Teaching children

I would want to teach my children

• cause and effect more than right and wrong
• that happiness is what ultimately matters in life
  
• that everyone else's happiness matters as much as ours
  
• to believe that anything is possible if we put out heart, mind and soul into it
• to fear nothing in life
• and try.
  

WeSignup.com

In the last few months, I have been working on a website that helps people organize projects in a simple manner. Here is a use case for this website.

Jim registers for the Rock'n Roll Paintathon project this year. The goal is to organize a 10-20 member team to paint the home of a low-income elderly person. Jim plans to ask his friends to join in this worthy effort.

Jim's friends are different types of people. Some are passionate about volunteering. Others are driven more because they have fun working along with their friends. Some don't have the time to come but have no issues in offering their ladders, vans and tools for the job. Several more are interested in contributing financially for the effort. Thus, each of his friends have different things to offer. Jim does not know all of them well enough to guess who can offer what.

So he organizes his project as follows:

1. Need 2 people to go to painting orientation (on Aug 16 at 6pm) and lead/monitor the painting job on paint day.
2. One or two to visit home owner 10-15 days before paint day and talk to them about what they are planning for the day.
3. Need four 6 foot ladders
4. One tall 12 foot ladder
5. Need an SUV or van to transport these ladders
6. Need food money for all the volunteers
7. One person to pickup bagels, water and drinks for everyone at 8am.
8. One person to pickup lunch for everyone from Subway at 12 noon.
9. Need 15 painting volunteers
10. 2 volunteers pick up and bring paint supplies from the organizers
11. 1 volunteer to return unused paint supplies back to the organizers
12. 1 volunteer to use the SUV/van, collect all the ladders from owners and bring them to the site. Same person returns the ladder and vehicle to the owners.

He goes to http://www.wesignup.com and creates a new signup sheet by adding the details. He adds as participants all friends who may be interested in helping out.

Sindhu gets an email from Jim about the Paintathon project. Jim has described the project well to convey the value of the entire effort. Sindhu is able to see that it is indeed a large effort and needs a lot of help. She clicks on the email link and finds that she is able to login to Sygnup using her existing Gmail or Yahoo account safely. There was no need to create new accounts and passwords. She signs up for #9 painting volunteer and also the "#3 can-offer-6-foot-ladder" tasks.

Shane is a gregarious extrovert. He has been seeing that all his friends have been chattering about the upcoming painting project. He decides to reopen the email he got from Jim last week to see who are coming. He logs in to Sygnup and finds that Nathan, Praveen, Meena and the whole group have actually signed up. He knows it is going to be fun. He signs up.

Jim has been monitoring the signup sheet for several days now. He thinks the project is good now, and has sufficient people. He sends himself a report of all the participants who have signed up. He gathers all their emails so he can send them an important announcement regarding the project...

WeSignup designed to:

• Give the participants visibility to the entire effort involved in the project so that people know that their contribution is indeed important.
• Orient the organizer to think in terms of how he can break down his project into concrete tasks that individuals can own and drive.
• Create a sense of ownership and responsibility for participants
• Create an easy way so people can sign up for what they like and what they are good at instead of being assigned something that they may not be interested in.
• Recognize that each person is different and brings different things to the table.
  
• Make good use of group tendencies - "All of my friends are in, let me join too". And the other way too - "Its been so long, and not many have signed up yet. Let me join. Looks like I am really needed here."
  

Do send me feedback on what you think about this.

Sep, 17, 2010 Update: I changed the domain name of the website from www.sygnup.com to www.wesignup,com