Notes from Op3nCare community call 18/4

Workspaces OpenCare
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Present: @eirinimal @alberto, @alessandro_contini @rossana_torri @moushira @noemi @patrick_andrews @costantino, Silvia

Agenda for the call:

1. Alberto’s Big Picture for Open Care Year 1: we need to collectively contribute to a post publicly outlining our work this year. If no one wants to do it, Alberto volunteers to write it

Related topic here: Documentation.

Even from last weeks call we discussed some of the constraints in bringing stories from the very ground (In Milano) online and the barriers to participation.

Alberto: It is worrying that documentation is perceived as hard to get, as we wrote it in the proposal and now have to execute.

Rossana: We are waiting to hear from people we are engaging and who would be more comfortable to tell us things that may be private. On the 4th of May we are starting activities of co-design with Milano communities and it would be a better time to collect stories. Also, video operator needs time to process the material etc.

Costa: we are not active on the website, but we will as soon as we have confirmation from the community and partners we engage.

The offline activities are not aligned at the moment with online activities.

Our 1 hour events are not enough to onboard them - Milano events are not conversations yet, they go one way. These activities are more of a warmup, our hope is to get their attention in the co-design sessions.

Eirini: I know of this EU funded project (crappy UX> sorry). http://www.innovvoice.com/ it’s platform where you can post your challenge/problem and then receive comments and collaborate further on the develpment of some projects (the hacking @alessandro). quite familiar idea (crowdsourcing innovation). but this is what you are actually proposing as far as I understand maybe take some ideas from those guys in order to facilitate this sharing and co-creating

2. Costa & Co. proposal for a new Open Care landing page (complementary to the one we have now)

A very hard project because it is a meta-project: we strive not to build something, but first understand what is the right approach to solving a problem.

We propose a new landing page above the content and landing pages already there. A one page website - very simple and clear and explain OpenCare in one minute to anyone. Link to proper resources so people can get more involved. Hosted outside of edgeryders.eu .

Example: https://openideo.com/

Alessandro: user story example “If I’m a developer and want to dig right into the code - I should be able to access the github rep immediately”

Needs to answer key questions: What is OpenCare? How can I find more info? Who is doing it?

Tools have to be as simple as possible.

WeMake are preparing a clear HowTo guide mapping the environment of relevant projects in the Care field (DYI, Maker world). Should speak to people who are not accustomed to online tools, but also the more skilled in using Internet tools.

the reason of a landing page

  • this is a redirect, that helps people find relevant information, and we aren't creating a new destination.
  • the "elevator pitch" is hard to get
  • it is hard to find answers to these questions:
    • what is opencare?
    • how do I get involved?
    • who is doing it?

landing page design criteria

  • it shows in a brief intuitive way what the project is and it redirects to online spaces of the project
  • it will answer these questions:
    • what is opencare?
    • how do I get involved?
    • where can I find more info?
    • who is doing it?
  • picture
  • statement that describes the project
  • call to action button: share your story
  • call to action links:
    • opencare community page
    • opencare research page
    • (github repo)
    • (youtube channels)
  • twitter feed
  • partners logos

to do & roadmap

  • we'll use github pages (as a start using WeMake organization page)
  • the repo can later be transfered to Opencare organization page on github
  • we have a nice template (similar to OpenIdeo)
  • we'll post it on the research page and we'll manage the issues using the repo issue un github
  • only in english for now (a simple page is easier to be translated)
  • before the next community hangout will be publish and shared on the research page

Alberto, Patrick, Noemi were OKish with building a new page, and paging here @nadia for input too. Advantages: removes the technical constraints imposed by Drupal. Disadvantages: Content Experiments cannot be used – testing of comparative performances of different landing pages impossible. One more thing that can break and needs maintenance. Edgeryders does not take responsibility for web pages outside of its website.

This was about it. Everyone, let us know what you think as we’re collecting input before and after each meeting, so that we save some time (one hour is not enough to get everyone’s opinions on topics).

Next call is on Monday, 16:30 CET. (check the Meetups page for updated event)

PS @eirinimal can you please re-post the link to the online room we will be using and any other useful info? I will make sure to include it in the event page. Thanks so much, and again, let us know if this conversation made sense to you at all :slight_smile:

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OpenCare landing page

@costantino / @zoescope / @cristina_martellosio / @markomanka / @massimo_micucci / @luciascopelliti / @rossana_torri / @lakomaa / @melancon /@alberto / @nadia /@noemi / @moushira

Hello everyone,

It’s a shame I missed this community call, because, ahem, well… I starting creating an OpenCare landing page myself. I developed it recently to see what and how we could do to provide info on the project to the public.

I had hoped to present it to you very soon, once its layout would have been done for good - but since you mention it, why not discussing it right now and see how we can go.

The page has some of the criteria you listed so far, and can still be developed. It is still under construction (need to add a footer with all credits / logos etc. for example), but the structure and the pages are done. Every information you see on the pages are excerpts from OpenCare’s Description of Action (Annex 1 GA).

You can visit it here: https://www.labri.fr/perso/lchiodel/opencare/

It is a Wordpress-based website, which I did with my very modest means.

I share it so that we may either further use it and develop it at a higher level or get inspired from it.

For now it is hosted on my personal website at the University of Bordeaux, but the website and its back office can be transfered to another server anytime.

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:slight_smile:

Hi @lucechiodelliub, thanks for sharing your work with us. So it seems we have a bunch of designer heads around :slight_smile:

Myself, I am not one, so I basically welcome all these proposals if you think they speak better to the communities we have to engage. What’s important is that they link to the conversation website on edgeryders and attempt to bring people in, so that we’re not putting too much effort in informative materials, but keep focusing on their engagement function. Of course, engagement can mean different things to us partners. The way I see OpenCare is that we don’t need to speak to a general “public”, there is no public. There are people who could be community members, contributors etc, and landing pages should speak to them. The way we quantify online engagement is by site visits and conversion into online activity posts and comments. One thing proposed at the call was to test these pages and measure the results after some time.

Anyway, hope you guys can agree on this.

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The major issue

I totally agree with Noemi. The most important issue should be maximize the process of “semplification” of EdgeRyders’ pages. I’m young and I’ve grown up posting all kind of things on several web forum but I have to admit that EdgeRyders platform is very very confusing. Moreover, i met some people who was really interested in discussing on the platform but the language is a too relevant obstacle which pushes them away from us.

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Sweet :slight_smile:

It’s lovely Luce, thanks for taking the time to put it together.

I’ll have a look in a couple of hours how to incorporate some of the elements onto http://opencare.cc

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Open Source teleconferencing tool

It’s https://meet.jit.si

You simply add:

/name_of_the_chatroom

For example you can include this in the event page: Jitsi Meet

and people should be able to join. (it might need some page refresh when a new person joins in). I’ve had a call with up to 20people.

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Thanks!

Thanks, @eirinimal, definitely worth trying out.

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For the record

I am grateful to @alberto_simonetti, @moushira and @lucechiodelliub for input. But I implore you: do not spend more than a few hours on it. When all it’s been said and done, OpenCare is a difficult project. It requires very active participation from people. Doing landing pages might help incrementally, but will not change this situation.

Commercial design techniques are a bad match for this kind of problem, because they assume that “the user” has a 20 seconds attention span (Alberto mentioned an exact number, which might even be smaller, I forgot what it was), and requires immediate gratification. It also assumes, critically, that each “user” that walks away is a loss to the project. In a commercial setting, all of this is true, because the “user” is there to be shown advertisements.

The OpenCare kind of stuff assumes that the “participant” is an intelligent adult, who is measuring up with a big problem and enjoys the challenge. She is not scared of ugly interfaces and even command-line ones. She understands that it will take hours of deep reflection and engagement to even make meaningful contribution, let alone solve anything. And if she is not prepared to do that, she should walk away. We are doing no favour to her, nor to ourselves, by keeping people engaged who do not like our terms of engagement.

This experience, at least for me, goes back to 2008 (Costantino remembers Kublai, and that in turn stood on the shoulders of a simpler projects in 2006-2007). What I have learned is that smart, committed people gravitate to smart, committed people: that a challenging environment repels some, but signals to the others that they are being treated as thinking adults, and brings out the best in them; and that there is no way to build engagement other than handholding, seeking out actively the smartest people and leading by example – for example uploading your own care stories onto the platform. And that’s where the bulk of your time and effort should go. Not artifacts, but process: community management and dogfooding.

Meanwhile, plenty of Euro projects have tried all sorts of designs and failed miserably to attract any kind of real engagement. The extent of this failure is hard to believe. It basically tanked a whole program, called E-Participation (paper). Meanwhile, Edgeryders – for all its faults – was avoiding these pitfalls. This is why we were mentioned as an example in the working paper by Fabrizio Sestini, the CAPS program officer, and the overall failure of E-Participation is one of the reasons why CAPS looks the way it does. I really do not recommend to walk the same path as the (smart, professional, motivated) people in E-Part.

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imho, it’s more about legibility at first sight

It’s not that much about being commercial or non-commercial. Having an entry point that solely bound to the OpenCare project name is a plus, just as having info about how’s who in a glimpse. (And I won’t hide you it is useful on the admin/reviewing side.)

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Alessandro Contini != Alberto Simonetti

Alessandro Contini @alessandro_contini was present in the last conference call and also during the consortium meeting in Brussels.He works for WeMake.

Alberto Simonetti @alberto_simonetti was not present in the last community call. He works for Comune di Milano.

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Mea culpa.

You’re right, sorry. Alberto was present last week, hence the confusion.

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being short - keeping my resources

Hi @alberto,

you rember well the empiric law 1000-100-10.

As we’re using the social network to interact with the future, the possible, the not-already-here community, we have to talk in many linguistic registers as wide as possible.

If you want to filter out people from first layer, this is not our case.

These years of makerspace activity taught us how to be as inclusive as possible, and try to lower the barriers to participation and engagement . We keep triyng and we improve every day how to do it.

Sleakness has not to be a “commercial” thing. it is just effective.

I don’t really understand your friction and here we’re talking of minor changes and improvement considering that @alessandro_contini and @moushira have some experience too in user interface and community management.

(not using more time on this in order to be efficient)

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Timing. 29 days to respond/propose alternatives?

“If you are unhappy with that landing page, by all means produce a new landing page and all the related pages (design, copywriting, concept etc) and send it to me by the end of the week. We can do an A/B test for the landing page and loo[k] at conversions. But I require the answers [t]o the questions I and Noemi have already asked, but not yet recieved responses to.”

https://edgeryders.eu/en/comment/22041#comment-22041

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fields of action

your timing proposal was a little passive-aggressive

“and send it to me by the end of the week”

also considering the we (me and zoe) pointed out that we where in China.

Over this there is also other consideration:

  • hard to be precise on little task / topic (as the landing page is) without a clear big picture view

  • it’s a moving target (the development of the community site was “unscheduled” from our point of view)

  • it’s not our primary role, we try to rise question and issue (plan a) if nothing happen we make some extra work (plan b)

The point is still:

I expected some concise and understandable explanations about the Outreach strategy for a while then I tried to rise the flag kindly posting this post.  - See more at: https://edgeryders.eu/en/opencare/strategy-wp1-and-wp2#sthash.kM2CkDjf.dpuf

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Explicit communication, pace and active participation.

This is a fast moving project- online engagement/social dynamics have a pace of their own and do not follow anyone’s schedule. It is like riding a wave, it’s up to you to stay on top of things. If you don’t make a convincing case, or concrete enough suggestion in a timely manner then things move on. Some general/vague requests were made from your side. A counterproposal was posted. No response: neither questions asked from your side nor a suggested alternative time/date for follow-up discussion. And then: “ it’s not our primary role, we try to raise question and issue (plan a) if nothing happens we make some extra work (plan b)”  - To me it signals you want the kind of hand-holding which no one can afford.

You would not be the first person to have a hard time keeping up with the fast pace with which we get things move. It is up to each one of us to take individual responsibility for staying on top of things:

  1. Be proactive in building answers to your questions well in time. Rather than vanishing fo long stretches of time and then expecting everyone to scramble when you finally bother to show up. 
  2. Participate actively in the weekly community calls/hangouts as a quick way to catch up whenever you feel "lost". Put things on the agenda, make creative proposals, etc. Or better yet, actively put in coordination work to actively convene the partners in calls etc. Instead of waiting for e.g. Alberto, Noemi or myself to do it. 
  3. Produce the content/material/code or whatever you feel is missing yourself. Accept that it may have become irrelevant or that people no longer have time to engage with your demands if you are too slow. You have all the material you need to produce whatever it is you want if you are unhappy with what is there for any reason. If you feel you do not understand the project or how it is meant to work, please reread the actual proposal as well as the information already produced and pointed to. 

Regarding your demands/questions/complaints:

  1. Your demand/question "that has been kindly flagged" has already been responded to: https://edgeryders.eu/en/comment/22518#comment-22518
  2. The engagement and outreach strategy has not changed from what was presented during the consortium meeting: Fellowship program - to be eligible you need to complete challenges and you were invited to cocreate the challenges themselves. After no engagement from you for over a month, again we invited you to get involved. Not much action there either.
  3. It has also been communicated on multiple occasions including during the consortium meeting, that coordination and alignment of communication and outreach happens during community calls, the contents of which are documented and posted online. The discussion about outreach and engagement strategy took place several weeks ago. You did not participate in it ( in spite of our having re-scheduled the day and time around your request). The documentation was posted online and responded to by others. Again no questions asked from you regarding outreach and communication: https://edgeryders.eu/en/opencare-research/hangout-4-planning-open-care-outreach-efforts
  4. Had you actually read and acted upon the documentation from the call you would have seen:

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Go right ahead!

No friction, Costa. I already wrote that you (and Luce, and any other designer out there) is welcome to go ahead and improve things. That’s really not a problem. My comment is titled “Thank you”, and I mean it.

In the call, we have been discussing something that is much more worrying to me, and does have the potential for friction: this project, as most European research projects, risks losing coherence, as partners drift apart form each other. I wrote about this already last week, and hopefully we can discuss it in the next call. I just wanted to signal that, in my opinion, this a much more important risk than the landing page, and that it deserves much more of your attention.