With October coming to an end and December right around the corner, our team has switched our focus to prototyping and coding to get the development of the app on the move. Since the start of the project, our foremost challenge has been finding content for the app. Content must come directly from Indigenous partners, and building relationships with these communities requires trust and takes time. Our struggle to find content has been defeating at times but throughout the project so far, we have learned a lot about relationship-building with Indigenous communities from our own experiences as well as from our project mentors. One thing we have learned is that in-person communication is much more powerful and effective. This made us all nervous at first because showing up in person to speak to people about our project was a bit nerve-wracking, but we trusted the advice from our mentors, and our experiences doing this have been positive so far. We’ve also learned the significance of being open and willing to share about yourself while building these relationships and this helps build trust and ensures the relationships goes both ways.
As we continue our efforts to find a partnership, we are working out a way that we can build infrastructure for the app so that information can be added to it as Indigenous communities are willing and ready to provide it. This has not been an easy task and we are working as a team on how we can work on the code without knowing exactly what is going to be included in the app. For this reason, we’ve started to lean on other public resources such as books to get a solid proof of concept that we can bring to Indigenous communities so that we have something to show and hopefully get advice. It is exciting for all of us to be working on the more technical side of this project, but this has also been challenging because none of us have used Flutter, the app development program we are using, nor have any of us coded using the Dart programming language before. This has been a learning experience and we are all eager to gain knowledge and technical skills from this project.
Despite the ongoing challenges of this project, our team remains motivated to tackle whatever comes our way. Our team dynamic remains strong and we do a great job of working together and supporting each other. We are looking forward to seeing what happens as we go full speed ahead on development over the coming weeks! Stay tuned…