As we moved into November, the mid-year conference quickly came upon us. For many of us at INSPIRE it was our first experience getting to show off something cool we did to industry professionals and our peers. Leading up to this event, our team was very scared as we were unsure what information we could share about the cool things we had been working on, as well as general nerves around giving a public presentation to so many intelligent and older individuals. The experience was amazing, the team worked really hard on our presentation and public speaking beforehand and we were all super proud to have overcome our fears and nerves and present in front of some amazing individuals. At this conference we were able to unveil what was at the time, a hopeful pivot for us. The hope was for us to be able to work with four students from Tuktoyaktuk to build the MVP centered around their Nation. That dream has become a reality for us as their community and parents have consented! We have been meeting with the students twice a week to work to get to know them as people and become friends. They have expressed interest in learning about design so we are hoping to be able to mentor them and pass down what we know while doing this project alongside them. As we have spent more time going back and forth with them, their enthusiasm and passion for the project has really shown through increased levels of engagement, as well as the ideas they bring to us and the involvement of design.
In terms of ourselves in the project, Team Honey has been focused on prototyping an activity to go inside the application, and fixing bugs in the registration and the missing verification fields. We have also had the pleasure of working with Aarjan from INSPIRE Nepal. He was able to help us understand databases better and gain practical knowledge instead of just purely theoretical so we are hoping to have that implemented at the end of the next sprint. Right now we are feeling super hopeful and motivated but also a little burnt out! We think the weight of the project and the intensity of it is starting to get to us a bit so we are exploring options to keep us fresh. Some ideas we had were to move all our meetings to one day and to try a four day workweek going 10 hours a day so that we can have Fridays off to tend to our personal lives and responsibilities. We will be talking about that in our next reflection so stay tuned!