The development of this idea was a very educational process as we canvassed and synthesized our individual points of views and passions to create a project plan that was cohesive while still being representative of our diverse interests and opinions. This process started with large scale ideas that we then had to mould and adapt to fit our timeframe, budget, and general abilities.
After brainstorming our ideas, we narrowed down our topic to one idea: how regional differences are reflected in the way a political party addresses particular regions while campaigning. We then had to determine how to design our project in the most appealing, efficient and accessible way to allow a voter to access the information we were trying to deliver. We chose the vehicle of a well-designed, user friendly, and informative interactive map to track the campaign stops of each party leader as well as what issues they addressed at each stop. The goal of this tracking is to determine where party leaders make certain announcements and address particular issues and whether their addresses differ based on the region they are visiting according to that region’s specific interests. Ultimately, we hope this tracking will allow us to assess each party’s major policy issues by evaluating their consistency across regions, and if there are instances of inconsistency, the extent to which any inconsistencies reflect the credibility of the leader in question and the strength of his or her party’s promises.
A challenge we encountered early on in this process was scope. Were we biting off more than we could chew only a few weeks out from the election? It became clear that we could not answer this question until we began tracking the campaign stops of the leaders and the issues they addressed at each location, and started to execute our vision to create a tangible version of something that only existed in our minds. This development process was very illuminating, and has taught me the importance of talking through ideas fully, exploring all perspectives, and accepting that sometimes you reach a point where you have done as much as you can theoretically and need to just begin to execute the practical part of a project with the understanding that you might have to make adjustments along the way.
This process has taught me how to kickstart a project, moving from the initial idea, to brainstorming how we will bring that idea to life, to finally executing our vision.