The platform is designed to support archival work primarily: collecting artifacts, both in basic and applied ways, for lack of better terms. Basic in the sense that whenever we find something interesting but unrelated to the task at hand, it gets uploaded. Applied in the sense that 90% of our work is very directed: we are uploading and analyzing data related to utility moratoriums or water affordability, or increased energy usage. But I think the platform is designed to support a wide range of tasks and practices.
As for workflows, it’s funny: This is something I have given zero thought to explicitly, the style of our workflows. And now that the TERP research team is putting together the collaboration protocol, there is so much that RAs want to put in there related to workflows, documentation, and protocols. This signals to me that, while I think I have good documentation, it’s disorganized in google drive, hasn’t been updated in over a year, and doesn’t account for new forms of work (like the survey and interviews).
I would 100% say that the workflows the TERP team currently uses are linear and efficient. I think later on down the road, if we were to use TERP in other settings (courses, workshops) or take on new research team members, I would design work practices that are more exploratory and experiential. I guess my feeling is, you have to build the thing first… Even the workflow practices that might seem exploratory -- “search the site using keywords first to see what comes up, i.e. similar artifacts or the exact same artifact” -- I would still say that protocol was put in place to bolster efficiency.
But few things are written down. We have a tagging protocol, we have an interview processing protocol, we have guidelines for survey data write-ups, and that might be about it.
