Fear and Loathing in SICamp

“Does that look like a decimated tree to you?”

So, things get tense on day two. The pressure has compacted our free-form open collective into a brutal presentation-perfecting hive mind. Intensity etched into the brows of the dev team, alpha-waves resonating from the brains of the creatives, you can almost smell the determination.

The presentation is taking form as a friendly letter to SICamp, and everyone’s working really hard to get the formatting just right (apart from the devs, who have more pressing matters at hand).

PostPost is looking super pretty now, and neat touches (like autocomplete) are raining down from the dev gods. There’s a feeling of quiet confidence about the team that we’re going to get this done, and done well.

Postal is dead. Long live PostPost!

“The less fluffy we are, the more credible we seem”

A lot can change in a day at SICamp.

Postal is now….  PostPost!  (as in after Post)

Smart eh?

(Major props to the extremely clever people of Glove Puppet for coming up with such a great name for us!)

It’s been all go at SICamp today and everyone’s been working flat-out to get PostPost working for tomorrow.  Our elite programming squad are taking no prisoners and already have the bare bones of the website up and ready for fleshing out tomorrow.  Lots of super sexy touches have already been implemented – we’ve already got OpenID integration for instance – and the rest of tonight is being dedicated to turning PostPost into a fully rounded application. The power of Rails is with them.

Serious progress has also been made towards turning PostPost into a financially sustainable project. Current thinking is to secure local authority funding on the basis of the waste reduction aspect of the service.

Finally, the design team has been scribbling away furiously, and logo ideas are coming thick and fast. You can have a look at some of their efforts so far, and check out pictures of the whole beautiful team by clicking on the link at the bottom of this post.

http://flickr.com/photos/laurajo/3086670219/in/set-72157610747236963

Hello from Postal

Welcome to the Postal development blog!

Postal is a service that makes stopping junk mail through your letterbox as simple as blocking spam in your inbox. It provides a convenient way for users to manage their interactions with companies, and incentives for marketers to switch to greener methods of communication.

Postal is currently being fleshed out in Social Innovation Camp, a crazy weekend meetup of code warriors, design ninjas and world changers. Between us we’ve got 48 hours to mash together a working prototype of the website, and convince a panel of judges that our idea has the best potential.

At stake? £2000, mentoring, and 10 days of consultancy from Headshift, a leading social computing consultancy; all the nourishment an embryonic social enterprise needs to grow into something that can make a real impact.

Over the course of SICamp we’ll be documenting the development process and noting our yays and arghs, so make sure to check back frequently for bleeding edge news on Postal.