Brainstorming in eClub

We had a discussion about what to do in this run of the eClub about two weeks ago. One of three requests was to organize a brainstorming session. Let’s do it today. Brainstorming theme is: web applications. Jan Matejka will have short presentation about emotional and social intelligence and just after he will help us with brainstorming. We are relatively large group, which may generate a lot of ideas. To enable easy and quick idea entry I have prepared a simple entry form on our web. Each idea will be labeled with a name to allow add comments or further suggestion. The author can edit the original idea. All ideas, comments or suggestions will be collected in a read-only spreadsheet. I leave the idea entry form and the spreadsheet open even after today meeting to let you think about them. I hope, the preferable way of generating an interesting idea is to stand up and shout ... Remember we are not going to do any evaluation during the session. The main purpose of brainstorming is to generate weird ideas and then extract the best essence.

Last time I have also asked who is going to enter the competition for the best projects. I saw a decent number of hands. This is a signal to go ahead. What are we going to compete for? It will be a scholarship 5-15k CZK per month for 3-5 month in the summer semester. We will award the first three teams. The winning teams will be selected by an international jury after presentation just before Christmas. You will also win an experienced mentor, who will help you turning your idea to a viable product.  We will organize monthly meetings between you, your mentor and the representative of CTU Media Lab Foundation to evaluate the progress. The meeting may decide to stop the funding in case of a poor performance. The presentation tryout is next week. Get on stage, you’ll get a valuable feedback before presenting in front of the jury. All of you intending to enter the competition register in, please. The registration link is on our home page.

What are the rules? The entering team must have at least two members and one of them must be a university student (PhD students are OK too) in the Czech Republic in the academic year 2011/12. Members who are not students are not eligible for scholarship. We also have prepared a simple summary how to present on our web pages or you can have a look at a presentation by Lucie from last year to understand what is the trick.

I have created also the “Interesting links” page with some good startup know-how sites. At the button of the page is a comment window. Use it to suggest your favorite links, please. You can also send me a suggestion by email. Let’s try to select the best links.

Prepare for nest week presentations, join us for today brainstorming!