What were your main objectives during this reporting period?
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The needs of our participating cooperatives are incredibly diverse, and their readiness to adopt new technologies and platforms differs greatly. Our project's goals are ambitious, complex, and highly dependent on recruiting a community of contributors to help grow and sustain the effort. As a result, we are working very closely with our partner cooperatives and the larger platform co-op community throughout the design and development process, using iterative and open source methods. Our design process typically starts with the creation of the simplest possible intervention into the problem space—a sketch, a prototype, a workflow or journey—which we then share openly with co-designers and the co-op community to critique, help refine, and transform our initial assumptions. We build from small successes, and aim to design simple, constantly-evolving artifacts whose provisionality invites greater feedback and improvement from our community. Over the course of many iterations throughout the project's timeline, these designs are extended to provide new features, greater robustness, and to respond to emerging needs.
During this reporting period, we:
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Several prototypes of the Learning Commons user experience have been designed, at varying levels of fidelity and functionality. These prototypes will be used as part of the co-design process with participating cooperatives, and our co-designers will have the opportunity to adapt and create their own prototypes prior to our implementing the full Learning Commons software. An interactive Learning Commons prototype is available on the web, and a collection of different experimental paper prototypes, which were elaborated with members of the platform cooperative community, have been posted as well.
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