Thanks all for a great meeting! Whole team present (@amelia @Jan @Wojt @Jirka_Kocian @SZdenek) including @alberto and a tiny guest star from @Wojt family 
These are the notes and to-dos from our call today, 9 October 2020:
Report
Priority number one is a writeup of our ethnographic progress so far after our first full round of coding, and a plan for the next stage of the project. The method we will use is to limit our analysis to a smaller range of topics, allowing us to drill deep into them in a more sustained and continuous way and involve a wider demographic of participants.
The report will have a 3 part structure:
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An overview on the themes that have emerged on the platform so far, and your analysis of these themes. You are encouraged to use Graph Ryder screenshots for this section to illustrate the concepts and how they’ve connected so far. (see the NGI report as a possible model). Filtering the graph to 4 or 5 co-occurrences using the wheel at the top right corner is the easiest way to do this.
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A description of the narrowly focused topic areas that you would like to focus ethnographic attention on for the rest of the project, based upon the first round of coding.
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What themes, questions, and/or relationships you are hoping to explore in more depth through these more narrowly focused topic areas.
Please give us a deadline for when you will complete this – as soon as possible, since it has major effects on what the Community Management/Outreach and Engagement teams plan for the rest of the project. @nadia and @noemi, heads up that this is incoming and will be very focused on specific topics that you can focus on on going forward.
Exceptional Call
To finish the code review of the spreadsheet, we will have an extra call next week, at 8:30 USA Eastern, 1:30 UK, and 2:30 Prague/Warsaw.
Prior to the call, we will be having a call on Graphryder updates (time TBD) and @jan will send @amelia his reflection on parent-child relations.
All of our calls will take place on Zoom, at this link: Launch Meeting - Zoom
General Notes
Feel free to use these to help write your reports – they are your words from the call, as best as I could note them down!
Polish Forum Update
@Wojt reports that the Polish forum has generated discussion around the main themes of institutional failure and a general lack of support. Not many people feel they lead a decent life. People experience a lot of daily struggles: with healthcare, and with inadequate income, with housing.
People talk about the need to engage in dialogue and civilised debate, expressing a feeling that there is too much hate, a lack of solidarity, and a collapse of a sense of community.
There is also a noted divide between big and provincial cities, “Poland A” and “Poland B.” These divides are cultural and economic, and deeply felt. The failure of the state is a recurrent topic, via discussions of political inaction, institutional failure, and the destructiveness of neoliberal capitalism.
LGBT rights are another key issue, clashing with traditional values. @Jan is interested in exploring the connection between anti-intellectualism and mythologies around gender ideology (and anti-LGBT sentiment).
Czech Forum Update
@Jirka_Kocian expresses that the main themes emerging in the Czech forum are around healthcare, housing, and climate change. These are discussed in terms of intersocial relations and politics as they are expressed through everyday life.
Participants express problems with predatory behaviour from political elites to the state. There is a question of what the analogy might be to the system as a whole – its antisocial nature. Whether this is a representational problem of society or a measure of something broken.
Most participants on the platform are “coffeeshop intellectuals”, between 25-35 years of age, residing in major cities like Bruno and Prague.
They articulate a divide between sticking to the liberal narrative (and opposing populism) or calling for complete alternatives. They express open association with the green parties, or at least a sympathy with them.
@SZdenek thinks that some deeper conversation could be generated around the figure of the Prime Minster, who is the 2nd richest person in the Czech Republic. His media representation is also interesting.
COVID-19 is a major topic that he feels could generate deeper conversation and be a platform that brings in a diverse crowd. Through this a lot of topics could be approached:
- gender, via work patterns, educaiton, leisure time, and a division of labour that is having to be negotiated/brings existing disparities to the fore, as childcare falls upon women much more.
- housing, including intergenerational relations
- healthcare - access and inequality, reflections on the system and its relation to politics
- anti-LGBT sentiment and relationship to ethnic minorities and refugees - via scapegoating, etc. can also approach this via anti-intellectualism — particularly in the covid setting, around relationships to covid (e.g. is it a government/elite play for power or a legitimate public health issue)
This was widely agreed upon as a good approach for all the language fora. The theory being that people’s responses to covid — its effects on existing systems and practices, and what it tells us about those systems and practices in the first place— and the way they frame those politically will shed light on the ‘shadow of populism’ in each country. And having the topics be largely the same across countries creates a good comparative.
