tagged: citizenstories

the broad concept is there, but to progress to wireframing the missing recruitment and participation piece needs to be resolved. what is the participation experience?

there are some basics. the research community puts informed consent up-front, where people are asked to digest a comprehensive description of the project and consent to every possible aspect of their future participation. the benefit is ethical clarity for the researchers, but it’s a big ask of people, leading to research staff intervention and financial incentives to get them over it.

that approach is anathema to commercial digital products, as the manual handling imposes a burden of cost and limit of scale. with the right design, the product sells itself, at scale, for free. key is to have an onboarding process that helps people experience the product’s core value. citizen stories needs that, for the same reason the concept introduces automation to the tagging process – it releases the ethnographic process from onerous labour, unlocking commercial possibilities.

but the ask of the concept entry wasn’t just to apply UX 101, it concluded “this kind of crowd-sourcing is inherently extractive, and we need to turn that around”.

nine earths neatly grounds some thinking on that. the existing piece is a high-end audio-visual installation, and used the research model to get there; it was in part university ethics approved research via kevin walker. d-fuse worked with local partner organisations, and people from these organisations recruited from their community. those organisations then guided their community through the process and ran events that fed back what we were doing with their contributions. it was an ongoing dialogue, people more collaborators than contributors. d-fuse got what it wanted, but value was made and stayed in the community too.

at least that was the idea. the feed back process was frustrated by practicalities; tooling could have helped a lot. better, it all be an integrated digital platform…

and what next for nine earths? to reach more people, it should spread beyond gallery installation; too few people can attend, from too little of society. to have more impact, it should engage people wherever they are, and those people should engage others where they find them. could it be a streaming tv channel? could it live in a browser? could it be… in their pocket? the same phone app that engages peoples to contribute hints and glimpses of their lives, could be the artwork itself? An integrated digital platform…

it’s clear to me the phone app needs to gathers video data, yes, but it should also engage people with their contributions. to be able to see their contributions in context, thematised with others. if there is value in commissioning the ethnography, in seeing patterns and drawing conclusions, the participants as well as the clients should be able to experience that too.

the missing recruitment and participation piece starts, then, with bringing the data explorer app for analysis into the crowd-sourcing app to gather video data. doing that right will enmesh value, ethics and a social virality. it’s what can live up to the name citizen stories. the wireframe pictured is my first pass at that, and i think it’s good.

diary | 18 nov 2024 | tagged: citizenstories · dfuse

I’m Toby from D-Fuse. We focus on environmental storytelling and have a strong background in filmmaking and audiovisual innovation. You can see that here. This is Nine Earths, a project that launched at the COP 26 climate change conference.
Before going into the application proper, I want to try and describe the impact of being one of these people because it gets to the heart of why we’re applying. There is something visceral in being confronted with this mosaic of people from all around the world. You start seeing patterns, it makes you think. But it rests on each of these hints and glimpses of life unpacking into real people living messy lives.
The challenge we’re addressing you can see here, it’s a data-led transition in creation and production. Previously we would fly around the world and film individual stories ourselves. We now design remote participation schemes and crowdsource that media. Before, we would then use an edit suite to arrive at a concrete form of the stories we’d gone out to film. Now the creation and production process is closer to exploring and visualising that crowdsourced data set. It’s unlocked this new way of relating you and I to the indexes and issues that matter. To those scary graphs.
The core problem is that the time burden of tagging and processing crowdsourced media is far too great for anybody but the research community – and us, but we’re foolhardy and it’s really limiting. Applying innovative new cross-cultural AI we are developing, we can automate the analysis of all this data. The benefit for the creative industries will be transformative.
This funding will enable us to create and test the software as a service prototype, de-risking the hardest capabilities required on our journey to a commercial product.
We are small and scrappy, but we’ve had big impact. I have no doubt we can deliver on this with your help.
Thank you.

‘UK registered micro or small businesses in the creative industries sector can apply for funding of up to £50,000 with a package of tailored support to grow their business.’
— Creative Catalyst, InnovateUK

diary | 17 oct 2024 | tagged: citizenstories · dfuse

nine earths invites audiences to see patterns and draw conclusions from its presentation of people living their lives around the world. at the project’s core is a creative spin on ethnography. now that’s a particular approach to media art/activism – contrast with the tired climate change imagery of smoke-stacks and polar bears. but beyond those particulars, there could be all sorts of creative uses of ethnography if only there were the tools to unlock the possibility. the tools we need ourselves…

hence the pitch posted before this. that we won funding for! the work of that application was back in march, we found out over the summer, and there’s been much blocking bureaucracy since. but now the project can start in earnest.

the project is two things. an automation technology for tagging, transcribing and translating video. a product built around that technology that gets the video in, then facilitates the insights out.

what’s the minimum-viable version of that? the tech part is straightforward: we can get baseline functionality using commodity computer machine-learning/ai, so that part’s an integration job. the product part could be straightforward, in that we know the pieces needed. i drew them in the slide above. so that part could just be a user-experience job to create a cohesive whole out of them. in the broadest strokes –

the client is another business. their need is cultural insight. our offer is a creative-industries spin on ethnography made possible by

• crowd-sourcing app to gather video data
• automatic tagging (AI)
• data explorer app for analysis

that is the straightforward answer, but i’m not sure it’s sufficient. take for example orbit, a research project to crowd-sourced a video dataset. the premise was people with low vision would better a future where AI could usefully ‘see’ for them. with this project–participant alignment, we had grounds to hope recruitment would go well.

the more examples you have when training ai, the better, so orbit had a further idea. it would have a crowd-sourcing camera app that people would actually want to use. it invested in product quality to unlock participation at scale. squint, and we’re in the ballpark of ‘suitable for the creative industries’.

in the end, participant recruitment was respectable but didn’t make the hoped-for leap of scale. we learnt that project–participant alignment for recruitment and product quality to convert that into productive participation was not enough.

so – it’s not sufficient yet, because there’s a missing recruitment and participation piece. to be commercially viable it needs to scale free of the transactional grind of financial reward and research staff intervention. in short, there needs to be a ‘why’ for people to get involved, and their friends too. this kind of crowd-sourcing is inherently extractive, and we need to turn that around.

diary | 17 oct 2024 | tagged: citizenstories · dfuse