I might be able to pull in Leiden (NL). At the very least, I know someone there. They are EU Capital of Science 2022, and might have some maneuvering space.
On ethnography, you have a point. My favourite ethnographers (after @amelia, who is no longer available) are:
Jan Kubik, the POPREBEL principal investigator. He teaches at UCL. It turns out that UK orgs are still eligible for funding, though the association agreement is not yet finalized (source). Very senior anthropologist with a wonderful mind, very complementary to the EDGE stuff.
Anders Munk with the Techno-Anthropology Lab at U Aalborg (DK). Brilliant and reliable. They are a bit more similar to us, with a lot of network science stuff. These have solid experience in doing ethno in virtual environments, so it may be a better fit with your idea. And I love Anders, he is great. Also – long shot, but they talk a lot to the city of Copenhagen. Problem with Copenhagen, it’s one of the usual suspects, the small group of cities that are leading on every front (with Amsterdam, Barcelona, Milan…). Personally I would find Leiden more exciting (and a short train ride from Brussels).
Thanks for this @alberto I was looking at the TantLab and it seems indeed a great space for something like this: their vision is both rigorous and playful (vision). In term of budget, it’s not yet clear to me what could be the work of the ethnographers and the lab (vs Edgeryders who is doing what?), but I’ll streamline the process in the one page and see if it make sense.
About Leiden, why not, again here my reasoning is only on the fact that 3 out of 5 pilots are in Italy (the other two being in Portugal and Germany), so Nederland sounds great!
I’ll try write down the one page this week so we can approach them?
@matteo_uguzzoni I’m running a small creative hub in Split, our community is composed of mainly artists and cultural workers but since we just opened the space (after 4 years of working without it) in July 2021, this year we are also investing efforts in engaging inhabitants of the neighbourhood into collaborative projects to tackle some of the challenges they are facing in their environment. However, we never did any citizen science projects…but of course, open to discuss if there is any way we could contribute.
Hello everyone, while writing the one page for this one I read about Babel between Us and I have to say that I see a lot of similarities between the two ideas. It seems to me that the project was pretty successful both in term of the process and in term of the results, I saw some posts around and the amazing video here and the graph@hugi , @jakobskote or @OlaClaesson I have so many questions :)) Maybe if this first round of the application go through will you be able to have a quick chat? I’m really interested in how easy/hard was to set up the group of ethnographer and if you feel like that part was successful as well…also do you think that the SSNA was the best output? I saw that there was an artistic output that should have come out but maybe this changed while the project was evolving? Anyway thank you for being so generous on sharing stuff this is really helping me a lot on clarifying the idea.
Hello @marina what you are doing sounds perfect, thanks for your interest! I think this could be a project to build a bridge with public administration as well, and citizens of course. I guess the language in which we will play the LARP will influence how the digital ethnography will be made so if we speak in Croatian we will need Croatian ethnographers? But other then that I think your creative hub could be a great local partner!
Hi @matteo_uguzzoni , of course - we’d love to help if we can! A chat if the first application goes through sounds great.
Some short answers to the questions: The ethnography was both more and less difficult than anticipated. Since we didn’t have an explicit strategy for the ethnography it (or a specified target audience of it) it quickly broadened out of control. We realized too late that we needed to delineate, which resulted in a scattered output. This was of course also due to it being an etnography of fiction, which is in many ways closer to literary theory than to ethnography. There are a thousand ways to read a book, and so on. From a cursory glance, your project seems to have a specified purpose and target audience, which will help the ethnography immensely as you are essentially trying to make it make sense for them.
The SSNA was very interesting, but ultimately I don’t think it was very useful in the way we utilized it. Again, this is due to the ethnography and not due to the tool itself. Too many strategies of analysis competing for space in the same graph make the graph messy (some competing are fine, but we had more than 10).
We have some artistic outputs that are still in the works. It’s a slow project and has been in hibernation for the past year, but we are currently starting up the machinery again with the intent to present something to the public sometime this spring.
Always a huge challenge, especially our local administration - think of a very traditional closed structure far from experimenting with anything new. There is the city development agency, mainly focused on entrepreneurship. I’m unsure how successful this is but could be an entry point.
Should be possible, maybe by reaching out to Universities (we have good relationship with the ethnology and anthropology department at the University of Zadar).
Hello y’all, here is a one page of the idea so far (title Ethnography of Utopia)
@marina can you check if this could be an interesting idea for CHC? I imagine your group as the people on the ground mainly responsible to (1) get the participants, (2) facilitate the games and (3) helping finding the local ethnographer.
@alberto does something like this sound interesting for the Edgeryders Research Network, is there something that we can add or something that I got completely wrong?
@nadia and @ivan how does this looks for a Witness point of view? The goal could be to have a tested prototype that then we can use as a workshop tool for multiple purposes.
@jakobskote (and @hugi and @OlaClaesson ) do you think we should keep in mind on proposing this AND what do you see as weak points based on the experience of Babel and us?
Thanks all, I appreciate every comment!
Oh, to assess the file do the google thing and I’ll add you
Actually, this is mostly a LARP with a layer of ethno on top. And the more I look into it, the more it seems a good fit for Blivande/Borderland. @matteo_uguzzoni, what is the advantage of bringing in local govts (remember I can still ask Leiden)?
@matteo_uguzzoni is it ok with you if I share with one professor at the University of Zadar? From the concept, it seems they would be the full partner as well (in case the ethnographer would be someone from the University)?
Great synthesis @alberto it is exactly that.
My feeling is that in case of emergencies local governments are often in responsive mode, and they will be pushed to the limit the more we move forward in the climate change scenario. During the pandemic it happened that they discovered what the central government was going to do together with their own fellow citizens, or in case of natural disaster, they are usually “invaded” by a central unit (Protezione Civile in Italy) and then they are left to rebuild the social quilt after that.
I wonder if it could be useful for them to have a space of autonomous imagination for these scenarios, to embed some long term planning.
Hello everyone, the organizers of the call replied to my request about partners eligibility. While Edgeryders Research Network can be the consortium leader there is the need for at least another academic institution, so if the University of Zadar is interested, great, otherwise we should explore other ways (@marina@alberto) .
Also I was thinking about the Nomadic Branch of Trust in Play as the game design partner, since I’m part of it, but informal groups or individuals will not count as partners.
I’m collaborating with a group of theater-makers in Bulgaria lately so I’ll explore if they are available on taking this on - again just to highlight the game design aspect as something different and leave Edgeryders as the main research partner -
The deadline for the first application is Jan 30th, so we should define the partnership in the next days.
My main problem remains that of budget. 50K for a project with three partners?
Division of labor between the three partners:
EDGE: game design/delivery, SSNA.
Academic partner: one ethnographer, participant observation, ethno coding.
Local partner: not very clear, @matteo_uguzzoni writes of local partner/policy maker. But what would that be for? Also, it is difficult to find local partners that are solid on that side. We do have one… but it is in Messina, Italy again! In KR I would probably not risk trying to team up with the municipality, from what @marina says they can be very slow and unenthusiastic. But maybe partnering up with a locally rooted organization (like Marina’s in Split, or Blivande in Stockholm) will be enough.
I am seeing two possibilities.
Leiden and TANT-LAB (there is a tradition of LARPs in English in Western Europe, even here in Belgium they are mostly run in English). Frankly, I am not super confident to be able to pull Leiden into an application in 15 days! An alternative would be Stockholm (keeping TANT-LAB), partnering with Blivande if @hugi and @jakobskote agree. This means
Split and U Zadar (in this case the LARP maybe would be in Croatian).
Most of the young-mid-generation people in Croatia don’t have any problems with using English, if it would make things easier we can totally do everything in English.
