The development process and the results of Eurasia.
Τhe following article is part of the #Eurasia project of the Ad Discovery Workshop of Panteion University in Greece.
Eurasia is a start-up project based on the Ad Discovery Workshop: an experimental peer-to-peer learning, hands-on workshop conducted by Assistant Professor Betty Tsakarestou of the Department of Communication Media and Culture, of Panteion University, Athens, Greece. Founded by 6 university students from 3 different countries and 2 continents, Eurasia works as an international journalistic and social platform that serves as a multicultural community that everyone from Europe and Asia can join, read articles from various perspectives, meet people from different backgrounds and write articles of their own to post on our site and social media pages. Our basic purpose is to create a better understanding of the travelling, technological, social and cultural beliefs and differences between the countries of Eurasia. The following paragraphs refer to the steps that each one of our members took in order to create this project, with mentions to our sources of information, web resources and partner collaborations.
Group Formation: Our team was formed within the framework of the Ad-Discovery Workshop of Panteion University. With a very creative and interesting method, each student of the workshop was provided with paper slips and writing utensils in order to write 3 to 5 topics of his/her interests, such as “communication”, “culture” and “travelling”. The students were then encouraged to converse with each other, as well as share and compare their interests. Eventually this whole process caused our team’s current members to get to know each other and chat briefly. During this talk we became aware of the similarity of our interests and ideas, which were associated with topics like “branding”, “multiculturalism” and “media”, and decided to form a team.
Collaboration: Since collaboration is a key element of success, after our team formation and during the whole semester, we tried to engage online or in-person as many times as we could. We created a private Facebook group and a messenger chat group in order to stay always in touch and make sure all the team members know, understand and execute their roles and responsibilities on time. Due to the fact that engagement in meetings starts to drop off quite rapidly after about 30 minutes, in our in-person meetings we tried to schedule gatherings that lasted 50 minutes to 1 hour. It was crucial that we had already created an agenda with all the topics we needed to cover, to make sure that at the end of each meeting we have accomplished both the desired outcome and a stronger team spirit.
The process of engaging our idea and problem: During the first steps of the project, we encountered some problems regarding our start-up idea selection. After several in-depth conversations we understood that we needed to narrow our focus -and not broaden it- and shrink our plan into a simple conceivable idea. In other words, we decided to address a small problem or need in our space, which would become the keystone of our project. With the help of the brainstorming steps of the “Brainstorm Toolkit” from openideo we stayed focused on finding the topic of our project and came up with several suggestions and ideas. Afterwards, we organized and filtered all these ideas in order to reduce the potential project topics. Ultimately, after sharing our thoughts and insights and repeated the filtering process, we reached an agreement and concluded that “Eurasia” will be our final topic and goal. As 6 university students from 3 different countries and 2 continents, we decided to create a platform to try and connect people from Asia and Europe, thus creating a better understanding of our travelling, technological, social and cultural beliefs and differences. Before finalizing our decision, we made sure to search for already existing similar startups or programs, as well as checking for viability and prospects. During this research we detected that Eurasia’s strongest point and quality is the fact that our team consists of individuals who come from different backgrounds and have different cultural views and at the same time, share the same amount of passion and dedication for this objective.
The results, learnings & achievements of Eurasia: Throughout the process of creating and managing Eurasia our team had the chance to inform readers and provide insightful articles and videos about Europe and Asia regarding cultural, technological, society and travelling matters.
Moreover, as a team we were excited to see an interest in our community through our media social platforms. This interest is making our team more passionate on writing articles, sharing videos, being more active on social media and show dedication in the promotion of our community.
Last but not least, the reviews from our readers and community members helped us spot our strong and blind spots. As a result, we were strongly stimulated to consider and plan ways of future improvement and development.
You can find more info about our startup and the articles on our official website: http://eurasiaco.wix.com/eurasia
Like us on #Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eurasiaco
Follow us on #Twitter: https://twitter.com/eurasiaco
TEAM: Amanda Voulgari, twnia nisotaki, Daphne Diapouli, Catherine Meng ,Ling Jin, Zuzana Hájková
With the help of Assistant Professor Betty Tsakarestou of the Department of Communication Media and Culture, of Panteion Univeristy, Athens, Greece.
© 2016 by an Ad Discovery Workshop of Panteion University
