Project Play

Sometimes it may seem that those of us on the Project Play team glide through the Web 2.0 world with no problems – every implementation is seamless, every project successful. Yeah, I wish!! Let me tell you a story:

We recently moved to GoToWebinar for our online continuing education programs. It provides videos of the sessions in a well-known format (cool!). We don’t really have a way to stream videos from our web server (not so cool!) So, we turned to the Web 2.0 world for a solution, and found it in blip.tv. A great solution, but the road from “great idea!” to “great service!” was FILLED with potholes!! I won’t go into gory details of all of our problems, but let’s just say that we’d navigate around one pothole just to find another one on the other side. But we got through it, and are now well on our way to “great service!”.

Reflecting on this experience, I wanted to share with you some of the things that got us through. Maybe it’ll help when you hit a bumpy implementation road!

• Listen and Learn: We couldn’t have started this project if we hadn’t heard that Beth Carpenter was using blip.tv for a project she was doing. That gave us a great headstart – someone we know and trust had used this service.
• Google liberally: Especially at the beginning….if you don’t know a term, google it! If you need a basic introduction to the topic, google it! You’ll find enough information to continue down the road.
• Pool your knowledge: I know some stuff, our CE person Jean knows some stuff, and Mark Ibach (our resident video guy) knows some stuff. Together, we know LOTS of stuff. Pooling our knowledge, we were able to figure things out much more quickly.
• Ask someone: There is a time to keep looking for answers, and then there is a time to turn to someone who has done it before. We reached that time pretty early in this project. I knew that Beth Carpenter had done some work with blip.tv before, and we needed some help figuring out a video conversion package to use. We asked Beth, and quickly had a definitive answer.
• Read the help: There were times when I could not, for the life of me, figure out what to do next. Blip.tv is intuitive, but not THAT intuitive. The help and FAQ was a lifesaver. I couldn’t have continued on without it.
• Don’t worry about solving problems that don’t need to be solved: I wanted to do something a certain way. I looked in the documentation, googled it, and asked Jean if she knew how to do it. I could have spent the time to figure it out, but it was much quicker and less frustrating to just move on and do it another way. There are often alternatives in the web 2.0 world, and while persevering is important to a point, if you can figure out a detour, don’t be afraid to take it.
• Don’t give up: We could have easily walked away, given up, decided that we could keep doing things the old way (or not at all!). But we didn’t….and we will now have a great new service for our member libraries.

What tips have you found to help with a bumpy implementation??  Share them with us in the comments!

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