation, so access to interrelated content is easier Other people are visibly present & accessible in the application Application enables people to team up People can share more types of content: toolkits, inspirational content, challenges Members have permanent access through a widget

What is the status of the two?

• Stichting Bamboostones was put in place at the end of last year

• Stichting Bamboostones promotes social innovation

• Stichting Bamboostones supports both bamboostones.net & co-do.net – But is in practice not doing much right now

Topics

• Bamboostones: the purpose of the experiment

• Where are we now? • What’s happened in the meanwhile?• What are our options?• Discussion

What can we do? • Option 1: nothing just wait and see• Option 2: something implement the changes proposed by

Karlijn, Markus & CJ (see addendum) • Option 3: try to do better

– Raise the level of activity, also from the core team– Get the founding partners actively on board– Involve more founding partners (ICSE, Van Abbe, …)– Get more people to join bamboostones

• Option 4: learn & improve (costly) study co-do and implement (improved) features from co-do on BBS

• Option 5: migrate (less costly) give BBS members free membership of co-do & wrap-up the bamboostones content (in an e-publication?)

Related costOption Indicative cost

1. Do nothing 0 € (but may destroy potential value of the tool)

2. Do something (i.e. implement the already proposed improvements)

5.000 € < Cost ≤ 10.000 € (depends on the required applications)

3. Try to do better ? € mainly effort (+ Google adwords campaign?)

4. Learn & improve ≤ 15.000 € (co-do.net cost 33.000 € out of pocket)

5. Migrate ≤ 5.000 € (cost of e-book based on current BBS content only + migration cost)

Topics

• Bamboostones: the purpose of the experiment

• Where are we now? • What’s happened in the meanwhile?• What are our options?• Discussion

Discussion• What do we actually want?

– If it’s ‘a movement’, how do we get that going? – How do we keep it going?– If it’s ‘content’: how do we make it? – How do we get other people to read it? How do we track if reading it

served a purpose?

• What can we afford? – If we can’t afford what we want, can we get others to share the cost?

• Founding partners?• Other ‘sponsors’? (potentially new partners?)• In another way…?

Addendum: improvement suggestions for Bamboostones

KvdN, ML, CJM

Taking a longer term perspective• We should ask ourselves: where is

Bamboostones going?

• Let’s assume it develops in line with innovation for sustainable development at Philips Research – It’s 1st phase was dedicated to starting an open

innovation platform with partners– The 2nd phase is about making connections– The 3rd phase would be… (we could think about this

now, in order to anticipate new functionalities better)

What does that imply? 1/2• We should ‘wrap up’ phase 1 of Bamboostones• Improve content-wise

– Introduce the innovation framework for sustainable development in a more complete way

– Put all videos together– Do something with the transition tracks

• Improve the emotional appeal– Make the visual identity more lively

• Take the co-do visualization as starting point– Introduce animations– Make it more colorful– Show number of visitors & participants

What does that imply? 2/2• We should start a ‘phase 2’, focused on enabling

connections– Introduce a ‘Bamboostones passport’

• Give people a public profile page• With their interests

– Make a community page• Google maps: networking around the globe• Help people make connections, identify themes, collaborate

– Improve the positive feedback loop between contributors and people thinking about them

– Activities: Event calendar– E-book: give people a format to read info

Additional improvement opportunities

• There is no balancing between old and new contributions– The older ones, who had a longer time before new

ones came, have higher scores

• It’s possibly quite ‘hoogdrempelig’– Does ‘big thought’ sound too difficult? Does it raise

the bar too much?

Recommendations 1. Wrap up phase 1 of Bamboostones2. Implement improvements to start phase 2

– Move ‘beyond content’ (make the site emotionally more appealing)

– Start enabling networking (help people connect to each other)

3. Give Bamboostones an active role in the preparation of Connection Day – See next slide

Addendum: two more slights with web statistics

Whereas the # of views is stable(could this be ‘search bots’?)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 100

10000

20000

30000

40000

50000

60000

70000

80000

90000

Total views

Total views

How about new visitors?

• Bamboostones has 50% less new visitors than benchmarked webites (source: Google Analytics)