Found a Team for the Climate Fixathon

Two days ago I announced I was looking for two teammates to join the Climate Fixathon. I received a dozen of proposals. It was a tough choice to make so I settled it by picking three persons with complementary skills to mine. We are going to build a Nomad List for Ecovillages together for a month.

Alina Sava will be our lead designer. She is a web designer and product maker based in Berlin, Germany. You might know her from Makerlog, she works on amazing minimalist designs.

From Spain, Miguel Piedrafita is only 17 years old but he already made a name for himself in the maker community. His shipping skills are beyond spectacular: 53 featured repositories on Github and 8 products made! He will assume a full-stack developer position within the team alongside me.

Patricia Pires is a friend of mine from college, born in Portugal, now living in Sweden. She will be helping Alina with design but she is also a civil engineering major writing a Master thesis on how to evaluate creative urban projects, which will be helpful to evaluate the data we need to filter the different communities and to understand our users’ needs. Some of her teachers are involved in coliving projects as well.

The first thing we did was to create a Telegram group  to gather our European team and talk strategy/operations. The Fixathon starts after July the 10th so we have plenty of time to think. The way I see it, our job till then is to prepare the project and start teasing:

1. Find a name and a logo. Then start Twitter marketing, maybe create a simple landing page to tease and gather our first signups.

2. Think of user stories and place them all in a public backlog (Trello, Notion, or Google Doc), as well as writing a short pitch (one-liner + catchy product description)

3. Choose a common stack: Alina has basics of React, Miguel knows Laravel and Vue, I do Symfony and React, so I think a stack Laravel/React/MySQL might be a good trade-off but we will discuss this with Miguel.

4. Set up collaborative tools: Github + Google Drive

Then we have to wait for the actual starting date to ship mockups and code. We can use this time to organize get-to-know online meetings as Patricia already proposed.

Concerning the workflow, we need user stories first to agree on what we want to do from a functional perspective. Then we can think design and database.

Since Patricia has the market expertise, she will play an important part in establishing the backlog of user stories and talk with users/stakeholders on a regular basis. Again, the user stories will be the bridge between code and design.

Then once the skeleton of the project is set up we can contribute to the public Github repository the way we feel like. If someone wants to work with JS/PHP/HTML/CSS he/she can just send a push request to the main repo.

Of course, everything is still an open discussion. More on this project later.