Pushing through..

We are beginning to reach the latter part of our project and in a about 5-6 weeks we should have a ready product to help the campuses become more close and communal. The team has worked hard to find solutions and we have come up with many kinds of ideas, some of them good and some of them not so good.

This week we met twice, first on Tuesday and again on Friday. On Tuesday we tried to deal with the project-partner meeting that we had on Friday. We found out that we most probably have to let go of one of our solutions on which we have worked for some time. The solution in itself is good but just hard to implement quickly and would require quite big arrangements to make it happen. Some of our social marketing ideas proved to be too costly for our project-partner so we are going to have to look for cheaper solutions. We weren't still ready to let go of some of our social marketing ideas but we are trying to find cheaper or free ways to make them happen.
On Tuesday we also tried to come up with some new ideas that we could start pondering upon. We came up with some ideas that we then could brainstorm better on Friday.

On Friday we asked our facilitator to help us again with brainstorming and she did brilliant job again. We thought of our new ideas and tried to refine them a bit further by asking questions after questions like: what, why, who, when, how etc. In the end we answered the questions and now we have some new perspectives which to elaborate on.

Some my own thoughts on the project is that I find it a bit frustrating that we don't have the necessary resources to execute good solutions. Right now I feel that we are dealing with quite superficial ideas and solutions and I'm afraid in the end they don't end up making a difference. We should be able to think bigger and deeper. Some of the biggest questions in my opinion would be: How can we make people to change their behavior into the direction that we want? How can we reach permanent change of behavior? Should we be able to change the structures that prevent communality from happening? If communality is created with good leadership, who are the people that we need to reach? Then the following question is: where can we find resources to implement bigger solutions?

I hope we will be able to push through so that the students will benefit from all our work in the end because they are the reason we are working hard for. But besides that I think this project has been very good experience of project-work and the nature of project-working. Especially when the solutions you're trying to reach is something more abstract in nature and not for example an app or a game or any solid product. Despite of the challenges and frustrations (which are natural parts of project-work) the team is still well motivated and keeping positive and we believe in the importance of what we are doing. We are sure that we will do well in the end!