Crossposting from the Convo Blog

Blographies add to the conversation! We’ve been using the term “Blography” to help explain how we capture information for clients on longer ethnographic research projects in a real-time immersive and agile way. As all our team members are using blog it was only natural to consider where they fit in a research program today. For the client (reader) it’s a great and transparent way to see how our field work is progressing. A typical project today combines direct inputs from participants; typically forms (mobile or PC enabled) which result in blog posts and updates to the common database. This creates a number of benefits.

Discussions with the client can become real-time. This is particularly important when doing more longitudinal studies. Our client blog-space remains completely private. Which means we can have an ongoing conversation around everything from transcripts, interview summaries, emerging themes, planning and scheduling, to diary updates, questions of the week for participants etc.

There’s a second aspect. Blographies can save money and get greater depth. We find we are using them more and more to screen participants, target further areas for inquiry. We are also using them to set up and get to know participants before running co-creation workshops with them.

It also means – at the end of the job you also get a repository of information that is accessible, searchable, and readily sorted into new categories or tagged to be looked at in different ways. If required we can even turn it into a “book” for you.

This is a post that’s long overdue, since the time the film was released! I was spurred to write it this morning, as I’m quite excited to be on a panel discussion at the screening of Tactical Tech’s film called 10 Tactics – Turning Information into Action.

The screening is at the Conference Room of National College, Bandra today and is being hosted by Point of View.  I’m often asked what Info-Activism is, and this film is a must-see for all those who are curious about, interested in and work in the area. I’m also often asked whether I’m a rights activist or a digital activist – and I say no, I’m an ethnographer and researcher who is sometimes an accidental information activist. I’d also broaden the scope of the relevance of these 10 Tactics to those who are working in the social media area, and to those in the corporate world, who’s focus of work is in developing products, services and strategies in a world where customers, users, consumers are already exchanging information, having conversations, and learning often much faster than organizations are. Or simply, it’s for those who care and already use these tools – how can you get more involved in making a difference?

From the 10 Tactics website:

What is 10 Tactics?

10 tactics provides original and artful ways for rights advocates to capture attention and communicate a cause. It includes a 50-minute film documenting inspiring info-activism stories from around the world and a set of cards; with tools tips and advice, for you to work through as you plan your own info-activism

The film features 35 info-activism stories told from the point of view of advocates in 24 different countries including Lebanon, India, Tunisia, Egypt, Kenya, Indonesia, South Africa and the UK.

The film is shared at the website as 10 Tactics, along with Tactics cards that cover a case study, a video story, suggestions and tips, and a featured tool. The 10 Tactics are:

1. Mobilizing people
2. Witness and record
3. Visualize your message
4. Amplify personal stories
5. Just add humour
6. Manage your contacts
7. How to use complex data
8. Use collective intelligence
9. Let people ask the questions
10. Investigate and expose

(I’m featured in Tactic 8 – Use Collective Intelligence – here’s the gist of what I said – “We have communities that we have developed over time in several spaces on the web – on blogs, Facebook, Twitter. What these tools allow you to do is network with all of your online communities, to operate as hubs of connected people. So when something happens and you need to respond, it’s about the spontaneous mobilisation of a community that already exists online, through the multiple nodes and hubs that you have created as you leave your footprints on the web.”

Tactic 8 – Use collective intelligence from Tactical Technology Collective on Vimeo.)

The project came about at the Info-Activism camp held in February 2009, which I was very privileged to have attended.

We’ve also used collective intelligence and swarming way back in 2004 when the Tsunamis had devastated parts of Asia and then again in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina – each of these on a different scale, and using other technologies like blogs and wikis and Skype.

If you’re interested in this area, make sure you view the whole film, all 10 tactics! And there are screenings all over the world, so do go for them, and participate in the discussions.

I was asked this question at the Anthrodesign group, in the context of a conversation around getting into the swing of a project and developing some working momentum . I shared there, how I often find myself turning to my blog and twitter communities for helping me with my thinking on qualitative and ethnographic research projects. I was then asked these questions: Could you elaborate a bit more on how you tap into your twitter community? with the limited character set, do you drive them to answer in more detail on your blog? How effective have you found twitter in generating meaningful conversations and resources?

Sharing my response here with a few modifications – there are many many ways I use Twitter, apart from keeping in touch with people, the world, and sharing warm fuzzy feelings or rants. I’ll try and describe some of these:

• If I’m looking for advice (from a community I trust) on say which phone to buy next, or where to find macbook chargers, or how to solve a particular problem I find I can really rely on my twitter community.  During the Mumbai 26/11 terror attacks Twitter was what kept many of us feeling ‘safe’ (in the way of experiencing it together) and connected to the outside world, as we were stuck in our homes. We also used it to try and reach out to people who were affected – eg. sourced and published lists of victims from hospitals (and directed people to those lists via links on twitter). I’ve often also used Twitter to help mobilize action around immediate causes like someone needing blood of a certain group in a specific hospital. But these are all very specific short term needs being addressed by quick responses.

• I often use Twitter (and my blog – they’re linked BTW) to have meaningful conversations, tease out some areas, ask for help on resources, opinions, suss out experts, or participants for studies. Obviously, with no mention of the actual client or specific subject of research. A recent example – a client is looking to understand Durability as a driver for purchase in her category, and I  broadened the issue and asked a question on Twitter  - the thought to actually blog this series started off with this tweet – and responses to it - looking for evidence that ‘durability’ as a brand proposition isn’t a big purchase driver for youth today. egs, links anecdotes welcome!”.  Sometimes its linked back to my blog, or to something someone else has published and I’m always amazed at both the depth and width in the sharing of perspectives that it evokes.

• And I use it increasingly to share links around what I’m reading or find interesting. The way I do it, is bookmark the link on Delicious and I’ve automated it to show both at my blog, and on Twitter. Often, these are starting points for meaningful conversations among several tweeters who share similar interests. And as importantly, if not more, I get to see all their marvelous links too!

• Or to live-tweet an event I’m at, as I did with TEDIndia last year and then just aggregated my tweets at my blog, and TedXMumbai more recently. The interesting thing about such tweets is you actually have people responding back in real-time, you feel your community is ‘present’ too, and often their questions and comments are shared back at the conferences. These could be conferences around my areas of work too.

• To amplify interesting thoughts, ideas, requirements, needs of others I follow on twitter thru RTs.

• Every post I make on my blog, every bookmark I link to at Delicious – is tweeted. As a result, it helps me broadcast my thoughts, and encourages people to come in and add to the conversation. It really doesn’t bother me where they do this – as today it’s possible to weave much of this into a lifestream of sorts. (I know this might be annoying to those who follow my blog, my twitter profile, and facebook as there can be much repetition – I need to find a way to sort this one out!)

So to answer the question more directly … I find I’m using Twitter increasingly both as a quick-byte sort of space – in and out, and as a gateway or pipe through which information and conversations flow!

Would love to hear your views – How do you use twitter or your blog in generating meaningful conversations and resources around what you do?

I asked this question on Twitter this morning and have had fabulous responses from a very alert and vibrant community there. Thought I’d share:

My question – need egs of advertising anchored in rites of passage – rituals assocd w transitional points – eg. grad’n, wedding, baby… help pls!!!

The answers:

Thank you all!  I love Twitter – naah the people who make up Twitter!!!

For a few days over the next two weeks, I’m going to be a “scribe” where I will visit with people who’s lives are being transformed through mobile innovations. This will be in rural Maharashtra and Kolhapur, and the two projects we are covering in India are Nokia Life Tools and Nokia Tej.  This is part of  Progress, a Nokia initiative with Lonely Planet that is focused on capturing the human impact of mobile innovation; bringing to life real stories of people.

As a scribe, I will be reporting on ordinary people progressing through mobile innovation from a fly-on-the-wall perspective, taking parallel content – text photos, podcast and video.

Why I accepted this project is because it’s a great opportunity to be exposed to mobile innovations on-the-ground. One of my pet research themes for the last few years has been to study how technology is making or can make a real difference in the way we live, work and play. Also how it might bring real changes in people’s lives. It also ties well into my experiences and skills of being a researcher, and I’m hoping to view these projects through an ethnographer’s lens.

I, like Stuart who is covering other programs in San Francisco and Manaus Brazil, was asked by Andy Abramson [@andyabramson] and Danielle Ross of Comunicano to participate in an evolution of the Nokia blogger relations program.  Stuart has a good post on what this means for blogger relations and how might a company engage with bloggers in such programs.

Full disclosure – I’m not getting paid to do this, but my travel and accommodation costs will be borne by Nokia.

UPDATE:

Here’s the full series:

1. Mobile Innovations – Introduction
2. Nokia Life Tools – Agriculture Service – “The Internet for the next million” – mobile innovations in rural India
3. Nokia Life Tools – Education Service – “Raju go get bakery” – mobile innovations in rural India
4. The old, the not-so-old, and many facets of the new
5. “My laptop, my MBA” -  Commercial Mobile Innovation for SME’s

This one’s especially for my more recent readers and newer members of my community here, on Facebook and on Twitter.  I was interviewed by BlogAdda. It was interesting to be able to reflect a bit upon my early days of blogging from 2003, and introspect on how blogging has changed me and my world!  I’ve stayed away from mentioning all my early blogging buddies – you know who you are – but focussed on how we shared, learned and grew together. It was also nice to touch briefly upon my research and ethnography experiences, more on which you can find here.

Some snippets “stolen” from the interview:

Click below to read it in full. Enjoy!

If you do too, don’t hesitate to click the button below, this December.

Take this – it’s a great start to collecting some good data:

We need your participation:

1. You can take the survey here- open until 24 December 2008 but don’t wait until the last day.

All valid participants get a FREE copy of Summary & Key Points from the “Overview of Blog & Social Media Environment in India”, a report prepared by Blogworks – this will be emailed to you. For it to be a valid entry, you must answer all questions.

Once you have completed your entry, do share your feedback on the questionnaire by writing to survey@blogworks.in.There would be mistakes to learn from & things to do better the next time -we’d appreciate you sharing your thoughts.

Media Partners for the initiative: Impact, Pitch and Exchange4Media.com

Bonus Link: Here’s a list of Indian businesses using Twitter, being compiled by Gaurav.

I’m getting a huge load of comments around the politics of religion, of division and hate at my last few posts on the Mumbai terror attacks. While religion and politics may have a lot to do with the state of our world today, my blog’s not the forum to air or feed these divisions. I almost feel it’s a violation of my own person.

So I am deleting them. Sorry. All other comments and conversations are welcome, as always!

The #Mumbai Twitter feed is now flooded with them too. I’m stopping watching it. I’m certainly not playing.

For all those who feel they have lots to say – I’d recommend they do something more constructive. Start by reading Ingrid Srinath’s post titled This is not India’s 9/11 [thanks Peter, for the link] and Priyanka Joshi’s comments there.

I rediscovered this TED talk by James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds.

James Surowiecki pinpoints the moment when social media became an equal player in the world of news-gathering: the 2005 tsunami, when YouTube video, blogs, IMs and txts carried the news — and preserved moving personal stories from the tragedy.

. Thanks to @gauravonomics for pointing to this on Twitter.

I remember in a post on my reflections I had referred to insect societies as a metaphor to describe the interdependence and decentralized approach we took with the South East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami blog. And had also stated there:

Today, I believe that no crisis on this scale or magnitude will ever be handled again without sms, blogs, and wikis. That social tools will become a natural extension of rapid adaptation to chaotic conditions.

James Surowiecki also talks of the dark sides of blogs and social networks – one of the dangers of spending a lot of time on the internet is that the more tightly linked we become to each other, the harder it is for each of us to remain independent. The network starts to shape your views – which has a lot of benefits, but the problem is that groups are only smart when the people in them are as independent as possible. This is the paradox of the Wisdom of Crowds – the danger of a circular mill. Surowiecki talks of a circular mill of death where ants march in a circle, thinking they are following the leader, but actually just going around and around until they all die. He states as an example, memes that emerge from the blogosphere.

As I observe the progression of social media, I do feel we are more than ever, grappling with this paradox. There is no doubt in my mind that the Wisdom of Crowds as Surowiecki describes it can be huge. It has been transformational for me personally and professionally.

However, what I’m also seeing is less jazz play and improv in the blogworld, as we did in the early days of conversational blogging. We read the same stuff, we link to the same stuff – we did that then too – but there’s so much blogging today that it’s becoming almost impossible to escape following the echo. The economics of the market has begun determining what we blog about. Communities and networks (like with the social media and PR blogger scenes), while helping professionals in the space form frameworks and value for clients, are making many of us shy away from truly independent thinking as we seek easy answers and smart ways to convince our Clients to ‘buy’. We’re very good at re-framing and recycling the same stuff and we’ve learnt to build and manage our Whuffie to market ourselves in a post-scarcity economy. And we’re looking for easy answers.

I look through my GoogleReader and I see only a few posts with interesting original thinking in them today. Or maybe the gates of attention are allowing very little to come in? Twitter has exposed me to a whole lot of new and interesting people and thinking, and has replaced my GoogleReader as my dashboard for the day. It’s definitely my hangout space today. But I am greedy and don’t want to lose the breadth of good stuff that comes through in my newsreader.

So how do we resolve this – adopt the good from our networks and yet break away from the circular mill?

Preoccupation with whuffie + easy answers = the circular mill of death?

It’s a trap I am falling into. I don’t really have a solution. Should I be following more people on Twitter – this scares me! How do I find more diversity today? That wow and magic and flow of serendipitous discovery in my early blogging days just isn’t happening enough today. In my view, what the Wisdom of Crowds should mean is a collection of individuals with independent thinking that is allowed to emerge and grow in the collective. We’ve got to guard against excessive averaging out, imitative behaviour and aggregation. I’m just going to keep looking for the mouse!

Bonus Link: Gaurav just did a post around his take on Crowdsourcing, Wikinomics and the Wisdom of Crowds.

I’ve been helping out with the PhweetTalk – the Phweet blog and I’m cross-posting this here. I’ll probably be doing more of my blogging there for a while. And I’ve become a real Twitter monster – I update stuff I am doing very regularly there – so do check me out!

Since the public alpha launch on July 30th, we’ve been asked several times whether Phweet is a noun or a verb. We’d like to think it’s both.  Phweetisms we like, even more! Here’s a collection of user-generated comments around Phweet afloat in the Twitter world and the blogosphere:

Twitter’s curry; it is called Phweet: TeachEng.Us

A CB radio – space for spontaneous conference calling: Chinarut

Post Cards, and Now Phone Calls, from Twitter Island Tweet-Phweet: Ed Moltzen

Michael Bauwens,P2P Foundation – Phone + Twitter = Phweet

Ruthlessly Simplified Disintermediation – Jim Courtney at Skype Journal

Jon Husband at the FastForward Blog:Twitter Conjoined With Instant Calling (TM) = Phweet

VoIP is Unstoppable – It’s Simply our Infrastructure – Ken Camp

Jeff Pulver: a new application promoting the End-to-end principle.

Christopher Herot: (Try doing a Twitter search on “Skype”.)  The result: Phweet.

Who says you can’t VOIP on Aircell, I just did it – Andy Abramson

PhoneBoy : because I can?

Mark Mayhew: @comcastcares are you using http://phweet.com yet (to enhance your customer support)?

This one made us laugh – Phweet-Phound-of-Phuccess: Doug Haslam

Phweet has that wild-west VoIP feel – ntheory

“On-Demand Consulting” and “The principle of talk radio”: Mark Mayhew in a Phweet conversation with Stuart and me.

Phweet Rocks!: Scott Baird, @mediapirate

VOIP from your browser (via Twitter) direct to my Truphone and Phweet to front-end calls to Truphone – James Body of Truphone

A cool visual representation of Andy’s Aircell-Phweet experience, from ValleyWag:

Atmasphere: it’s pretty damn simple

Do drop in more Phweetisms at the comments – you may get as creative as you wish

We’re now working with another tech company on a research project which will include blogging and the use of twitter for both participants and researchers who are located all over the world.  Some issues we’re grappling with:

• how much coaching and of what kind is required for those participants who are not actively using blogs or twitter; or even those who don’t have 24/7 access to the internet?
• the balance between being broad or narrow in our focussing of the space – the issue here is we don’t want to lose out on spontaneity, and yet we do have a research agenda we need to meet
• also the balance between an informal space and a formal space;  data-collection vs. data collation
• how do we guide the content without biasing participants – would intermittent telephone calls be useful?  home visits where the benefit could be that as observers, if we see something interesting and we say take a quick pic and point out to respondents that this is the sort of thing she could be blogging – would that bias the research?
• the balance between allowing respondents/participants to literally ‘own’ the space vs. our curating it so it becomes more ‘usable’ for the client, and works as a reporting format too
• linked to the above point – should it become a presentation deck for the Client (and hence neat ‘n pretty ) or is the Client willing to take the risk of letting it emerge as it does in its natural flow?
• how do you encourage participation between participants – should we? Would an open discussion page work?

Hmmm. More issues and questions we should be asking? Experiences? Opinions?

…. to break my blogging hiatus. How helpless we are under the force of nature’s fury. Myanmar Cyclone 28,458 deaths & 33,416 missing. China Earthquake almost 10000 dead & mounting. All of this in less than 10 days.

There’s been a huge load of blogging and tweeting live as the earthquake and its aftermath unfolded, with first accounts – reports, images and videos from those in the zone, as it happened.

The Worldwidehelp group blog and wiki sprung back into action on May 4, with the Myanmar cyclone – there’s a huge load of information on aid resources available at the Nargishelp wiki now. Many of our contacts on the ground are saying that it’s been difficult and very political trying to get aid quickly through to those affected in Myanmar. We’re also blogging updates on the Sichuan earthquake, and will try and put up information on help required and aid agencies as we get the information.

Tags: Asia, China, Earthquake, Myanmar, Cyclone, Nargis, Floods, Breaking News, Disaster, Emergency, Humanitarian, Relief, Rescue

There’s nothing like blog friends to make you feel guilty about ignoring your blog!!!!! Stuart first slaps his own wrist makes his affirmations a couple of days ago, Aparna pings me today with a one-liner in her sign-off on a quick chat we had today:

“ok gotto go now – will talk more about the project later…btw I wish your blog would have more than just links for the day

Gulp. I’ll be back soon. Just been crazy busy with a large motivational research on condoms (Shubhangi and I, along with out Client, also a qualitative researcher, now feel we have done everything, and can talk to anyone about anything!!!). Quick trips to Hyderabad and Calcutta.

Right after that, without a day’s breather, we were off to Delhi on a recky visit for a Learning Journey we’re hosting in Mumbai and Delhi, for a group of health-care professionals from the US, early January. It’s quite challenging organizing both content and logistics for 7 full days. Visits to NGO’s and ayurveda centres and scouting venues and meeting documentary film-makers in 3 days of recky. And to rural Uttar Pradesh.

Have lots to share on my visit to two villages in the Ghaziabad district (the amazing pic above is captured by Shubhangi) – but for now, just this one. My field person there – Mithilesh – who I met after a pretty long while, reminded that the winner of Star Voice of India, Ishmeet, had been a participant in an ethnographic study I was doing in Chandigarh many years ago. This was a project on Sources of Cool among Youth, for MTV. In fact, she also reminded me that he had actually taken us to his college and hangout joints to meet his friends, as part of the study. I hadn’t made the connection till then.

Heh!