Lo3 - How to deveop a project

Apart from personal and social by prosumers and grassroots productions, social media is increasingly used by media professionals to generate ideas for projects and use online tools and social media to collaborate. 

What as is prosumer?
The word prosumer stands for producer and consumer, in other words: someone that isn't a professional but uses apps and software to create their own media products / content for either personal use or to make money. They are amateur, they don't work for a company or organisation.

What does grassroots production mean? 

Grassroots Productions can be pretty much made by anybody. It's where people come together to make a project or a campaign for a specific niche audience, typically more local or community based. Has to be self or crowd funded. Popular with charities and raising awareness or money for a good cause.

Includes citizen journalism, where citizens write or send videos to a news outlet. 

Name three documents / software taught in U2 that are used to manage a project / production in it's pre-production stage. 

- Microsoft PowerPoint: Production schedule, Moodboard, Mindmap, Risk Assesment.

- Microsoft word, Call sheet, location recce, release and consent forms.

- Adobe Excel, Gantt chart.

If the question asks for milestones and tasks draw a production schedule 

Online and collaborative examples of project management tools -

 (Use in exam)

•  ActiveCollab 

ActiveCollab is perfect for collaborated global projects due to the fact that you can invite unlimited associates and clients to your server which has unlimited storage space for all your files, documents and projects. This is beneficial as if one of your associates is somewhere far away they will still have access to everything they need in regards to all the building blocks used to create the project and further information. The fact that you can invite unlimited users is also very beneficial since your project may have loads of team members or free lancers working with you, making it possible for everyone to have a god understanding on where the project is at and what needs to be done. You can assign tasks, share files and get notified through email when anything happens including discussions and comments. The fact that you can communicate and discuss projects and ideas over this site is crucial as this is something you'd have to be doing more or less everyday during meeting over the project, making it much easier to do when collaborating with others as you don't ned to plan extra time consuming tasks such as often / daily meetings.
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• Teamwork Project Manager 

Teamwork PM is great for collaborative projects as it allows you to assign tasks to your staff, co-workers and contractors, helping keep everyone on top of what they're doing and stay organised. Teamwork PM also lets you add project milestones to keep all team members updated on key dates and goals. This is beneficial as it gives everyone an understanding on where abouts the project is at and what else needs to be complated. You can also track how long it's taking someone to complete tasks by the hour, allowing you to keep projects on cost and efficiently bill your clients, This feature also helps you plan how long each task will roughly take you, helping in regards to completing other documents such as Gantt charts. which is a huge benefit as timing is everything when creating a project. Especially if there is a set launch date.

• Kapost

Kapost allows you to upload and share your initial ideas during the pre-production stage from pitches and story ideas to assignments & editorial calendars, to drafts & publishing, and into performance and payment tracking with your associates and clients. This is an extremely beneficial feature in regards to a the creation of a collaborative project as you don't need to be frequently planning time consuming meetings which some people may not make it to and so on, this way everyone can share their ideas online and all team members have access to them and can have an input. Not only this, but Kapost enables the entire production workflow to be moved online. In Kapost,anyone can create Story Ideas, which can be closed or approved and assigned. Making the project much easier to work collaboratively on. Track the performance of your content in terms of page views, uniques, re-tweets, FB Likes, etc

Kapost also allows you to track the performance of your content in terms of page views, uniques, likes and re-tweets. I think that this is a really good feature to include due to most projects being consumed online, therefore it's important to understand who's interested in your project in  order to target them more specifically. Lastly you can automate the tracking of the payment of your contributors, Kapost handles the calculations and reporting of the payments, which is highly beifficial as the process of doing this manually is very time consuming, lifting another weight from your shoulders.