Apps for America 2: Lessons Learned During Speedy Application Development!

Since many of us are involved in campaign-focused work that requires rapid turn-around, I wanted to share some lessons from a recent internal project we delivered in 4 weeks for the "Apps for America 2" contest.

(Our application, DataMasher, placed in the top 3 (out of 47), so by they way, I'd appreciate your vote so we can be pushed to #1.)

First some background: The contest was created by Sunlight Labs to celebrate and publicize data.gov, a new resource for federal government data. We were given 11 weeks to work on it, and we actually completed the entire application in 4 weeks from kickoff to launch, in less than 200 hours. We spent a few weeks brainstorming in June, but the bulk of our work happened during the last 4 weeks. At times we weren't sure we would finish in time, but we really believed in our idea to make government data usable, visual, and accessible. So, we persevered!

Here's are a few lessons we captured that should be applicable to similar projects:

1. Keep the team small. Our team was only 5 people - a Senior Advisor, a Project Manager, a Tech Lead, a Developer, and an Information Architect/Designer. This focused the scope and increased our overall productivity.
2. Choose a few pieces of key functionality and ROCK them! Although the possibilities were/are endless with DataMasher.org, we tempered our expectations and were practical with our decisions. We wanted to ensure that the features we built into the site worked really well and that we'd have time to test and tweak. We also wanted to ensure that the site would be flexible enough for growth in the future. There were times we had to turn down great ideas because we weren't sure we'd nail them in the time we had left, but we kept a running tally of enhancements to develop in the future, and continue to seek out that feedback from users (including you!).
3. Leverage user-generated content whenever possible and appropriate: many heads are better than one! DataMasher is by "the people" and "for the people". We wanted the site to be about the users and their data, and most importantly, the ways in which users could manipulate that data to be relevant. Letting people create their own mashups, rank and rate them, add comments, and upload new data sets was critical to our overall goal.
4. Be flexible and keep moving - don't get caught up in the churn and debate, make decisions! If we had spent a lot of time planning and scoping, we never would have entered into development. We chose basic goals, met weekly to discuss progress and opportunities, and were always willing to both succeed and fail, and most importantly, learn.

The project was a ton of fun to work on, if not a lot of work.

I hope these insights are helpful. Once again, if you wish to vote for DataMasher, here's how.