Spektrym - a social network for studying
Spektrym founders, from front: Ashley Elder, Cody Carnachan and Edward McKnight at the Spektrym headquarters. Photo Jay Boreham.Manukau Courier, 10 October 2011
Cody Carnachan, Edward McKnight, Ashley Elder, Fraser Killip, and Patrick Sun
Dilworth School
Last year, Dilworth School boarding students Cody Carnachan, Edward McKnight, Ashley Elder, Fraser Killip and Patrick Sun created Spektrym – a highly successful award-winning nationwide social network to support senior study in New Zealand secondary schools.
On the site, users post a question and receive answers from other users in the form of comments similar to an online forum. Edward McKnight explains that Spektrym offers far more useful and in-depth information than a simple Google search or online forum however.
"You can get basic definitions of things on the internet but Spektrym is more useful for discussion. For example, an economics student might post 'If the government decreased the top tax rate and this is the effect on income distribution, is this a good or bad thing?', and the resulting discussion may well turn out to be really useful."
Being New Zealand based, Spektrym also provides access to a very specific knowledge base for its users. Edward uses the example of a graphics student posting a design online for feedback.
"If they asked 'How can I improve this graphic?' on a forum they might get useful feedback from an artist's perspective," Edward explains. "But if they asked 'How can I improve this to get excellence in NCEA?' then that's a very different question, and they are looking for people who understand their subject as it is being taught right now at NCEA and the criteria required for that. Our hope is that our users will be 'on the same page' and have similar knowledge, and that is what we envisioned as Spektrym's true value."
A user-moderated point system also adds another level of legitimacy to the information on the site. These points are accumulated through either starting a useful discussion thread, or by posting an answer that other users find helpful.
"Each user's profile shows their total accumulated points, so people could decide 'this person has a lot of points, so their comments are probably more trustworthy," Edward explains.
How Spektrym was developed
Screenshot from the Spektrym site. Spektrym's chief coder Cody Carnachan explains that the initial idea for Spektrym came from the needs of a few scholarship students boarding at Dilworth.
"Dilworth is quite small and there weren't many people doing the Scholarships exams, so when the teacher went home there was no one to talk about it with. So we thought we could connect people of the same ability doing a Scholarship in a similar subject but from different schools and cities. It then evolved to being not just for Scholarships but for everyone."
To gauge student interest and get ideas for a potential site, the Spektrym team ran focus groups at Dilworth and at the nearby Diocesan school for girls. They also looked into existing sites with a similar focus and found that most of these either focussed on university-level programmes or were internal systems limited to within one school.
"There weren't many sites that helped people link over large distances, so if you wanted to do something different to the rest of your school, you would have no one to talk to about it," Cody says. "And that's where the whole social network aspect comes in – if you are in Auckland you can talk to someone in Invercargill and get help or discuss something."
In May 2011, the Spektrym idea won the University of Auckland's Spark Ideas Challenge. As well as a $1,000 cash prize, this win gave the team invaluable access to advice from business mentors throughout the project's development.
The team then spent a week during the holidays developing the Spektrym idea in Cody's garage before purchasing their server and making the site live in August 2011.
As the success of any social network depends largely on the people using it, the team had to attract a user base as quickly as possible. Edward's responsibility within the team was to liaise with the staff of schools around the country to convince them of the site's potential value to students.
"I ended up talking to about 20 DPs and principals as well as the tech staff in each school – they were all very keen for their students to use it as it was a free resource."
Responses to Spektrym were very positive from staff and students and by early 2012 the site had around 600 users from around the country.
Challenges
Screenshot from the Spektrym site. As the Spektrym project was entirely extra-curricular, time management was a priority for the team.
"Four of us were at high school and Edward was at university, so balancing our time between studying and Spektrym was a challenge," Cody says.
This required a high degree of communication between the Spektrym members.
"Most of us were at boarding school so we could usually communicate in person, but we also used email and, funnily enough, Facebook to communicate and make sure everyone was up to speed with what we were doing. So if something needed fixing I could tell another member and he would work on it when he had time."
The technical challenges of creating the site were also significant. "We wrote the whole site by hand in HTML and considering that we are all self-taught there has been a lot of learning to do when setting up things we had never done before," Cody says.
An ongoing challenge has been adapting Spektrym to work with the numerous versions of Internet Explorer used in many New Zealand schools. This required several weeks of patient work ensuring that all of Spektrym's features would be supported in each version of Internet Explorer so that the site would function for as many users as possible.
Social networks also require more than just technical expertise but a good understanding of the social factors that influence people's online activity.
"There is a lot of social science and economics involved in this. It's not as simple as The Social Network movie about Facebook, where you make a site and people come to it. Just telling people it will be useful won't get them on, you have to get them on first, and then show them its usefulness," Edward says.
Maintaining their users and attracting more over time is another ongoing challenge for the Spektrym team.
"It's a generalisation, but young people tend to do what their friends do and may not go to the site just because it's a good resource – there has to be other reasons to go there. And we have spent a lot of time throwing ideas around, trying to figure that out."
Through the development and monitoring of Spektrym, the team have gained knowledge about how people work when using the Spektrym site. The points system has been one particular area that has changed over time.
"We found that users didn't like the philosophy of being able to dislike someone's comment, the idea being that anyone can ask even basic questions without feeling stupid for posting. So that started discussion about how a user moderated site works; you don't want a dislike system, but then how do you determine what's valuable or not?" Edwards explains. "So those are the discussions we have between what you put into place technically, and the desired social effect."
What next
As Spektrym is mostly used towards the end of the year for study purposes, it is in many ways a 'seasonal' website. This makes the mid-year an excellent time for the Spektrym team to redesign any aspects of the site they feel could be improved.
"After looking at where the team is at now, personally, and an analysis of what worked and didn't work last year, we have decided that Spektrym must go through a radical design, and functionality development," Edward says. "The Year 13s we reached last year are at university now, so after the development it will be targeted at university students, and aim to be a hub of functions for the students' academic, and campus life. The social study network (online collaborative learning tool) will still be a core function of the new network.
The Spektrym relaunch is planned for the middle of Term 3, 2012 – check it out then at spektrym.co.nz
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