The following three personas of MeetingOfMinds platform have been introduced and defined here and they will be used in our scenarios posts. We have considered that our users are either post-graduate student or professors at the University of Southampton. We described the academic interests, learning and research style and supervision style for each persona. Also, we have described that each user fit in which position of Rogers adoption curve ( as covered in the Social Enterprise lecture ). In addition, we specified the ‘type of user’ by describing the main goal of each persona from using MeetingOfMinds, we take benefits from the Flickr diagram discussed in the the Social Enterprise lecture to design each type which also covered in our earlier post ( please click here to view it ) in the Social Network section when we talked about how our project being a social network.
Persona [1]: Garkie
- Masters student at the University of Southampton, studying Web Technology.
- Home Country: China.
- Academic Interests: Machines Engineering, Artificial Intelligence and Ship’s Control Systems.
- Working Style: Garkei prefers to get the full instructions from professors, set with a timeline and have continuous meeting and frequent supports. She is more productive at the morning and loves working in the library.
- Position of Rogers Adoption Curve: Early Adopter.
- Garkie is socially forward and has higher social status. She believes that MeetingOfMinds is a good platform and she could take benefits from it. Hence, she has made the choice to join it.
- Type of User: Postgraduate (Taught Student) – finding best supervisor
- Garkie mainly uses MeetingOfMinds for finding the best partner (supervisor) for her Msc Thesis who have the same area of interests and learning style. She uses the feature of adding to my favorite list to add her favored professors to be updated about their new projects and activities.
Persona [2]: Stave
- iPhD student at the University of Southampton, studying Web Science.
- Home Country: Greece.
- Academic Interests: Data Mining, Linked Data, Semantic Web.
- Working Style: Stave prefers to begin research from big zone without following limited instructions. He prefers having monthly meeting with professors. He also likes working at the evening and sometime at the end of the day from his home.
- Position of Rogers Adoption Curve: Innovator.
- Stave is willing to take the risk of MeetingOfMinds failing, because he is interested in the content, has closest contact to scientific sources and interaction with other innovators.
- Type of User: Postgraduate (Researcher Student) – help other students
- Stave is very socially and like interchange the ideas and experiences with others. He knows what he exactly want, hence, he search through filtering to look for a professionals who best match his interests. Stave also uses MeetingOfMinds to get contacted with other postgraduate students who are in the same program or have the common area of interests to exchange experiences and ideas with them.
Persona [3]: John
- Academic Staff at the University of Southampton, Electronic and Computer Science.
- Home Country: UK.
- Academic Interests: Software Development, Machine Learning and Deep Learning.
- Supervision and Research Style: John prefers meeting frequently with his student to follow up with them. Also, he is very systematic and committed. He is contactable only through week days.
- Position of Rogers Adoption Curve: Early Adopter.
- John has very high social status and he is interested in the Social Academic Network. Thus, he thinks that MeetingOfMinds is a good platform for researchers. Therefore, he decided to join it.
- Type of User: Professor – Supervisor
- John is the academic researcher and he believes that finding a good and suitable research group members would have a great results. Thus, he is always try to be active in the platform by update his ( academic and contact information ) through his profile. Also, he is always check the notifications in regards of receiving new messages to be contacted with his students.
Finally, based on the six degrees of separation discussed in the Social Enterprise lecture, people can be connected to each other through the common friends between them which illustrate the concept of foaf and it will take 6 steps on average ( could be more or less ).