interviews and data

Hey John, no problem. I can get a little too into it at times. But I found myself reading as much as I could about the problem. I read everything. But I think a big problem is that people don't know what information is out there. Even me, I'm finding it to be a challenge to identify the gaps in our research, and figure out what we still don't know.

It might be useful to just summarize a few key sources of data that we have. We have our fact base. We have the interviews. We have the summaries of the interviews. And we have people who have started flagging outside research that's relevant to our task force. I think we kind of have this little list of resources here and there, but some stuff slips through the cracks.

Maybe what we really need is to just create a suggested list of action items for every task force (similar to the suggested templates), and show every task force some of the things they could be doing. The broad point: understand the research, and help flag key findings for other people on your task force. The smaller points -- read the fact base, read the interview summaries, read the interviews, modify the interview summaries, look for other research, add key findings from the other research to the fact base, and (finally) identify questions that cannot be answered the the data we have right now. Not that every project needs to do every one of these. But it's good just to show people the kinds of research activities that they can be doing. Judging by the scattered activity here, I suspect some people feel lost with what they could do in terms of research.

Thinking out loud.

I really like this idea. What do you think the best way of presenting this "action plan" is? A simple post on LiquidThreads for each TF?

I think it would be useful to make a little essay/template like the one we have for roles. Just some suggestions. But maybe the title would be "suggested sources of research". Have some links to some of the general research sources we've flagged and included in the site. But then the last one or two points should be to (1) look for additional research that is relevant to your task force, and (2) be ready to identify gaps in research (e.g.: questions we cannot answer). We could then post this little essay/template at every task force, listing it on the front page, and maybe on the talk page too to be safe.