Community Management + Ethnography -- Team Meeting Notes!

[alberto]

Good work everyone!

@amelia

We’ll create a new tag (like ‘ethno-attention’ or ‘ethno-hot’) for the community managers to use when they want us to code something right away/with priority.

CMs (like all users) can configure their own work environment so as to manage their attention across different classes of topics. For example, in Discourse they could:

• Watch topics with the ethno-hot tag.
• Keep a tab open at https://edgeryders.eu/tag/ethno-hot
• Direct the RSS feed of the tag onto their feed reader, if they are still into reading blogs that way ( https://edgeryders.eu/tag/ethno-hot.rss)

@amelia

A good way of structuring future events and questions is to look at central nodes in the SSNA and go one adjacent to the “big” buzzy topics.

Very cool idea, even potentially experimentable (in a proper, controlled, scientific way, I mean. Not by us, we would need proper experimental economists, but…).

@amelia

Interviews are too long and are hard to both code and engage with.

Coming from a group of ethnographers, this is surprising! I thought coding interviews in which informants ramble and digress was a core practice. What exactly are you seeing?

@amelia

Summary posts and posts in general have too many topics, making them uncodeable.

I don’t think summary posts were ever meant to be coded, they are secondary material. If they generate further discussion, that discussion is potentially valuable for coding. Are they generating discussion? My impression is that in generally no, they are not, but I could be wrong.

“Posts in general” => What do you mean? We have no control on what people in the community post.

@amelia

Summaries of events should also be shorter, and focused on a limited range of themes (and/or broken up into multiple posts).

Can you make examples of “good” and “too long” event summaries? I ask because I wrote one myself. It is indeed quite long (almost 3K words), but I think it is reasonably well written: at the high range of length for a blog post, broken down into individual results, plenty of quotes. As it encodes collective work, it can not be as compact as me speaking my own mind and using my own language (for a fairly complex topic that would be 1.3 to 1.6 K words for me). That post would be easy to break down by result, coming down to 5 posts. But, I feel, that would not do justice to its primary purpose, which was to return something to participants, and generate a round of further discussion. Which it did: 50 posts in the topic by 12 users. Do you consider this a good or a bad example?