{Group Presentation

By Michael, Maggie and Kotryna

We chose the Palestinian boycott of Marks and Spencer by the Revolutionary Communist Group because its interesting and the conflict between Israel and Palestine is current, with the bombings of Gazza just months ago.

Event and why

6-8pm on Oxford Street, on the first Thursday of every month.

The boycott we reported on the 6th of November.

When

We looked at the RCG`s websites, and looked at pictures and videos of other protests and boycotts that the organisation had taken part of. We also looked up the organisation on Facebook and Twitter.

Beforehand

We planned to turn up early, and leave late. We also planned who was going to use which social media, and the tools we were going to use. Maggie and Kotryna used their phones, and Michael used an iPad borrowed from the university. Michael used Audioboom, thiinglinkand Flickr, Maggie used Vine and Audioboom, and Kotryna used Twitter and Instagram.

The plan

When we first got to the event, we struggled with finding the people from the RCG, but we quickly found members from the two other teams. After that, members of the RCG started showing up, and they made a stand with a huge banner outside the M&S store

What did you do first when you got to the event?

Kotryna was the social media editor, Michael was the web editor, and Maggie was the research editor

Michael and Maggie focused on interviews when they used Audiobooms, and by using Instagram, Vine and Flickr, we could easily capture special moments. Kotryna actively used Twitter and Instagram throughout the event. It worked alright, but we had some problems by uploading the material, and by tools

easily losing charge, which was frustrating.

Organising the website

The members of RCG were easy to identify, as they happily wanted to talk to us, and sometimes took breaks to shout things such as “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and calling M&S terrorists. We tried to speak to the manager at M&S, but we were quickly turned down in our attempt on interviewing him.

We interviewed almost every member of the Revolutionary Communist Group, those we didn’t interview said that they didn’t want to be. We made a few attempts of interviewing employees at M&S, but neither of them wanted to comment on the boycott. It felt unnatural to interview any of the people passing by, since most of them looked like they were in a rush, and seemed careless towards the boycott. We definitely got RCG`s perspective on the case; they were pretty much the only ones that wanted to talk to us, and they gave us their newspaper, and pins that they encouraged us to wear. But with only the perspective of RCG, we recognise our webpage and reporting of the event, may be biased.

Interviews

We created 5 pages on our website that are easy to navigate via links at the top of each page. They include: Home, About the event background info, live blog and About us. We learnt what pages to include through trial and error and thought that these display our content in the most coherent way.

Kotryna and Michael added photos to the gallery on the Home page and Michael added the intro.

The About the event page was completed by Michael, with info, a map and a thinglink.

The background info age was completed by Maggie with info, and a youtube video.

We all added content to the live blog and about us pages.

Website design

What we did well:

Uploading and editing content on Weebly

Thinking about what content should be on what page

Allocation of roles.

Reflection

Difficulties faced:

Uploading some content, especially on the day, with wi-fitrouble and battery trouble

Organisation of the group

What to improve:

Meeting as a group more

Communication and co-operation

Reflection

Yes – the assignment went by the plan.

Every member of the group managed to attend the event, actively participate and later on complete the assignment as a team.

Each of us had different roles and tasks in this project witch where completed great and with a fine team spirit !

Do you think this assignment went according to plan ?

We chose interesting and not too difficult event to cover

Every team member had to use different platforms and deliver different part of the work to the assignment, that way each of us could focus on our work and afterwards combine all the material to one team project

Ability to work as a team, doing some work at home individually, as well as completing some tasks in the University library

3 things that worked well in the assignment:

How to work as a team

How to live report an event

How to create a website based on the event, using different multimedia tools and platforms

3 things we have learned :

How to use multimedia tools and platforms more efficient

How to collect valuable information and get good interviews

How to improve the structure of the website

How to work better as a team

Skills we need to improve: