The Ecole Nationale Supérieure supports applied research projects in a wide range of fields, particularly in cognitive science and data science. The Bunka project, led by the Computational Cultural Sciences team, aims to map and quantify the distribution of cultural representations (beliefs, opinions, preferences, etc.) using natural language processing and machine learning tools.
The Bunka project team wanted to create a first version (Minimum Viable Product) of an application using their data science technologies, and needed a complete team of designers and developers to create a web application. No technical or product resources existed in-house, so the members of the collectives had to start from scratch for this mission.
The advisors on the Collective.work team were quick to see the need for high-caliber developers capable of adapting to the fast-changing context of an early-stage startup. In particular, the Citadel collective seemed to us to be the perfect candidate for the development part of the project, as some of its members had themselves been startup founders and were therefore familiar with the originality of the MVP construction process.
Three developers and a CTO from the Citadel collective worked on the project, starting with the integration of data science models developed by Bunka on APIs. At the same time, we worked with the customer to provide resources in Product Design, user research and UX/UI, so that the application developed would be as relevant as possible for future users. On the Product Design side, it was Yohann from the QYQV collective who was able to propose a mission to clear the way for the best possible development direction.
It was therefore a consortium of two collectives who worked on the mission with Bunka, to ensure the best possible skills for the Ecole Nationale Supérieur and that the project was carried out in the best possible conditions.
In less than a few days, the Bunka team was able to find a complete team or squad to create a web application from scratch. The design mission enabled us to lay the foundations of the MVP's user experience and to better direct development.
At the same time, the team of very high-level front-end and back-end developers deployed on the mission enabled us to finalize this first project with Bunka in excellent conditions, and to deliver an MVP whose functional and design characteristics exceeded the customer's expectations.