In Information Technology (IT), it’s all about projects. So, when an IT guy tries a project in Communications, well, it’s going to run like an IT project. Microsoft Project is our tool of choice for managing the staff, milestones, roadblocks, deployments, and timelines. Our team consists of Tarah, a great mentor and comedian by profession, and me.

Prior to the current sprint, I purchased a domain name and whipped up a WordPress shell site. I solicited my granddaughter to draw out some needed graphics to avoid copyrights. Over the years, I’ve collected audio recordings of stories my mother would share around the kitchen table. Stories of her childhood, growing up in German when the war broke out, life in an orphanage, coming to Canada, raising us kids on the prairies, etc. I consulted with Tarah on what it would take to clean up an audio recording. Not everything your mom says would fly out on the public internet. We’ve both dipped our feet into choreographing a couple of those videos for a prototype. The experience helps me see you can really leverage journalistic skills to make an engaging story. I’ve also identified the fact that my mother is actually quite the storyteller. It’s not a universal skill among family members.

The current sprint was focused on the identified need to have a sign-on process. I discussed this with the family, and all agreed I needed to incorporate this before any of their content would be on it. You don’t want it public if something gets missed in the editing.   I researched what needs to be added and configured to your site to have sign-on and how to restrict page access. It turns out they use security groups you can define and then link pages to the group on one end and registered users to the other end. I still need to work out having story owners be able to grant registered users access to their stories.
I decided to define some of the roles needed to develop content for this site. The role of being Chief Family Editor is key. It can be a one-man show, or delegation is leveraged to cover subordinate roles.
The site is the storefront for your Family News Network, just like CNN, but FNN. Set now is the repository for the creative and engaging content that will get generated.

To that end, Tarah and I brainstormed about what skills one could develop to generate such content from your uncovered family stories.
This produced some motivational material I put on the site under the menu item “Your path to becoming Chief Family Editor.” This included tips from my experience so far and Tarah.

We concluded that a sample live conversational podcast covering me and my learnings to date would be in order. Tarah would interview me and provide the role of the investigative journalist poking me for more intriguing story angles, digging down to truth. I would need to provide my honest feelings about how the interview is going. So we’ll see how that goes for our next sprint.