Rescheduling OpenEthnographer: tasks, milestones, deliverables

Workspaces Software (SSNA)
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OpenEthnographer is making obvious progress, as per the feed coming from this group. Also, thanks to LOTE4, we have plenty of material for our tests. And yet, we are running late on the testing itself! Let me go through the deliverables, milestones and tasks.

Milestones

  • Task 1: development. We write the code for features 1, 2 and 3 of the previous sections. September 30th to November 15th.
  • Task 2: content seeding. We take advantage of the upcoming Living On The Edge 4 event in late October to get key members of the Edgeryders community involved in an online conversation on the theme of community stewardship of public goods, to be harvested using Open Ethnographer. September 15th to November 31st
  • Task 3: onboarding and starting the stewardship conversation for testing. October 25th.
  • Touchpoint 1 on onboarding. October 31st. Done.
  • Task 4: deployment. We deploy the code onto the Edgeryders platform. November 15th to November 30th.
  • Touchpoint 2 on deployment. November 15th. Deliverable:  Interim report. Not done
  • Task 5: testing. We use Open Ethnographer to harvest the stewardship conversation. December 1st to 20th.
  • Task 6: documentation. We write good documentation, critical to open source development (December 1st to February 1st). We allocate some time to writing both a developer’s manual intended for sysadmins (deployment, integration etc.) and user’s manual intended for QDA researchers and analysts.

Deliverables

  • Deliverable 1: onboarding workshop on using Open Ethnographer to investigate stewardship. Delivered on October 26th, documentation available on October 31st.
  • Deliverable 2: code base. Available on November 15th on the Edgeryders GitHub repo. Delivered.
  • Deliverable 3: Live installation. Available on November 30th on https://edgeryders.eu. Not delivered
  • Deliverable 4: test content. Consists of a minimum of 30 posts and 100 comments by 20 unique participants on the theme of stewardship. Available on November 30th on https://edgeryders.eu/. Delivered (but needs a check on the numbers).
  • Deliverable 5: test results. Consists in a test ethnography of stewardship, run on the above data with the Open Ethnographer prototype. Available on December 31st.
  • Deliverable 6: documentation. Available on December 31st.

We are late on the testing, mainly because it does not look like we have a working live installation of OE yet to do the testing with. To bring the project back on track, to a first approximation we need to do the following:

  1. commit to a date for the live OE installation (Matthias)
  2. finish the migration of the LOTE4 Hackpads onto the platform, and check the numbers (Noemi). Do some engagement as needed.
  3. start the testing (Inga), asking questions as appropriate to the community to refine our idea of stewardship.
  4. summarize all this into an interim report, written by everybody and compiled by Nadia.

Any thoughts? @Matthias, @Noemi, @Inga_Popovaite, @Nadia

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It’s all +2 months, no?

My last information from the calls was that the whole project is moved back by two months compared to the application’s time plan, due to late signing of the contract. (It’s what I assumed for the current project plan. I had asked you about details before, but sorry for not following up on this again.)

Anyway, my previously intended 2015-01-31 date for a working software installation on edgeryders.eu seems achievable based on current progress. (@danohu is contributing, which is very helpful, and I have the next 6 weeks full-time for this as well after moving to a more quiet place for programming now …)

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My understanding as well

Timely update, thank you. I am under the same impression as Matthias’s with respect to the project timeline.

At my end, I’ll be going through all existing content on stewardship eg what we have in terms of numbers and type of experiential accounts (first hand vs second hand accounts) and check with @Inga_Popovaite to see what else, if anything, we would need to sort out this month.

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Correct: Project plan updated with the deliverables and dates.

I’ve updated the Open Ethnographer project plan with the information that is on the signed grant agreement. Please @Matthias @Noemi @Inga_Popovaite and @ArthurD confirm that you have checked the information in the form of a comment on the page.

Let’s discuss the contents of the deliverables on that page only so we keep everything in one place.

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Sounds good. But what do you mean by “start testing” if OE is still not integrated to the site, or did I miss it happening? Do you mean starting dedicated discussions to stewardship on  ER? Or going through a content available and making a preliminary code list? (but  if OE allows code-as-you-go, this step would be a bit redundant, no?).

When it comes to the first and second hand accounts, from case studies, more methodologically sound would be to use first hand accounts only (such as transcribed interviews), as second hand accounts are already influenced by the author’s experiences. But again, even reported first-hand experiences will not be posted by those people themselves, so we loose the multidimensionality of OE here. Hence first-hand accounts, not published by people who were interviewed themselves, are useful for the research itself, but not for testing the OE at it’s fullest.

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Inga see comment above, let’s move this to the project plan page

…I’m setting up a separate wiki for the testing and reporting deliverables which involve your work to keep the different threads from getting too complex :slight_smile:

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All updates are in the project plan now.

The dates, delivery names etc. mentioned in the post above are outdated now. Everyone, please refer to the project plan, where Nadia put in the updated ones.