SMART05 - plan the next phase

5.2.1) Review the wiki after considering Evan’s views, consolidating pages, working on content and form. Make sure there are 3 good quality pages to show.

5.2.2) Offer to make one “user” page.

5.2.3) Start referring to the wiki and asking for opinions in the cop.

By Wednesday.

One of the features of Action Research is flexibility, because we are dealing with real living situations and people which cannot be frozen, re-run or predicted. So plans are not set in stone, they can be amended as events unfold, and that’s what happened just now.

The plan was to draft an initial explanatory message, deliberate upon it for a while, and then post it to the community. Instead what has happened is that the topic has arisen naturally in others’ conversations which suggested to me that the time to begin explaining what i am doing is straight away. It just means doing some of the plan in a different order, that’s all.

So here’s a copy of my messages which effectively initiate the enquiry into the effect of bringing a wiki to an existing COP.

1)

I’ve been thinking about the possibilities for collating this kind of information (and more) together as a group quite a lot recently, and I think I’ve worked out how best to do it. I’ll explain more about it when I’m ready in a few days time but if anybody feels they’d like to get involved in helping to steer a project for getting the ukcider world-editable reference website underway, then do please contact me.

Andy

2)

Hi John,

You asked what help am I looking for?
As I said I shall explain better in a couple of days time but the kind of help I am probably looking for is a small team of UK based cider enthusiasts who are interested in discussing the formatting of ukcider related lists and other information, the detailed development of an open group copyright policy, spending a little time watching over areas for which they have personal knowledge/expertise, and most importantly helping to build a growing participation from other members and website vistors. The lucky volunteers will also be co-researchers in a small part of my degree project, for which I have managed to negotiate credit for doing ukcider related work :-)

I don’t think I need the specific skills of programmers or traditional website designers, but those of librarians, community facilitators or reference book publishers might be handy. Anybody who has ever joined in on a wiki based community would be most welcome. In fact anybody who has even heard of a wiki and has time for the idea might step forward.

It’s all about trying to build the maximum amount of cooperation to build a growing pool of useful and up-to-date information for the good of the cause. I believe that, for real cider and perry, this group is best placed to pull together the biggest range of sources and make this a reality.

All of this could be discussed right here on the list, and maybe it should. On the other hand it might swamp the lowish volume friendly and directly relevant discussions which we tend to have here, if the ukcider list is suddenly inundated with posts about the structure, classification and formatting of lists. So what does the group think about that?

Andy

So now of course I am anxious to see what sort of response (if any) I get.

So in this critical stage I am acting upon my plan, but also interacting intuitively, reaching out for collaborators and collecting data all at the same time.

Phase 1 was a “1st person action enquiry” which involved preparing the required technology and investigating SMART tasks with 43things.

Since it was successful, I now know that I should be able to proceed with Phase 2, which attempts to answer questions about community members attitude to the idea of building up common resources and knowledge on the Wiki.

Phase ONE needed to be very flexible and barely planned, since it was an exploration into the unknown for me. Phase TWO I think, needs to be more carefully planned if it is to produce valid results as part of the Action Research process.

So the next task is to tidy up after Phase 1 -

• fully transfer out from the old host
• check permissions on the config diirectory, tidy up /wiki
• minimal wiki skinning

And then

Plan Phase Two

planning phase two will involve

• seeding the Wiki with an illustrative initial structure
• drafting an initial message which broaches the project to the community (show this to peers)
• thinking about data collection
• identify non-members who could also be contacted – DM, OhV
• deciding on a few definite goals, research questions
• identifying more possible SMART tasks for phase two

so , quite a big task altogether. I shall give myself until Saturday 5th Feb to complete this planning cycle, and then launch the main part.