We’ve had 3 calls with UNDP in Georgia, Armenia and respectively Egypt, Khatuna (our other UNDP project manager aside from Millie) was present in all. We’ll be seeing follow ups on the below during next week:
Contract:
signed off by Arthur and emailed, we're expecting the Bratislava office reply.
On our pending team: ethnographers and engagement managers.
[engagement manager] Armenia is a safe bet. Their office understands the best what our project is about, but is also the most available to help us and be in the driver seat like Millie once said. George Hodge has even offered to assign someone in his office to be our engagement manager (not clear if we'll need to even pay that person).
[engagement manager] For Georgia I am already in touch with people, especially foreign journalists, who can act as entry points and recommend locals. If you’re interested visit my working space here.
[engagement manager] For Egypt, Maria has a clear proposal, Mostafa Amin, and she’ll introduce him to us.
[ethnographer(s)], if nothing shows up next week, Alberto and I agreed to hire Rebecca Collins (if not, Valentina) as main researcher, and later on contract students to work with her and help with translating codes into English.
Our first deliverable, the timeline we will be turning in next week includes the feedback we received as to the dates of the tour. Turns out:
We’ll host workshops in Georgia and Armenia during first half of April (8-10 and 10-12), as per Armenia's preference. Should I put my name down or is anybody up for doing the travelling? Any way, fine by me.
If [Nadia] agrees and we get confirmation from Egypt, she will be traveling there early April (1-4? or the week after) so as to benefit from their "Get Online week" regional campaign follow up
Spot the Future final event is tentatively scheduled around the 13th of May, in Tbilisi
Anything you see not ok, please react to it, [Matthias] let me know if I got these right… Next week’s calls, for whoever ER director would like to join, are:
Monday at 11 am GMT/ 12pm CET : [ArthurD] and Noemi to discuss upcoming administrative work, contracts, payment options etc, all welcome
Wednesday at 1pm CET: Call with Khatuna and George, and probably Egypt to review detailed timeline and decide on ethnographers and engagement managers to approach and hire. Matthias and Noemi will be joining, all welcome.
As an attempt of getting up-to-date, I am going through all the different posts and materials I can have access to.
I’ve just read this post. Since I am still lagging behing, I haven’t understood what kind of work is requested from the Ethnographer but as you might already know, in the design field, Design Research is the first and most important phase of the project as it’s where we get the inspiration from and what supports whatever comes next. Design researchers use ethnographic methods to understand the context and find insights. Opposed to Humanitarian Research, after observing and analyzing, Design Research seeks for opportunities to interviene in the system to improve it.
What kind of work is requested from the ethnographer?
Heya and thanks for reading (NB we’re waiting for UNDP to go public with Edgeryders driven Spot the Future any day now, until then we’re keeping it quasi confidential).
I’d say this is the run-off-the-mill ethnographic research, except it is open (files are made public) and online: researchers are coding and analysing written input from platform participants in Spot the Future (posts and comments). They’ll most probably use a free software to input relevant pieces of content. The deliverable is essentially a report similar to what we had for Council of Europe - it’s a narrative report ending with key citizen solutions which institutions should pay more attention to, and maybe outlining possible intervention areas.
Does that answer your question? We won’t be advising UNDP on design solutions at all, it’s rather implicit that the project output is a material they can use as an assessment tool…
Thanks for the very clear and professional wrapup.
Nadia is ok traveling to Egypt that week.
I support the idea that [Noemi] would be the one going to the Black Sea.
I see a potential drawback with using people close to UNDP as engagement managers: they would stay in their bubble. A major plus of Edgeryders 1 was that CoE came into contact with people whose very existence they had no idea of. If George assigns us a person, great, but maybe we can then look for and hire someone else... at least, Noemi, I would raise this point, also with Egypt.
Can you check Mostafa Amin's social media footprint? If it's all in Arabic, maybe get help from the community: Said Hamideh, Ibrahim El-Badawi and Nathalie Bezér all speak and read Arabic. Nadia is unfortunately out of the picture for now.
I have sent the timeline OK-ed also by Matthias, but because of the contract signing delay we also ended up with a slighly different calendar. To make sure STF missions in each country don’t overlap with our platform launch, all missions are now crowded in the beginning of April. I had to move [Nadia]'s trip for the 7th-8th of April. We can always change that I guess if she can’t make it, plus we can still operate changes this week…
I sent [ArthurD] terms of service for the paid positions, and he’s drafting contracts as I write.
As soon as I get the green light from Millie about finalizing the contract, we’ll go public with the community release.
FYI: Our Skype call with UNDP in all countries and management has been moved to Friday, 1pm CET.
