AO: Participation as users. “Our engagement with CTVC is allowing us to discover “local protocols” of collaboration and discussion. After joining these channels, we can adapt them to conduct PD activities with community members.”
AO: Less about data practices in the collaboration and more about how the research team collected their data of what was going on online: “We are taking screenshots of Facebook pages, Wiki pages and blog posts, and also taking daily notes to summarize ongoing activity. … collecting material samples on the use of online tools not only helps us learn about these tools, but also about the people using them, opening a window to their intentions and aspirations.” I’m a bit unclear on what is “collaborative” here as it largely just seems like the researchers collecting data off of the online site and remotely participating in discussions?
The data collected about the online conversations does not appear to have been shared back online or outside of the three-person researcher group.
AO: The authors note heavy use of online communication and collaboration tools including Facebook groups, Wiki pages, blogs, email and message groups. (page 50).
AO: The authors note their remote physical distance from those they are engaging with. “We note that our research has been so far conducted remotely. The first author did visit Damascus once in September 2011 and met with several members, however, afterwards the research team has been residing in Switzerland. To triangulate our data under these conditions, we engage in discussions among CTVC members on social media, and we keep in contact with community members to collect their reflections through non-structured conversations (over text-chat and email).”
AO: The paper is co-authored and authors note the first author’s “insider” status and second and third authors’ “outsider” status (although they all reside in Switzerland?). Here, there appears to be an unarticulated assumption that the collaborative writing with members of “insider” and “outsider” status is beneficial (in order to get both insider and outsider insights). They do not discuss in detail the subject positions or epistemic cultures of the interlocutors.
“The first author, Halabi, is a PhD student who grew up in Syria and is currently in his late twenties. He has a profile similar to CTVC members, and benefits from this situation by being able to understand the community activities in detail. Most of the data presented in this paper was collected by him. At the beginning of the research project, he was also able to travel to Syria to meet with some CTVC members. The second and third authors, Courant and Zimmermann, are more experienced researchers who have Swiss backgrounds and did not travel to Syria recently. In a traditional social sciences perspective, they benefit from their cultural distance with the data to raise questions about aspects which may appear normal to community members.”
AO: “Participation” is generally promoted as a main tenet in conducting the design of ICT for development” (49)
AO: shared value system (“Members of CTVC share an interest in benefiting from open-source culture and modern online collaborative tools to promote their learning and to contribute to Arab and Syrian societies.”) (page 50)
AO: The authors write: they are“finding the design problem through participation with the community” but it is very unclear what exactly they are doing that is “collaborative” other than interacting with those they are studying.
AO: The authors write that: “Our engagement with CTVC is allowing us to discover “local protocols” of collaboration and discussion. After joining these channels, we can adapt them to conduct PD activities with community members. Taking the example of the above case, we can suggest an online collaborative design workshop with CTVC members by using a Facebook event page. This approach thus enables us to appropriate PD methods according to the local context by learning to use existing ways adopted by community members to communicate and coordinate.” They seem to be using the term collaborate interchangably with “communicate” and “discuss.”
AO: The authors do not discuss power relations at all.
AO: not discussed at all. It is unclear how the interlocutors are interested in the collaboration.
AO: The authors write: “We thus express commitment to an inductive process of research, where the emergence of design problems comes through grounded and participatory inquiry. We would like to move beyond problematizing “participation” when it comes to defining design problems, and to explore how this issue can be resolved.” (49)
AO: Authors cite th emergence of feminist HCI and postcolonial computing (50)
AO: “local communities”
AO: The authors are thinking about how they can address ICT design problems through engagement with their users.