We have three new awesome ethnographers joining our team. Let’s discuss today in our bi-weekly:
Onboarding Meetings. Our Friday meetings are quite large now, so I think next week we should have 2 meetings with them. First, an internal meeting with their language team – so @Jan and @Wojt onboard Mania and introduce her to the Polish forum, coding you’ve done so far, your SSNA, etc, so she knows the terrain, same for @Richard and @hires with Djan, and @SZdenek with Jitka (and @Jirka_Kocian if he’s around, but also no worries at all if not). Don’t worry about going into technical detail, stick with what will be useful to them as they start their fieldwork – what concepts they are thinking of exploring and how that interfaces with the ones you want to explore further. Also discuss the timeframe we are working with and some practical milestones you want to achieve with the fieldwork. I recommend setting up regular meetings.
Training. Second, a meeting where they get to meet each other, since they’ll be working together. I suggest we do the three of them plus @amelia, @Jan, and @Richard, but open to ideas (just don’t want it to get too huge!). I’d like to introduce them to the platform in this meeting, too. Then they can join our next bi-weekly.
Field Manual. So they have a guidebook when they start, I think we should work together to create this for them. I started it here. You can add categories and content to it. This way you can also let them know what you’re looking for from the ethnographic studies.
Contracts. @Richard is sorting out Djan’s contract, I am sorting out Mania and Jitka’s.
Anything else we need to do? Let’s schedule these today in our meeting!
We have three new awesome ethnographers joining our team. Let’s discuss today in our bi-weekly:
Onboarding Meetings. Our Friday meetings are quite large now, so I think next week we should have 2 meetings with them. First, an internal meeting with their language team – so @Jan and @Wojt onboard Mania and introduce her to the Polish forum, coding you’ve done so far, your SSNA, etc, so she knows the terrain, same for @Richard and @hires with Djan, and @SZdenek with Jitka (and @Jirka_Kocian if he’s around, but also no worries at all if not). Don’t worry about going into technical detail, stick with what will be useful to them as they start their fieldwork – what concepts they are thinking of exploring and how that interfaces with the ones you want to explore further. Also discuss the timeframe we are working with and some practical milestones you want to achieve with the fieldwork. I recommend setting up regular meetings.
Training. Second, a meeting where they get to meet each other, since they’ll be working together. I suggest we do the three of them plus @amelia, @Jan, and @Richard, but open to ideas (just don’t want it to get too huge!). I’d like to introduce them to the platform in this meeting, too. Then they can join our next bi-weekly.
Field Manual. So they have a guidebook when they start, I think we should work together to create this for them. I started it here. You can add categories and content to it. This way you can also let them know what you’re looking for from the ethnographic studies.
Contracts. @Richard is sorting out Djan’s contract, I am sorting out Mania and Jitka’s.
Anything else we need to do? Let’s schedule these today in our meeting!
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Implement hierarchies in the backend based on spreadsheet. First improve on spreadsheet, until UX fix, then implement in OE.
Set up meetings with the new ethnographers.
work with Vello / Tartu crew, @alberto and @yudhanjaya to design a utopia/dystopia district-building project. Writing prompt, to imagine the future if a) dreams are realised and b) things that are bad now persist into the future. The goal is to see values and judgements about the present materialised through these dreams and fears (an “archaeology of the future”).
writeup to
a) summarise findings from the “pilot” phase of the project
b) map out topics for ethnographer study / to shape our future study
c) describe outreach and engagement collaboration
Questions to answer in the writeup:
How did the topics that we are dealing with so far emerge?
What are context specific concepts/topics that we want to continue exploring that came out of these pilot studies?
What is missing that we’d like to explore further?
How could we imagine exploring these with the field ethnographers?
How much to push specific focus topics and how much to let it be emergent?
Where do we need support from community managers/outreach?
–
Lingering Questions
What are the remedies we are going to suggest for the European Commission?
Focus areas
“objects of hate”
education
How to use Tulip in a way that does not crash the computer?
What is politicised where? (e.g. Islamophobia, sexuality)
Dear All, here is what I have so far (deconstruct, amend, improve, elaborate at will):
PROPOSAL FOR REVISIONS
After 12 February 2021 meeting
The Online Ethnography Project (realized mostly within Work Package 2) completed Stage One of it work (a pilot study) and has already begun preparations for Stage Two. In the first stage, we accomplished several goals:
1.1. We tested our assumptions about the themes and structure of the online conversation, and identified the topics/areas/themes that are most promising as the “generators” of online activity.
1.2. We prepared and tested onboarding and community management strategies in four different language communities.
1.3. We developed detailed coding strategies, coded the existing material, and our ethnographic coders acquired an advanced set of skills to be used in Stage Two.
1.4. We produced preliminary visualizations and started analyzing the data.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced us to change many elements of the original plan of action. Most importantly, live events – designed to bring participants to the online platform – became impossible to organize as the countries we study imposed lockdowns and/or restrictions on people’s mobility.
Given the experience gained in Stage One and the necessity to reorganize the project due to the pandemic, but also as a result of the systematic self-analysis of the achieved results, we are proposing several programmatic, structural, and budgetary revisions and adjustments to the project.
The prolonged COVID-29 pandemic forced us to reorganize many parts of POPREBEL and caused serious delays on almost all sub-projects. We are in the process of finalizing our extension request and proposing a new end date of 31 August 2022. This will give us about a year to realize the main research phase of online ethnography.
Programmatic revisions:
5.1. Refocus on populism. The work so far has generated many fresh insights into the mindset of the people in the countries we study.
5.2. COVID
5.3. Intensify comparative work
5.4. De-emphasize the “international” English-speaking community
5.5. Initiate and curate a conversation with other POPREBEL sub-projects, particularly with Work Package 6 on foresight scenarios. The scenarios developed by this team will be presented to the participants of the online conversation and will constitute one of the methods of stimulating this conversation.
Structural revisions:
6.1. After a thorough review of our accomplishments and failures, we conclude that in order to realize our research plans most efficiently and thoroughly we need to have people working in four roles in each language community (Polish, Czech, and German):
6.1.1. Outreach organizer (onboarder)
6.1.2. Community manager
6.1.3. Ethnographic coder
6.1.4. Ethnographer
6.2. Ideally, in each language community we would have four separate persons, each working in only of the four roles, but even if have fewer people, each role needs to be precisely defined (ACTION: prepare four role descriptions). In practice, one person can work in more than one role, though not more than two. This is the case in the German language community where one person works both as outreach organizer and community manager.
6.3. The work should move forward in three language communities. We should scale down or even eliminate the English language community. The material collects there so far provides already a sufficient “transnational benchmark.” The energy should be directed to three language communities (Polish, Czech and German), as we now see that a comparative study of the three language communities combines a strength of ethnographic immersion in a given country’s culture with a rarely practiced these days comparative study based on ethnographic methods and evidence.
Budgetary revisions:
7.1. The COVID-19 pandemic forced us to change many of our plans, but it also allowed us to save funds, for example those initially allocated to travel. These funds will be re-directed to the project described in this document.
7.2. The team composed of our UCL Project Manager (Silvia Gigli), the PI (Jan Kubik), and the Director of Research (Richard Mole) will prepare the budget needed to execute this plan, identify unspent funds in our budget, and design a plan of transfers
So, the “outreach organiser” is split between two different roles at the moment, which we can now integrate into our teams productively:
Community Builder (to work on the futures/worldbuilding exercise)
Community Journalist (to write stories based on engagement with people)
That means each team would look like this:
Field Ethnographer
Ethnographic Coder
Community Manager
1 and 2 are ethnography, 3 is community management.
Ethnography Team. Currently we have roles 1 (field ethnographer) and 2 (ethnographic coder) covered for all languages.
Community Management Team. We need to hire for role 3 (community managers) for Czech and Polish, so 2x community managers. Anyone with ideas or leads please feel free to suggest!
@bojanbobic and @ivan, a status update on the community builders would be amazing – what your plans are going forward, when the first event is planned for, if we can collaborate with you on it – the goal is for us to all be on the same page and working together/supporting each other
Community managers work to connect everyone together and keep conversation going on the platform. Ethnographers work with community managers to connect participants with each other and with opportunities to respond on platform. (e.g. ethnographers introduce informants to community builders, and vice versa).
Hi guys, thank you for the summery! I am not sure I get the role of community journalists. I read the community guide (in Polish “Przewodnik społeczności”) that a Polish journalist authored and it was not particularly clear what role it is supposed to have, especially at this stage where there is a whole community yet to be built. I also know that Ewa (who was the journalist for Poland) spoke to her relatives, helped them make accounts on the platform and publish those long pieces, that look quite artificial and awkward I am not particularly convinced it makes sense to have more of these. What was your idea for those journalists in the first place, @noemi@amelia?
What do you mean by that? It looks dishonest? Which stories do you find the most compelling so far, just to get an idea?
We wanted to surface stories of lived experiences on either one of topics like: work and employment, health and social care, human rights, which give way to understanding a person’s view of the world and their values, and consequently, through interaction, how they act in the world. Not sure how to explain it better, because I don’t know what your understanding is.
Of course most stories are at the intersection of those.
That they look like written by one person, and don’t look like “normal” posts, comparing to other posts. They are not “organic” and have a journalist-y outlook. I think such posts are fine but I would rather have a journalist post them openly under their own name as interviews (which is to be my job to an extend, posting interviews from the fieldwork), not make their interviewees create accounts they will never use and make them post transcribed interviews that were edited to a post-like form.
Okay, but like surfacing stories from what was posted before or new stuff? And with a purpose to stimulate discussion? From my research experience, and I study online communities across the web, lived stories generally generate reactions rather than discussions. Let’s see what it looks like when we get more people to the platform.
I could see a use in a community journalist later on when there is more going on here, other than that a community manager would be a go to, I think!
There is a benefit to having people post them under their own account – first, because of the way that SSNA works (because when we code the posts, the thoughts expressed in them are attributed to a unique participant). Second, when you create an account with someone, you then have the ability to follow up with them and invite them back onto the platform, and they don’t have to go through the process of creating a new account. As much as possible, it is good to have someone post under their own pseudonym, for the purpose of doing better analysis.
Your reflections on the style itself, however, we can definitely talk about/iron out in more detail!
thanks for the summary @amelia! Personally, I think it could make sense to have funds to commission pieces to journalists later along the road. I think this could provide useful in gaining traction with regards to our ethnographic work in particular, and Edgeryders in general.
If we hire community journalists, we would also have to consider covering editorial tasks. Also, would be the idea be to publish the pieces on Edgeryders?
It is not completely clear to me, how the role of a community journalist would differ from that of a community manager, especially in the beginning.
May I suggest my dear friend Olga, who is a trained ethnographer, psychologist, a practitioning therapist and ardent local activist based in the Tricity?
She has already been interviewed during one of the recruitment processes within the project.
Edited based upon most recent conversation with @Jan and @Richard, and taking your feedback into account @Maniamana and @Djan. For now, we focus upon forming teams of field ethnographers + community managers + ethnographic coders – so finding 2 new community managers, one for Polish and one for Czech.
We are still in the organisational phase, but a couple of bullet points to define the following moments:
We will try to connect the project to the Worldbuilding Academy webinar that is happening on 9 March - here you can find more info and links, but long story short:
The “Project Witness” is an open source online space where people can participate in building imaginary, yet realistic social and economic systems arranged in different “districts”.
The general idea is to try to convey Czech, Polish and Serbian participants (through a competition maybe?) into producing stories based on the project, which in less than three thousand words:
describe a personal experience of the social and economic system they live in,
put a spotlight on one, two or more contradictions regarding safety, health care, solidarity, distribution of wealth, etc
propose a plausible solution which figures out the consequences of a change
fit the possible inclusion or creation of a particular (Czech, Serbian, Polish) district in the Project Witness which other people can join and populate with more content
It could produce some deeper thinking over the topics. We want to root it strongly into reality and would very much appreciate your input on how to shape it, which particular questions to ask and which doors to open.
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I am not particularly convinced it makes sense to have more of these. What was your idea for those journalists in the first place,