Edgeryders acted as a convener in the Future of Care consortium-to-be, but we are a tiny company that hardly exists, and there is no way we have either the time and the intellectual firepower to write the full proposal. If this is to work at all, we will have to work in a decentralized way.
“Who writes what” depends of course on who leads what activity, and that in turns depend on each partner’s competences. We covered this in the methodological note. In this post, I tentatively assign a partner to be responsible for writing each part of the proposal. The word “part” refers to sub-sections in the Table of Contents of the call-specific questions in the proposal template. The TOC is mandatory: you can think of each section as subsection as a box we have to tick (concept, expected impact, management etc.). By agreeing on a division of labor, we can then each work at our own pace to the subsections we are responsible for.
Two important methodological points:
- I am assigning partners to be ultimately responsible for writing subsections. This does not mean that no collaboration is to happen. We do this project because we want to work with each other, and our skills are highly complementary, so that some collaboration is required to do a good job, even in the proposal writing phase. For example, I have assigned Politecnico to lead the prototyping activities: but they will definitely need to bake into that layer issues of practices and ethics of how to work with patients, that is more the department of SCIMpulse. Politecnico's responsibility means that it falls down to @Stefano_Maffei and Beatrice to involve @markomanka and let him know what pieces he needs to write where. Marco's responsibility is then to deliver his piece to consortium quality standards and in time.
- A decentralized style of work is very efficient, but in this context it means each of us can make the whole effort fail by not delivering high-quality contribution in time. This means we absolutely need an internal hard deadline: that will give us a time buffer to fix any remaining issues. I propose the internal deadline is March 31st 2015, two full weeks before the internal deadline.
Common work on sections 1 (excellence) and 2 (impact)
All partners will have to do some work here. I propose to break them down across dimensions, that are more or less consistent with our layers. We hope to break new ground in:
- Running large(ish)-scale online conversation and harvesting them for collective intelligence outcomes (Edgeryders + LABRI). This is the online debate layer.
- Running hacker-style prototyping phases, that takes those conversations and their outcomes into account, turn them into artifacts, test them and document the whole process. This is tricky because the prototype lab has to take into account the online conversation, and refer back to it (Politecnico + SCIMpulse): it is a "ghost in the room" approach. This is the prototyping layer.
- Collectively designing system-level intervention, i.e. policy. This means channeling findings and contributions over to a systemic view; it is a more top-down and expert-led activity than the others, but its collective intelligence features must still be evident (SSE + Scimpulse). This is the system-level design layer
- Network-science based tools for harvesting and validating online community (LABRI + Edgeryders). This is the technological layer.
We are essentially claiming that advances in the treatment of a complex problem like care needs advances in many fields, and not just one. This makes our project inherently interdisciplinary, across four disciplines: social sciences for collective intelligence convening and hosting techniques and harvesting techniques; design for prototyping (to enhance its collective dimension); policy making, that needs to successfully mediate between bottom-up collective creativity and system-level constraints; and computer science for building sensing/sensemaking technology.
For now I am not quoting Ezio. If he accepts to get involved, as we all hope, he will probably do so with an Edgeryders hat. I think his main contribution could go to 2 and especially 3.
Who writes what
With this in mind, the complete allocated table of content of the call-specific questions could be as follows. Abbreviations: Edgeryders = ER; Politecnico di Milano = Poli; SCIMpulse Foundation = SF; Uni Bordeaux = LABRI; Stockholm School of Economics = SSE.
- Excellence
- Objectives – ER.
- Relation to the work programme – ER, LABRI, Poli.
- Concept and approach – ER to provide the first draft, then revision from the others.
- Ambition – ER + LABRI for collective intelligence; Poli for design; SSE for policy; SF to put everything in a (health) care perspective.
- Impact
- Expected impacts – ER + LABRI for collective intelligence; Poli for design; SSE for policy; SF to put everything in a (health) care perspective
- Measures to maximise impact – ER + LABRI for collective intelligence; Poli for design; SSE for policy; SF to put everything in a (health) care perspective
- Implementation
- Work plan - Work packages, deliverables and milestones. I propose to have five work packages: four corresponding to our layers and one for management. Each work package is care of the respective partner; management care of the leading partner.
- Management structure and procedures – leading partner + ER.
- Consortium as a whole – I would not worry about this for now
- Resources to be committed – byproduct of 3.1: each partner contributes to the part concerning the WPs she participates in
- Members of the consortium
- Participants – Each partner describes themselves
- Third parties – If any
- Ethics and Security
- Ethics – SF, leading partner
- Security – ER, leading partner