Terms to be used
Dear @Alberto , @Noemi , @Federico and all,
I think that the theoretical background is a complicate issue.
I don’t know if other colleagues agree in assuming my 2 +1 proposed working hypothesis. In the positive case, we should find the theoretical background and use the corresponding language. From your (Alberto’s) feedback I understand that your specific background cannot help for the hypotheses 1 and 2. But maybe you could give some ideas on the +1, that is a strong Edgeryders’ point and the one that should make our proposal unique: would it possible?
In this framework, (for everybody) a very specific, but for me urgent question
Having a digital space of possibility, what could be the most general term to name everything happens in it?
Until now I referred to “conversations” (and I like this term), but I don’t think that everything that happens there can be defined a conversation. In the OpenCare website, when somebody upload a case, this is called a “story”: is this a term usable by us, with some theoretical background? Other times other terms are used, as texts, interactions, behaviours, … … …
Waiting for your feedbacks, here a naïf proposal (it is naïf because I have not seriously verified the terms I will use - I just invented them for the sake of going on in our conversation):
OpnCare is a care-oriented digital space where a constellation of care-oriented events happens. These events have different characteristics. In my understanding they could be roughly divided in this way:
- indirect on-line encounters (up-loading a post or a story - reading a post or a story)
- direct on-line encounters (direct interaction between two people online)
- online conversations for knowledge (sequence of interactions aiming at getting information online)
- online conversations for action (sequence of interactions aiming at doing something together online)
- online/insite conversations for action (sequence of interactions aiming at doing something together online and in the physical world)
It is important to observe that these categories are fluid: they can evolve, from one to the others. Therefore, if today we would observe them in the website and register them, this would only be a frame of a movie. It would give an idea of the state of things at this given moment, but we know that everything will change immediately after that.
This observation permits me also to give an answer to the@Noemi point on which kind of examples do we want to consider. In my view, beyond the fact the events 4 and 5, at the moment, are not so many and not so strong, I think that, in any case, it would be better to consider all the kinds of events to observe their evolutions (and what made this evolution possible). Therefore, what we should explore is:
- when and how events evolve from 1 to 2 and then to 3; when they become 4, and when and how some of them evolve in 5, moving from the digital space to the hybrid, digital/physical space.
- What have been the explicit or implicit affordances that made the different events happen and, in case, evolve from 1 to 5.
On the other hand, we should better understand what the OpenCare space really is and how it works. Again, my naïf interpretation is that it is space of possibilities, favorable for different oriented events to happen and – possibly – evolve towards “doing together”. I.e. towards conversations for action in the hybrid digital-physical space.
If this proposed conceptualization makes sense, we should find criteria to analyze not only the examples of different kinds of events, but also our OpnCare space, considered as a space of possibilities
Do we have the possibility to do it (if by chance you will not have already done it)?