USER STORIES

OVERVIEW

The following user stories are designed to identify two ways in which ProM can contribute value. We have been using the dating site analogy and that has served us well. I also believe that the value of ProM shares much with social networking sites, Facebook being the prime example. Both dating sites and social networking sites share, to varying degrees, the following operating principles:

Intentionality/Active Seeking: These platforms enable us to actively define what/whom we are looking for and to go find it/them. Dating sites allow us to specifically identify potential mates that satisfy certain criteria. Similarly, Facebook allows you to look for particular events on specific days, find out who has friends in common etc.

Visibility: An extraordinarily important feature of these platforms is that they allow more passive visibility into the system. This passive visibility can be presented to users in two ways:

Browsing: One can simply scroll through profiles, event listings, groups etc.

News Feeds: A very important feature in Facebook is the newsfeed which provides real time visibility into changes in the entire system. This provides information on relations within the system. It lets us know who is becoming friends with whom, what events people are attending, what people look like etc.

The following user types are, therefore, constructed with these two principles in mind.

Open Projects: Something that we have not talked about but will be an important feature of an open collaboration infrastructure are open projects. ProM itself is an open project in that we are:

Managing the project in open spaces; Google Group, Skype, wiki, BM etc. Open to the participation of different people that want to contribute value in different ways. Crowdsourcing/Collective Intelligence: we are tapping into the wisdom of many different people

with many different perspectives.

Open architectures are the appropriate model for bringing the swarm together... for facilitating swarms that can come together and change the world!

This model is something that we need to think more about in the sense that we need to decide if we want to focus on just on matching on also supporting the collaboration process by helping to create open collaboration environments.

USER TYPES AND STORIES

Both individuals and projects could conceivably be participants in the system and it is not clear that a distinction needs to be made

What type of project do you want to create? Event

What infrastructure do you want to manage your event?Wiki, Google Group, real time chat...

Who are the project managers?Venessa, Doug..

How often do you want to meet on SkypeWeekly

INTENTIONAL: Individual wants to actively create an open project to help organize a conference in NY called Contact!

Venessa, one of the main organizers of Contact, wants to ensure that the conference in NY that she is attending in October is a success. In order to do this, she needs to ensure that several things happen: a strong list of participants attend the event, sponsorship for the event is located and good momentum leading up to the event is generated. This leads to the following series of questions...

ANALYSIS: This is an example of a flow that can serve to help to set up infrastructure to manage open projects...

What is your projects mission statement?Connecting Projects To Solve Massive Social Problems

What specific intentions do you have for this year?Develop and rollout Prom... etc

What specific needs does your project have?Those with experience building software ... etc

What can you offer other projects by way of exchange?Advice on managing open groups, business planning..

INTENTIONAL: Individual or Project actively seeking collaboration opportunity with another project(s) with aligned mission:

Suresh has been working for a couple of years, on and off, on a project called OpenKollab. He has worked with different people on the project and over the course of that time there have been some good ideas that have been developed but, for whatever reason, the project has not managed to really get off the ground.

Suresh feels that the OpenKollab mission... ‘connecting projects to solve massive social problems’, is a worthy mission and he feels that there have to be other projects that have similar objectives. His friend Tim mentioned that there is this site called ProM, that helps you to find projects that you might be able to partner with. He decides to give it a try... this leads to the following flow...

After inputting this information, ProM provides a list of Suggested Projects that have mission statements that are similar...

(it also provides the opportunity to filter by geography, size of organization, etc)

VISIBILITY: Individual/Project seeing interesting project while browsing ProM

John, a web developer, is taking a break while he eats his sandwich and decides to browse ProM this super cool website that is friend Mary told him about. Apparently it has something to do with dating, but not regular dating. He’s not really sure what this is all about but decides to check it out anyway.

On getting to the home page, he sees that it is apparently a ‘dating site for climate action projects!’... He sees that one of the button bars on the left hand side says: ‘Finding Cool Projects!’... with bated breath he hits the button... which leads him to the following

This leads to John joining the Google Group of a project called Climate Fighters. In joining this group he is made aware of an open Skype call next Wednesday at 10am pst. He decides that he will participate in the call to learn more about Climate Fighters.

INTENTIONAL: Project actively seeking resources

Dave works for a project called Climate Fighters, which has a mission statement that reads: ‘We will help to reduce net CO2 emissions in San Francisco to zero by 2030!’ Climate Fighters is a small group which does not have a lot of money, hence they have been struggling to upgrade their website.

His friends Jane has recently made him aware of a site called ProM which is an open collaboration infrastructure designed to connect projects and to support them in their efforts to collaborate. Since

they don’t have the resources internally to fix the website, he decides to see if he can find a web developer that might be interested in supporting Climate Fighters in some way. This leads to ProM asking a series of questions...

VISIBILITY: Browsing Prom and seeing connection between individual and project she wants to facilitate

VISIBILITY: Browsing ProM and seeing connection between two projects that she wants to facilitate