A think tank (and yes, it’s open)
Matthias, thanks again for great insight. This entry forced me to rethink our approach. However, at the end of the rethinking, I still stand for it. I think the risks to privacy in participating in the Edgeryders project are minimal. Let me explain why.
- Focus on the collective dimension. Everything in Edgeryders is about the extent to which my experiences can be somehow generalized, how they resonate with others. So, it is not about trying to find out idiosyncratic behavior that makes individuals stand out, but rather about rethinking what might look idiosyncratic as, rather, shared and therefore socially justified. For example, many people here have spoken out against ACTA. Others have highlighted the importance of a free Internet with freely shareable content as a place for learning, a professional resource for finding work, or for simply making everyone's life better through the creation and enhancement of digital commons. What Edgeryders does is tie these positions together into a policy recommendation that more or less says "emphasizing IPRs is likely to hinder the transition of youth to an independent active life. We should handle the issue with care, and not assume hacktivists are troublemakers and should go look for jobs. They need the Internet to be free to even carve a professional niche for themselves." So, while the trends we pick up are certainly interesting for government, individual behavior is not.
- Focus on world building. Edgeryders has no missions about consumer behavior. It is not interested in what movies we watch or what clothes we wear. It looks at world building exercises (how to combine crafts and e-commerce; designing bottom-up currencies; collaborative living; peer-to-peer learning). Not much interesting data for business here - at least, not for sales. Some might be interested, again, in the long-term market implications of some of the stuff discussed here, but not much in the way of finding individual consumers to sell stuff to.
These two features are reflected in the ethnographic coding, which I think you might have misunderstood. In ethnographerese, coding means tagging. As you write you participated in Erasmus, the ethnographer tags with the sentence with a code like “spatial mobility”. If you heard about a job opening from a friend, she would tag it with “opportunities from peers” or something similar. Here’s an example from a study about dementia carers:
So, by design there is not a lot of attention on anything individually sensitive. That goes both for the raw and for the coded data.
For any remaining potential problems, we were careful to frame Edgeryders interaction away from danger. We did this through three tools.
- Validation. The results of the ethnographic study are published on the website for community validation. If you disagree with something, you can always speak up. The first bit of results is here.
- Think tank metaphor. We define Edgeryders as a "distributed think tank on youth policy". This means clearly that it is a space for work, somewhere you go wearing a suit, as I like to say. Or maybe you prefer informal attire, but it is unlikely you'd show up in a bathrobe, no matter how informal your working environment. I think this is pretty clear from Edgeryders literature, for example our [presentation video](https://www.youtube.com/embed/DCocK4bKIFE).
- finally, we were quite explicit in the Legals page: Please be aware that Edgeryders is a public space where you are responsible for what you post: if you are unsure whether it is legal or appropriate to share something, please don’t.
It goes on to mention research purposes, and specifies an open license for user generated content. Finally, it mentions email as the only real bit of personal data we store (people can and do use handles, like you do yourself); that’s covered by Council of Europe data protection policy .
And yes, it’s open, as open as I can get away with. Because it is research, paid for by the European taxpayer.
How can we improve? People can ask to be removed as users already; they can edit of change their content (there are now a, “edit this mission” and a “delete this mission” link next to your mission reports, so I see no reason for a content freeze period . Maybe we could explain better what the methodology of the project is. Actually, the methodology is itself emergent, and was not as clear to me when we wrote the Legals page.
Any other suggestions?