Making the site

Wow, what a year it has been.

For me 2006 is the year of my graduation at the HKU, getting a job, but mostly it’s the year of the beginning of Helpalot. While I started my first brainstorm documents at the end of 2005, my first presentation at the HKU was in March 2006.

I was stating that saving the world was easy; all you had to do was build a website. I was going for the over-aim, under-sell reverse-reverse-psychology, leaving the teacher and other students a bit confused.

Because I knew I needed a community and building trust takes time, I quickly started this weblog. I started it on March 7, 2006 in a post called The Master Plan. (With a slight play of words, I was graduating for my Masters).

Reading books, blogs, sending emails I learned more and fine-tuned the concept.

This blog turned out to be great platform. I still think it’s great that you write something in the Netherlands and you can get feedback from anywhere from India to Italy or the US.

SIGCHI

Having written a number of blog posts I contacted the SIGCHI conference The web and beyond to mention I had something interesting to say. No guts no glory. So at June 8, 2006 I was speaking at the SIGCHI in the Tuschinski theater in Amsterdam.

Like I wrote in the blogpost, I was not really happy about a number of things in my presentation, but in the end it was a great experience and it lead to the next development of Helpalot.

Derick

June 14′th I met Derick in Utrecht. He had read about the SIGCHI conference and mailed me to set up a meeting. We spoke about social networks in general and Helpalot in specific. Having experience with creating social network sites, with Derick, we (I can speak in the we form with Derick in the team) where able to push the Helpalot project a major step forward. After our second meeting the project went from my graduation project to a real life project allready in development.

Exams

In a way I had an extra problem, because I had to spread my energy to ‘Helpalot the graduation project’ and ‘Helpalot the real project’. This led to an exam week in August that (for me) not even had the focus on exams, but on other Helpalot issues like setting up a foundation.

HKU-exposition

After I passed the exams, I started to focus on the HKU exposition. It was hard work, explaining the concept over 50 times did help me in getting a grip on how to most easily explain the concept and what topics people at problems with understanding or believing that would work. Handing out candy at an exposition works great btw.

Development Helpalot

After that, we really started the development of the site. I do the frond-end (HTML) and Peter the programmer of Derick the back-end (code) part. To make both ends stick, it was difficult at first to build a mental model of how the code of the site was working.
The next thing was communication; who does what when? I think we can still improve on this part, but we have a system now. We use Skyp to speak on the progress of the site, and coordinate our efforts.

A new job
Since December I have a job at Advance, as an interaction designer for four days in the week. Leaving me one day (besides weekends and evenings) to work on Helpalot.

The future..

So that was the story of 2006.

What will the future bring us? For one thing; it will bring us Helpalot.org.

It will take at least one or two months before we can release a version worthy of user testing. It will probably take another month to make it ready for a public release. I plan to make the launch with a big kickstart with all the media attention and viral marketing tricks I can think of. And a party of course.

In a happy scenario, the launch will be in March 2006. If there is not even a first version before May, something went wrong.

The kickstart

So how will we get the users in Helpalot? Firstly there is you, my much appreciated blog reader. I count on you to take a personal page and contact your friends and encourage them to do the same.

Also we have about 150 email addresses of people that would like to read about Helpalot. We will prefill Helpalot with at least 50 charities, and email them their login name and password to make it extremely easy for them to join. There are more ideas, and I have creative friends that can help out. This should put the first ‘early adapters’ on Helpalot.

When the site has proven its quality and reaches a number of about thousand users, I’ll contact Advance (where I work) and try to arrange that they back me by using one of their commercial platforms to send a mailing promoting Helpalot. These platforms have hundreds of thousands of contacts. After such a mailing the number of users should reach a critical mass capable of generating new users by itself.

The minimal goals for the end of 2007

Number of users on Helpalot: 1000
Number of charities on Helpalot: 250

Personally I think these figures are low, but it would still be a good accomplishment.

The optimistic scenario, by the end of 2007:

Number of users on Helpalot: 25.000
Number of charities on Helpalot: 5000

If that happens, I’ll be happy.

Beyond 2007..

When there is such growth that the sites starts to get growing pains, the costs will increase. Then the next step wil be taken; company pages.

On a company page a company can state what charity she supports and will need to pay an annual member fee. The advantage is that neither the personal supporter nor the charities have to pay. Also the company pages add a layer of trust to the social network. If a charity is supported by Google, I would be inclined to believe they are doing good work. Setting company pages will be a major operation, requiring the Foundation to drastically increase the team.

And for now

The best wishes for the new year!

Last week I visited Solitus during their repetition. Besides their normal repertoire they rehearsed the Helpalot song.

We now only have a tape (!) recording of the song and are working to get it recorded in a studio.

Today a new 9 Questions interview. Yvon has not a direct link to a charity, but does have her mission for a positive contribution to the world.

1. Can you give a quick introduction of yourself?

My name is Yvon Hajunga. I am Dutch. I am a painter and a writer. Since 19 years I travel to Egypt were I have a simple Bedouin house in the Sinai. I work in Holland to earn money to paint some months a year in Egypt.

2. Can you tell something about your trip to Cario?

I have lived in Cairo many times. It is a horrible crowded and in the same time beautiful city were I have many friends and wrote many stories about. The architecture is great, the people so interesting and helpfull.

3. What is the most difficult part of arranging your trip?

For me it is not difficult at all. Egypt is not difficult to travel in general. My difficulty is that i want to finish my book. I think with my book I can make a bridge between the west and the east.

The problem is that I cannot finish the book well. It takes me now allready more than 3 years to come to a stage that it can be read by a publisher. My biggest wish is to publish the book in Arabic. I have written it in English. (more…)

It’s really motivating to see the site coming together. We’re working hard to make progress, our alpha version (for our use only) has a first version of a charity page. Still, there is a lot of work ahead to make the site ready. If you like to be one of the first to test our beta, go to helpalot.org (scroll down) and fill in our form.

Also, a nice project I’d like to bring attention to (a Dutch site):
Project Aware - About bringing awareness to human right issues.