@Inga Popovaite, @Benjamin Renoust, after Futurespotters it is time to move to our final deliverable, due in by the end of July. I propose the following calendar:
as soon as possible (basically, immediately!) @Noemi emails the whole STF community asking for their authorization to enter their country of residency in their user profile. I would like this to be shaped as an opt-out thing, if @Matthias agrees. It would be nice to do the same with their age group. Noemi, with the help of engagement managers then proceeds to enter this information on their profiles – should not take more than a few hours.
by July 7th, Inga releases the draft report and makes it available on the platform, if possible in the form of a wiki.
by the same date, Ben produces the network report (this is almost finished, less the incorporation of information about country/age group, I am just waiting for information on community detection within the STF network).
we give it two weeks – until July 21st – in which the community can make changes, comments or proposals.
in the week 21-25 July we freeze the wikis, wrap the whole thing up, write an executive summary and deliver.
Cool, by July 7th I will be able to produce more in-depth report than for the conference. However, I will add more from focus group analysis to that a few days later - I still need to transcribe everything.
If it is a matter of days I am prepared to wait for the results of the focus group to be included in the report. So I guess: do the coding first, then draft report including everything, then validation. Works?
RQDA conversion ready; and on the profile data issue
@#5672 will receive the finished RQDA file with all the codings from the Spot the Future project shortly (next half hour). This fixes the bugs that were still present in the version used for the draft report at the conference. (I hope, all the bugs .) I can re-generate the file on short notice in case that Inga will code the focus group content the same way that the other content on the platform is coded. (Which I would think of as a good solution.)
Re. adding age group and country to the user profiles, it’s not “by the letter” (of the EU Data Protection Directive) since, when taken together with the name, it is personal data (making people identifiable). So formally, there is no opt-out solution. However, I think it’s admissible to do, since (1) the information itself is mostly also collectable from the posts themselves, and (2) I am planning for a system that will hide real-world identities completely, which will render location and age group data merely statistical data lateron.
Great stuff! Let’s get on with it. @Inga can probably do most of the data input herself (assisted by @Inge and @Hazem). @Noemi can I ask you to take care of getting in touch with the community to let them know what we are doing?
I received the new rqda file, looks good so far. I will code focus group off-line due to privacy reasons. Question: so now we go through all the profiles and mark them with country/age group tags? if yes, could I get a list of people that are involved in STF, so I won’t miss anyone?
Ok guys, glad we agree on this. So the opt out option should be framed as “we are doing this already, incorporating info that is visible anyway on other platform contributions of yours, but you can always un-tick the boxes if you so prefer, especially after the report comes out at the end of July”
The age groups will be hard to fill, we have scarce info in that respect.
Inga I’m sending you a list with all STF contributors and their user profiles…
Hey, no problem I went through the list and updated the users’ countries… over 130, so basically anyone who contributed at least a comment. Double check maybe to make sure we got everyone?
Looking forward to the published draft, let me know if you need help with anything…
I’m preparing views (and geoviews) with the User’s “based in” information, but I still find some missing and unprecise information for many users. Examples can be empty, “Universe”, “Europe” etc. The data is unstructured, so sometimes I have a city, sometimes, I have just a country, sometimes both, or even 2 or 3 cities
I’m trying to rebuild it on my own, but I’m wondering if I am using the right field in the end: @Matthias I haven’t found any other field in the User table that could correspond to the country information (the view I’m editing is stf_network_data_users).
For the age group information, it may be alright now, although 40 people (of ~130) haven’t filled it yet, we can see most users belong to the 26-30, then 21-25, and inter-class exchanges do not dominate the discussions (which is good: the age gap is not relevant in Spot The Future).
So here is a bunch of “world” views of the STF community (the original files have higher resolutions) choose the ones you prefer the most.
In these views the links present interactions across members of the countries, the size of nodes (not really visible in the 3D views) count the number of country members of STF.
I put a few different foci on the map for the idea
Here is also the pattern of country interactions, we can easily notice the central place of Georgia, Armenia and Egypt.
Here is a more subtil representation, it’s actually color coding STF member from their country of origin, however there are too many countries to keep color as a relevant variable, so in the first view, a link is colored from the nodes it connects (color interpolation for those who know Tulip). In the second view, I have colored in RED intra-country interactions and in BLUE inter-country interactions.
Here you get the details by countries/pairs of countries
So finally, we can see that the STF community is widely spread around the world, and is focused around 3 communities which are Armenia, Georgia and Egypt.
Most interactions occur between members of these communities, especially within the Egyptian community, but interestingly in this data Romania shows a strong mediator/intermediary role within all discussions
Indeed Romania is a little bit overrepresented because of well, just me.
What I like to see is that the number of inter-country interactions seems to be consistently higher than the intra-country interactions (the blue vs red representation)- a result of our collaboration oriented design. Can we get a view of that and numbers for just the 3 countries (Ge, Ar, Egypt)?
As for the age data, indeed a minority of people filled that field in their user profiles, but unfortunately there’s nothing we can add there manually
Noemi, Romania being overrepresented is a good thing, it means you are doing a great job
“As for the age data, indeed a minority of people filled that field in their user profiles, but unfortunately there’s nothing we can add there manually :-(”
But I thought that was the idea, adding things manually? You think that’s not possible because we can easily put in the wrong data for people who are at the edge between age groups maybe? In that case I could modify the age group field to have an “age group” value centered around each year, so like: 20–24, 21–25, 22–26 and so on. Would that help? Would that be acceptable for analysis, @#5924 (awesome visualizations, btw)?
But we could make a guess … for evaluation, it is enough if we guess the age group right, and we could even increase age group span to 7 years, or even better, increasing span widths for older people. If we make such guesses however, that kind of information should not be publicly on the profile page, since, you’re right, it might be plain wrong. A hidden field then.
…for data analysis would be the exact age of course.
The smaller the size of the span the better. What you were proposing is centering around the distributions, but it would assume that the community wouldn’t evolve, even within a long time (what would happen to the edge ryders and future spotters in 3 or 5 years? and let’s be crazy in 20-30 years?).
It’s good that we have all these privacy barriers because the techniques we use to understand our community are the same used by agressive commercial companies, I would suggest this information to be pure private data, and ask the users to give us the right to use it for analysis. Even if we have only 80% of the data, I still can say is that 80% of the EdgeRyders STF community is mostly represented by young people between 21 and 30 y.o.
Then let’s skip age analysis here (privacy issues).
To not get into troubled legal waters, we can not add precise age information without user consent (since that is personal data, in the sense that it enabled to identify somebody if taken together with other data). We could add age group information though, but as Benjamin notes, this is not too useful for analysis.
So I guess we have to skip age analysis for this project. It is unrealistic to expect users entering age information after the project is mostly over. What we have to do in the next project is asking for that kind of data right when a user registers (and also explaining what data is only for research, and what will be shown in the profile).
.) I can re-generate the file on short notice in case that Inga will code the focus group content the same way that the other content on the platform is coded. (Which I would think of as a good solution.)
