One area I have found fascinating is all the politics and structure of the international organizations that we have interacted with. While I understand that not everyone enjoys the political science (especially on a trip dedicated to Data and Computer Science), the humanities part of me is super excited to learn more on different ways to organize and govern people. Like what the first speaker at NATO said, at the international level there is no higher power making the rules and punishes those who break them. At the end of the day, there has to be trust between different parties to bring them together and move forward as such. The speaker on Tuesday (May 21st) who described the structure of the EU was super interesting, not only because he was a great presenter, but also because he discussed this interesting organization that differs from the United States in many ways but strives to recreate a lot of what makes our country great. As a result, they came up with their own system and own ideals on how that system should work, which is fun to compare and contrast to the government we live under most of the time. I think this really demonstrates that there is more than one way to solve a problem, especially a problem as hard as managing a country.
Building on that, NATO was awesome. Walking in next to a piece of both the twin towers and the Berlin Wall just creates this powerful reminder on why that organization exists and what it stands for (and in front of). The speakers follow what I said above, where the content was interesting to me from that poly-sci angle, as well as the technical one. I was unaware of how large the Russian disinformation machine was for example, which the EEAS speaker really demonstrated.
Stepping away from the technical side, exploring Bruges (and other areas of Belgium) was just al around amazing. It was a long day, but I loved every moment of it between exploring different areas, beautiful architecture, and unique foods. Having the ability to take a train somewhere was such a weird experience to my American brain (who was already amazed by the T when I came to Boston).
My contributions to the project over the last week have been doing most of the heavy lifting for the blog and some of the deliverable work. While I certainly cannot take all of the credit for the blog (especially since it was so easy to deploy thanks to the professor’s spectacular preparation), I did get it live and public, as well as configured to match the theme and customized for team Waffle. In addition, I spent a good chunk of time searching through datasets in order to help narrow down our idea. While we quickly knew what sectors / fields we wished to build around, it took some time to hammer out the details as well as figure out wha the actual app was about. In order to get that idea down, I spent plenty of time with the group ideating as well as talking to the professors in order to help workshop ideas around the project requirements. Finally, I wrote up the project description as well as data source and helped give some guidance around what the User Personas and fundamental questions would be.