I had an idea back in 2011 which I was going to call the “3 Month Project”. Trying to make the purpose of the site obvious in its name. Basically, start and finish a ‘project’ in 3 months.
While there are sites out there which promote and encourage people to achieve goal and accomplish targets in a month, such as National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), February Album Writing Month (FAWM) and RPM Challenge, I was thinking of a site for projects which might take longer to complete, or for those who wanted to complete the same goal as one of those sites, but with a longer time frame.
At the time I wrote up a business type spiel to explain what the site might be:
How often does a person have an idea and by lack of support, lack of focus or a never ending deadline, never actually completes it? 3 Month Project (3MP) is the support vessel for that idea.
3MP is an online community and future learning resource. Community for support and a learning resource for others who have similar ideas/goals. Future members will be able to see how others achieved their goals and to see what worked along the way, and what did not.
Each member will have 1 project/goal on their list at one time, they can’t start another project until 3 months after the current project start date. At the end of 3 months, they will fill out a completion form which let’s them assess where they got to and do a review of their project, addressing how much was completed, things that worked really well and things that didn’t.
Supporting others along the way by following them, and opening communications publically via commenting on status posts/questions, or by a suggestions on people page, such as offering links to sites or assistance which they can offer/help sold problems. Additionally private communication would also be offered if some subjects couldn’t be spoken about publically.
And this was my idea of how it would work:
After signing up to the site, providing basic information, members would be prompted to set up their first project and it’s start date. If not, just a basic profile to communicate with others members.
Each project will be given a ‘code name’, a short description, a more in-depth description, categorised and keywords added to the project. If there are known milestones that need to be met, they can be set as well.
From Day 1 onward, the member updates their profile as much as they can with images/videos/audio, anything that can show what they are doing. Effectively a public blog of their project.
The first project ‘on’ the site was going to be the creation of the site.
I know the goal sounds similar to the sites I listed above and something anyone could publish on their own blog (or a finished project on Instructables), but the plan was to make this a central resource for projects. Then completed projects, assuming fully documented, could be viewed as an extended tutorial. Also, while it’s find to see the finished project or tutorial, the journey in getting to the final outcome can be as interesting, if not more. It could also show decisions made and lessons learned along the way which affected the outcome. And that was where I saw the worth in the site, a repository of projects where people could learn from others. By keeping it central and open to be viewed by all, it would be a treasure trove in the future.
I think back to the movie “The Social Network” where the creation of “Facesmash” was presented. The character/Mark appeared to be documenting it through a number of smaller blog posts as it was created. I’m not sure how many posts were published, and granted, it was a way to drive the story forward in the film. But those posts/’pourings of the mind’, could explain why things worked or didn’t, or how it did work. Now I realise that what was put forth was a mild hacking attempt, but he was saying “they used this, so I had to do this instead”. You could ‘see’ the logic as it played out. You could learn from the rights (or would it be wrongs in this particular case?) so if other people made similar sites, they might get it right the first time.
That’s my ‘little’ post about “3 Month Project”. So, why am I posting this? To get the idea out there! I’ve had a number of ideas which I’ve realise that I won’t be able to make or create. So if someone likes the idea, go for it. I just ask to please give me credit if you make it!