Project Planning

The group met today to discuss and work on the project plan that will need to be completed in a couple of weeks time. We started off by revisiting our objective and strategy trees from the workshop from last week and confirmed that the main objective and strategy we will be focusing on is achieving a self-sufficient water supply and management process for the Rock Village project. 

We then began to analyse the components of our project plan which will involve: 

• Background
• Beneficiaries 
• Monitoring objectives
• Implementation
• Risk analysis and risk management; and
• Budget 

It was a productive meeting and we have made a solid start in our project plan. Desmond has already begun significant research of the current water sourcing and supply situation  of Lebanon and it has provided an excellent foundation for the group to begin the task ahead of us. 

In other preliminary research, it was discovered that there are other NGOs in Lebanon with projects that share some of our more general aims and goals, and we plan to investigate further about these other projects to establish whether there are any elements which will be useful to our own research. 

Conveniently, one of our group members will be visiting Lebanon very soon and will be setting aside some time to meet representatives of the Al-Amal Institute, and so between now and when she leaves we endeavour to brainstorm a set of questions for the organisation, and in particularly the current plans and goals for implementation as well as a clearer indication of what they wish to achieve in the social context of the project. 

At the conclusion of this meeting, I would be confident to say the group has a relatively clear idea of where our research will be heading towards this semester and that we all look forward to providing worthwhile research towards the eventual implementation of this project! 

Best, 

RVG2013

Hard at work, with our objective and strategy trees providing inspiration.

Final Project Plan

After our group met on both the 31th of January and the 7th of February we are now ready with the project plan. The project plan contains a lot of information of both the project as a whole as well as detailed information on deadlines etc. I will discuss the most important points of the project plan.

First of all could be mentioned that we have agreed on going on a field trip to the site between 6-11.4. All group members are coming except Susanna who unfortunately is on another trip at that moment. We will now be looking into flight tickets at those dates. Other relevant dates are some deadlines about our project.We have decided that the initial research should be ready 29.2. This means that everyone should be able to present some results that they have come up with. The final deadline for the research is 31.3, this means that we should already have some concepts and options about the energy solution for Rock Village. This includes cost analysis and dimensioning of the alternative methods.

We have decided to give everyone some areas of responsibility. This doesn´t mean that everyone will be working alone with their own projects but this way it will be easier to proceed with the project. Axel will be looking into solar energy solutions, Panu into the option of using biomass as energy source and Susanna will go deeper into the wind energy possibilities. Hossam will be responsible for finding sustainable building materials and Susa will be in charge of investigating the socio-economic opportunities in Lebanon. Susa will also be responsible for the communication.

Our group will now continue on the research and hopefully will we come up with some sustainable energy solutions for Rock Village!

Meeting on the 30th January 2012

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We met on the 30th January at the Aalto University Design Factory Studio in order to proceed with our project plan. Our first aim was to think about the goals of our project; what is it all about and why are we doing this? We listed our first insights from last week and came to a common understanding about the meaning and objectives of our Rock Village project. The goals are to be defined during the way, but our keywords included phrases like sustainable energy, people with special needs and the importance of implementation phases and modularity.

We were also discussing about the main stakeholders of the project and our own role and ambitions. Who is the client? Who are we? Who are the other main stakeholders? And what are the needs and aims of these stakeholders? We identified as our main stakeholders the future inhabitants of Rock Village, deprived communities, NGOs (Al-Amal Institute for the disabled), ourselves, governments, donors and sponsors.

We came up with some important questions that we need to find out for our project plan. We were thinking about the site for the village; why has it been chosen and what does it mean for the planning? What is the estimated energy consumption of the village and how is it divided during the day? Who are the future inhabitants of the village, is there some special needs we should take into consideration? And more practical questions like can we read the Lebanese law in English somewhere online?

We decided to have a new meeting on the 31st January and finalize our project plan with more defined goals, stakeholders etc.

Meeting on the 24th January

Meeting on the 24th January

First meeting was held on Tuesday 24th January at Architectural Department room AS0. All group members were present. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss about the case in general and to get started with the project plan.

In the beginning of the meeting we briefly got through the main points of the material we were given the day before. We also discussed about communication methods (e-mail between group members and Facebook group to communicate with other Rock Village project people) and document sharing channels (folder in Optima and e-mail).

Here is a list of the topics discussed during the meeting and also names of the persons responsible to do some background research about the topic for the next meeting:

•    Wind Charts (Susanna)
•    Temperature (Axel)
•    Solar radiation (Axel)
•    How much Biogas could be produced per day (Panu)
•    Local companies for photo voltage units (agency..)
•    Alternative sustainable building material& appliances (Hossam)
•    Sewer treatment/network/ (Panu)
•    Project Plan proposal& Final product (Report, Concept, Dwg???) (Susa)
•    Minutes of meeting (Susanna)

Next meeting was decided to be held on 30th January after the lecture.