So this means it can’t be used the way I wanted to use it for the research in the biennale? Meaning, the existing information won’t be collected and can’t be researched on on the platform, right? And this means I am not having my proposal approved by the board, correct?
It means I personally am not going to use anything else for projects I am managing.
Ok, so now I just have to wait for the board’s decision if we go with it. Good, thanks!
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Yes, but if I understand it right the people behind the usernames are fleeting (assuming many people won’t create an account). So what you don’t have in this interface is the ability to d the full research of emerging collective intelligence: how can you have conversations based on the footprint content of someone?
In either case, I think this could be worth a try - as an add on to our workshop methodology for documentation.
@natalia_skoczylas we don’t have board meetings weekly, but we should be able to find time to discuss it… As we do here. Thanks for the effort.
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Yes, you get it right @Noemi - this is both to create an easy way for people to sign up, as Matthias explained (they will get an email with a login once they fill the form), but it will still have the potential just to gather responses from people who might not activate their accounts, or even have internet at home (then we would just use a generic email address to allow this person to participate in the conversation, and as they can see it on the exhibition, they might want to check it our later while visiting family) and use it for the research. Less work for community managers, but it might be used this way in the future as well - and we immediately get some input, even if we fail at onboarding.
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I see. The crux of the matter is: do we wish to bend some of the principles that makes ER successful at generating interesting conversations in the first place? This is not consistent with our model. So we need to weigh this against the benefits of such a tool… Which we established I guess.
I would say these two don’t exclude each other - the community can always build beside it, once we have the content and money for it. I definitely see it only as a beginning of a much more interesting and rich discussion - and I will anyway do some community management around this topic voluntarily. But it doesn’t mean everyone has to participate, just as it is with every other project (it only means we don’t have to pay people to do interviews, we just put the simple questionnaire out in the open, in a sexy environment, and let things happen). It can fail, but in this case I really can’t see it fail 
Not exactly.
- If people do not go through the ethical consent funnel, we cannot use their responses, because they did not fully consent to participate.
- If people do not go through at list some box-ticking formalities we also have a GDPR problem, since we are saving people’s emails.
Yes, and we have already discussed it in my previous post and agreed these need to and will be there (With Matthias we already found a way at which stage these will show up, and will be always there when a person starts interacting with the questionnaire)
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Questionnaire? Now I’m lost. 
There are plenty of tools that we can use if we want to administer questionnaires (LimeSurvey, Qualtrics, Google Forms…). Is that what you mean?
If you mean a ramp to onboard people, then:
Then what’s stopping you from holding people’s hands as they create accounts?
Sorry it’s just a problem of us having this technical discussion somewhere else and me using a shitty jargon to call what it is - in fact, it’s just a simplified platform that can be easily accessible without having to register first - but with a consent and a set of questions that can be then registered on the platform, and a second step for everyone to activate their accounts and join the discussion when they’re back home. We laid it out while discussing it with Matthias here:
Aha, gotcha. Question: how many more contributions does this gets us, you think? Then we can compare the benefit with the cost, and decide.
This one biennale project I guess a couple of hundreds easily up to a few thousand, it will be a part of the exhibition in at least 2 locations for a full 4 months. And in fact, the biennale team really wants to see it grow outside of this setting and find a way to inform policymaking by using this research - which would have to be then figured out, but it means there can be a sustainable future both for the interface but also for the content it generates.
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Since @nadia does not want to use this for the POPREBEL or NGI Forward project in the end, we can’t use any H2020 project funds for this. It also makes two other things clear: it will be implemented by @daniel as part of the Ruby/Middleman framework we have here, and the required budget from Edgeryders Core funds are now 3000 EUR (or less if Daniel needs less time).
I still like the idea as an additional tool for user engagement that we can try in future projects. Because we can’t be sure that we have the perfect formula already, esp. since Edgeryders’ price tag per active user is still quite high (~700 EUR in NGI Forward, for example). So I vote yes, but of course I won’t decide that alone. Could the other mgm board members also make a decision and write it here? (@hugi and @johncoate, I think you didn’t see this thread so far … have a look.)
If this is what is meant by @natalia_skoczylas then I say yes and we can put some money into it from the H2020 projects:
"It’s a single-page form on its own domain, usually part of a minisite like we do now. Submitting that form will do several things:
- Create a Discourse account with the e-mail address the user entered, and send a password to that e-mail address.
- Collect consent from the user with the same consent funnel questions we have on Discourse, and record that consent in the corresponding field of the Discourse account that was just generated for the user.
- Create a new Discourse topic by combining the answers to multiple campaign-specific questions in the form. The Discourse topic will be posted from the account generated from the user.
Everything after that will be standard Discourse behavior: the user has an account already, will get notifications about replies to “their” new topic, can log in to that account and so on."
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It sounds really similar to what was already built in the CS framework and then by Owen - single-site frameworks for Discourse as a CMS with client-side JavaScript. It’s a bit hard for me to give clear advice without more parameters on what this will do and how it will be built. For example, it sounds like we could continue on the Vue.js and Node track we’re already on to do this.
I consent to the decision either way, but my advice is to provide some more technical specs before going forward.
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After talking with Nadia in Riot about this we “found” an additional 2,000 EUR from POPREBEL budget under position “producing communication materials for outreach and engagement work” to put into this. This is justified as the resulting system will also be used in some capacity for POPREBEL campaigns. Nadia had some conditions for that, which are possible to meet from the tech side. In short it’s these (and the details would be discussed while we implement it all):
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It should be a multi-step form with a clear, chain-like process through which the user is guided, as we had in Drupal times with the “Challenge” system.
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During this process, users should see previews of Discourse topics from the category where their own topic will also end up in.
Together with the 1,000 EUR from the H2020 tech budget, I think we already have enough now to make this happen 
(@nadia, have a look and please confirm / correct the above if needed.)
It’s true that “we could continue on the Vue.js and Node track” for this. It would of course need a server-side component in Node.js then that creates the Discourse account and topic via API.
Just that, if I happen to manage the implementation of this, I’d not choose that approach. I installed Vue.js and tried around for a bit and I still think that it’s too complex technology for a simple application like this. Also, it’s a bit of an outlier in our software landscape since all of Edgeryders’ custom or customized software is either Python or Ruby. So instead we’d extend the Middleman/Ruby based framework we use for the NGI platform – I used that and found it to be very compact and intuitive to work with. Since that is only a static site generator framework in Ruby, we’d have to add a Ruby-based MVC micro-framework. Not Ruby on Rails, that is already total overkill.
@hugi If you also have strong opinions about what would be the “right” way to implement this, let’s talk and find a common ground. I’d not project manage a Vue.js based implementation, but in case you want to do that …
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Great news, thank you so much for giving this idea support - I will make it worthwhile;)
I had a call today with one of the Biennale managers, with whom we briefly discussed opening this even wider, to 6 different projects that will be part of this Biennale - so the platform would be in fact accessible with different entry questions in 6 locations: the University of Ljubljana, the national library, the biggest newspaper, the Modern Art Gallery and maybe a garden, on top of the Museum of Architecture and Retirement home. This will be confirmed over this weekend, but I’m persuasive and I think it’s the best thing that uses the Common Knowledge topic of this event.
So I’m here to help you work and test this thing at any stage @matthias and @hugi and discuss whatever quirks we have to iron out to make it happen
To start, please provide us with a draft for the user interface for the website where you want it deployed. It can be rough, but should already be final about the basic structure of that site: the menu, what navigation item leads where, and what content you want to collect. Based on that I’ll make a software design that also meets Nadia’s requirements, and then we’ll implement that.
Since there is not much time, in the meantime we’ll already start with some basic tech tasks that are independent of the user interface.
Also, please tell use the domain to register for the site, or register it yourself. It saves some work not having to switch domain names shortly before the end. We can put in a password protection during the development process.
I will be developing the flow this weekend during my Biennale field trip, I have an UX designer already booked for that. By that time I will also pick and register the domain. I hope this is fast enough.
Do you think I/you could create a project space for me in which I could be collecting some of the interviews? We can call it Common Knowledge
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