This week has been a roller coaster of a week with different projects and Christmas workshop bookings,  and I can already see one of the main challenges for me personally with my project. My organisation is an entertainment and workshop company, and always busy with workshop and entertainment bookings. As well as MineMania, I am organising two after school clubs every week, a 10 Week Memory Cafe project, and writing a tender bid.  

To manage this and to make sure I can focus on MineMania I’m learning to step back from direct delivery, trust in my amazing team who do an excellent job, and devote a fixed time to day to day admin.  And schedule in MineMania work without any distraction.

I’m using Asana to keep track of all the different projects and at what stage each element is at, I want to look into other planning software but don’t want to end up down the wormhole and not actually get any work done.

This Week

I’m in the thinking and gathering information and people stage, and nailing how to communicate the project to the different stakeholders involved.

I’ve written a Community/Youth Group Proposal, to send to prospective beta testers and focus group who are interested, and would like more information  on joining the project and helping shape what we are creating. You can read it here.

I have made a shortlist of interview candidates for the server developer position, which begin Tuesday 26th September. I’m still accepting CV’s after this point due to the length of the project and mix of skills needed.

I’ve spoken with the Senior Lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton  Computer Science Dept, Herb Daly, who was really helpful and will identify some students who might be interested in applying to work on the project.

I’ve spoken with a local organisation, SEND Socials  who arranges lots of social activities and youth groups for children and young people with SEND, about working with me a beta testers/focus group.

I’ve  attended the first Power to Change Discovery Fund Meeting and met the other group who are on this journey as well. It’s all exciting! 

I’ve been working on how to break my idea down into no more than two simple sentences.  How does this sound?

Safeguarded, private, online Minecraft Youth Groups for community and youth groups working with children and young people with SEND. Hosted and done for you, with Common Rooms and Mini Games for different group members to meet and make new friendships.

I’ve been working on the safeguarding procedures for our regular weekly socials, and created a private online forum for parents and children to communicate with other members safely, privately and monitored.  This might be useful for the larger project.   I don’t promote communicating via Discord or other social media due to the ages and any other vulnerabilities that our players might have, so I’m trialling this forum as a safe way to communicate outside of Minecraft.

Hardware

Herb consulted with students on the suitability of the machine I looked at for the server, and they thought it might not be powerful enough for 200+ players, and to look at remaining with cloud hosting. Specs are:

Having looked at a lot of cloud hosting options, I’m coming back to the big thing to consider – ongoing cost.

Having a stand alone machine means we can expand without incurring more and more monthly subscription costs.

Until the server can be financially self sustainable, we need to be able to keep the costs as low as possible on an ongoing basis.

I am going discuss this more before financially committing but I’m considering starting with the standalone server and revisiting cloud hosting options once we have reached it’s capacity.

Fun things this week!

Updating the website with a new forum and server status page, I spent a really fun evening until around midnight with my daughter – she built the server status page from scratch, linking it with the server to pull  real time data of who is online, and I updated the website not only with the forum but a brand new Members Only  booking system.

We were both SHATTERED the next day. We both get massively and joyfully fixated on a project and in the zone though, and we can’t stop until it’s done.