Experimonth: Mood is trucking along and I thought in celebration of our 10,000th mood rating data point collected, I’d let folks over here at Useum know how things have progressed.

Technical difficulties were rife in the beginning.  I’ve learned a lot about SMS and the infrastructure that supports our ability to send and receive the 300 text messages for each participant over the course of a month.  I still don’t really understand how everything’s connected, but I do know enough to do some things differently next time (like getting a short code so that carriers don’t reject our text messages due to spam filters).

This blog is definitely a team effort.  We have three co-hosts for the Experimonth: myself + the researcher + an exhibit developer and a web developer who’s handling all the bugs and feature requests.  We’re still working out the kinks in getting posts reviewed for scientific accuracy (something I’m not used to in the kind of writing I typically do), and no combination of project management software (we’re currently shuffling between Flow, Dropbox and Google Docs) + email + in person meetings has proven to fit just right yet.  

Traffic to the site has decreased as the month’s gone on, though mood rating compliancy is till through the roof at 80%+.  I’ve got some new graphs and features planned that I hope will re-energize participants to visit the site throughout the latter two weeks.

My favorite part of the month so far is reading comments from the participants.  I’m floored at how forthright folks are about their own life and experimonth experience.  I hope we get a good turnout at our wrap-up event so that I can meet these creative and thoughtful people in person.  

More soon!