An idea indeed
When you said drudgery I had to think of school. You know where this is going - right? 
Who has connections to high-school English teachers? Perhaps in other earthquake risk cities? Istanbul, SF, Tokyo? We could find a central authority of course but ideally we’d package it with some input from ground level so it pushes the right buttons and avoids the touchy areas…
@Noemi you seem to know a lot of language people…
No contact 
Sorry, cannot help in this area.
When would the Skype/IRL thing be?
What works for you?
On skype I should be fairly flexible between tomorrow and Thursday evening. My IRL slot unfortunately seems to coincide with your MENA trip.
Thursday is best
… of these three days.
Are you coming to Brussels as I go to MENA? Nadia will be here, you can meet up. In fact, if you need a place to stay we have a guest room!
Skype - Thursday, IRL - Nothing planned yet
Let’s shoot for something after the community call then? Perhaps after lunch, say 13:30?
Thanks for the offer - I might take you up on that. Alternatively, if you have a few hours in one of the places in my user info, I can perhaps bundle things which makes it more likely/easier for me.
English teachers where?
Hi guys, are we looking for Nepali-English translators or transcribers from En (video/audio) into En(text) too? For the former, I obviously have no idea. For the latter, @Inge might be able to help as she’s teaching English and maybe knows others too; also @lucasgonzales seems to be a fan of languages; and @Jonathan_Walton & the Tonguesten community. I don’t think you need to be proficient, a lot of people here would help. What we need to engineer is a love campaign so people would be up for. If it’s posted under wikis, we could rely on Wikipedia style edits - I review your transcription, you review my review etc. improving continuously… the costs of fixing a transcription that is not exact are not as high, so we’d only need the first heavylifters.
Re: languages @trythis if you were hinting at newcomers’ wave from Romania, I don’t know a lot of language people - the thing is everyone in Ro cities speaks English, and quite well. We’re compensating for the fact that very few foreigners would be up for learning the local language. We might be able to help.
Talk to you Thursday then, following up on these long threads is quite unrewarding.
transcribing
It’s a rather tedious job :))) but let’s discus this thursday during the community call?
People who are good at it are usually qualitative researchers (or actually, their assistants 
) and journalists.
Deal
With pleasure. I cannot make the call, I have several other calls, but I can do 13.30 or even better 14.
Also: planning a trip to Vienna, part of my family lives there. Should have been early June, but now I have to reschedule.
Okay 14:00 then!
Vienna sounds good - I have a couple of edgy friends there, and a visit is overdue. I’ll do my best to line it up then.
Lauren
How about duolingo? Or some other language learning app company or local school? They get current and timely content, we get transcription?
Otherwise I think @Lauren was teaching English in Turkey, maybe she has some suggestions?
@Community_Service_of_Nepal Hey Lisa, you sounded like a resourceful can-do person! People like you usually have nice and helpful friends - and in your case they would also have the written English skills. Could you poke around your bee-hive and see if they can come up with ideas (or even the odd potential volunteer)? We could probably scale the work packages to whatever people are most comfortable with. And if they are a little uncertain they could cross check someone else’s version first, to ease them into the thing.
I think we can put this point on our skype/IRL agenda
I see the dilemma, but did anyone seriously try speech2text yet? Even if it has hiccups (that will likely improve over time) it may be good enough for the purpose.
Now we’re talking!
I think this is the right direction. I would suggest a few things to consider:
90% of video content runs in the background for me, and I hardly watch it cause it rarely carries much information and warrant precious “eye-time”. Thus I would suggest splitting the two things:
You hand out a bunch of recording devices (ideally something like the olympus ws-801, realistically cell phones you dangle around your neck and record in amr). Meanwhile one of you jumps around and makes short videos of revelant stuff + tiny intros of the people to have a face and match the voice to name/email (perhaps written on cardboard).
Integrating with the ER platform can also happen later, but would be nice. From my perspective getting the raw-on-the-ground-info+emotion accessible is the main thing. I would also let them record in Nepali if that is significantly easier for them.
You could also use the soundcloud account I made (is good for 180 minutes). I’ll send you the access info. It should be possible to link to a specific time from the ER platform.
Transcription…
@trythis, have you seen the exchange between Matt and me above? I know you are a fan of audio, but how would you deal with the issue that we are committed to handing out an ethnography?
Long story…
I’ve seen your exchange and you can probably imagine that I am cringing pretty bad here. I see your desire to deliver a “clean”, relatively conventional ethnography - and I empathize with it. But I think it would be better to widen the scope in a way that hopefully will not compromise but rather complement and support the text based facet of the ethnography. I would feel much better detailing this in a slightly intoxicated (the Greeks new what they were doing) heated 3-4h discussion, with my mirror neurons firing. I’ll also offer to do minutes for it, and perhaps try to speak without too much of a slur for an automatic transliteration attempt.
Creative ways for written online dialogue
Some initial ideas how to organize the online dialogue here so that participants don’t see it as “excessively challenging” but rather as “worth the effort” when contributing in writing:
Double pack
Perhaps you could do an honor system where they are asked to record one now, in return for also transcribing one of someone else. You could say they should perhaps rehearse their story once to make sure it is below X minutes, and there aren’t many extended silent stretches. Maybe do a 30 second summary. That could also help improve the quality (slow thinking) of the contributions - but would move away from a clean response.
You could offer help/the infrastructure for the transcription and at the same time get a chance for a follow up meeting.
Dialogue=Conversation
Hi there, I think we need to consider few things here:
The relief teams/initiatives are usually busy managing and coordinating relief work (a friend of mine has been on the run since the earthquake) which means the time that they do the reflection is probably on buses, micros, or during phone calls sharing information/story/updates. And as much as I would love for my friend to write on the platform, and start engaging in the space, he simply does not have the time to.
But, there are relief teams that are coming to a closure of some sort - perhaps, identifying these groups and meeting them first-hand to explain what we are trying to do would work better. I have messaged, talked to few about this and yet I think it would be a more compelling case to have a face-to-face conversation and then let them decide. The first barrier to online dialogue is it takes a while for people to get used to a new interface (if it was Facebook, I am sure there would be more users!). [Also like Matthias pointed out, we have so many of such conversations every day we meet someone who is a part of the relief team.)
About videos/audios/transcripts/SMSs: I love the SMS idea. We can definitely give it a try. I think as far as I understand the discussion, we want first hand narrative and I completely understand why. I think we will need to work on some tasks and start spreading the word. I havent yet shared much about by involvement in this project in my own Facebook/Twitter accounts - and once we start generating some kind of activity there, it will hopefully channelize some of that into this platform.
I slept over these comments - and I think the only way we can have dialogue online is if we are in contact update/loop about these projects ourselves. If we keep in touch with the people through Facebook, emails, and even meet, I think maybe they would be interested to post in this platform. I already see quite long updates/descriptions being posted on Facebook about such and such relief work they did. We just have to redirect some of those into this platform. (I also say this because relief teams are working on “batches” so they take a team, go, do their deed, and come back for a day or two - and then repeat that cycle. So maybe they will be free on those days - rest, and also reflect?
I prefer audios for first interviews because that puts less pressure on the speaker to “perform” (some are natural though). We can encourage them to share videos they have taken, photos they have taken though. Maybe in one of the workshops, we can also learn/share about visual documentation and they can make their own?
Challenges versus Opportunities
Hey guys,
I was hooked into the conversation before I knew it. There are suggestions flying and they all look good. I have a few points:
I think, the best way to get people to talk is to talk to them in person. That I tell you from my experience as a journalist. It is much easier than online discussion in Nepal. It was true before the disaster and today, it is more true than ever.
People are more comfortable in GROUP DISCUSSIONS. I recommend a group of 5-6 people (preferably friends because it will be easier to manage time) with us prepared with questions revolving around the theme. The challenge here is not lack of resources (people). It is getting the time to make them talk.
I like the SMS system. I also want to add that there is a time constraint. How about we prepare the questions we want to ask people. If we want them to “talk” then they do. But we’d probably be able to take 20 percent of what they tell us. People sometimes prefer a guideline. This goes into email exchanges as well. If we define objectives and come up with questions, then we can forward the emails to people and probably get more responses.
I agree with Dipti when she says people are conscious in front of camera in Nepal. Audio is a much accessible means. Both Dipti and I are experienced as journalists so we can even note down the questions (supported by audio of course). We can have few people talk in the video but most would prefer audio (probably with a picture of the speaker?)
Finally, I don’t know how much time we have (and I hope Dipti agrees to it) but we might get the richest resource when we have in-depth discussions with the people. I want to do a few blog posts where I talk to few inspirational people working in the field.
We can use social media more actively. How about we use the same introduction we have ready in all our personal Facebook Profiles and then invite people. I don’t know how much that can help but we can try.
Again, any suggestions are welcome. Dipti and I are meeting today to discuss it further. We will keep you updated. Meanwhile, we are trying to get in more people the old way as well! 