Doing it for REAL

This is all getting VERY exciting and just a bit scary. There are now (as of Monday) three full time folks involved in FreshBrain. Me, Todd and Stan. Here is what we have been up to and what is coming.

• Creating a prototype of the website. We, well mostly Stan, have been hard at work creating a prototype of the website. There are really three purposes for this. First, we will use it for the board meeting, second, it is helping us to flush out the usage scenarios and third, it is allowing us to try out some different technologies.

• Completing our plans. We have been working on a number of different plans. Todd has the lead on the marketing and fund raising plans. Due to the nature of our nonprofit, it is hard to separate out a marketing plan from a partner or fund raising plan. So Todd is creating one that covers all of this. We are also doing an engineering plan, a roadmap, a budget and so on. The first draft of these will be complete for the board meeting.

• Evaluating technology. Being a startup, it is a greenfield for us in terms of what technology to use. And given that we are really small, we need to leverage as much as possible, pick lightweight platforms and insure that what we create is very supportable (so that we don't need a lot of support folks!). Stan will put be creating a technology based blog that will go into more detail here. At a very high level, we started out looking at using a portal for our site. We did some prototyping with LifeRay. Pretty nice product, light weight and comes with lots of nice portlets. But after working through the scenarios a bit, it seems that it is more important to base our site on a social networking platform. We are now evaluating Jive Software. We will see how that goes ...

• Searching out partners and donors. We of course have Sun as a technology provider and donor. And we have Skona also as a donor. They are providing us with the corporate look and feel and help with advertising. There is a lot more that we need. The top two on our list (outside of the technology described above) is legal help and a CRM system to tracking all of the contacts including students, volunteers and so on. We are making progress on these and on others as well!

• Preparing for our first board meeting. This is the biggest thing that we are focused on right now. We have five members of our board - a very good start, but not the full board that we will require moving forward. Never the less, we will be walking through a demo of the prototype website with them, will review all of our plans and ask for approval to move forward. Lots of work, but none of it is a waste!

Just for fun - here are a couple of early graphics from Skona. We will be testing these out next week with some students to see what they think!

So that is it for now. I hope to be updating this on a more regular, at least weekly basis moving forward. The next one should be following the board meeting where I will share how that went and some of our objectives and goals for the first year.