The engagement and community management teams are doing a stellar job of eliciting interesting content. This phase of the work implied doing so via a plurality of channels: no longer just the online platform, which people find via web search or social media, but also targeted exchanges like interviews and physical events.
Our main process for acquiring informed consent to participating in research goes through a consent funnel. This is a little piece of code that will not let users of edgeryders.eu post unless they answer correctly to some simple questions, aimed at making sure they do not harm themselves by sharing information that should be confidential. This was received well by the evaluators of our proposal, and it continues to be in place. However, these new channels for acquiring content do not go through the usual process of signing up for an Edgeryders account and then posting, so they do not go through the consent funnel either.
There seem to be three of them:
- Physical events. In the case of this one (not a POPREBEL one), @nadia explained what the event was for at the very beginning; to protect people’s privacy, participants were asked not to take pictures and to respect Chatham House rules.
- Interviews. I imagine there are email exchanges where people are asked to be interviewed, they consent etc.
- Forms for pre-signup posting. @hugi has sketched this process here.
- Others?
I would like to document our process for acquiring informed consent in each of these cases. Once this is done, I will get in touch with our ethics advisors (Alberto Alemanno for POPREBEL) and request their advice. I have started a wiki to collect this information. It lives on the platform, rather than in a ad hoc document, because I think it should be part of every Edgeryders project.
Can you please help me to do that, @noemi, @nadia, @natalia_skoczylas, who else?
Also ping @Richard.