meiqimichelle / s4s

Science for Society Solutions (s4s)

What is the problem?

Right now, the problem is that dryland earth environmental science doesn't have access to participatory methods of stakeholder engagement. This leads to decisions that are made without the stakeholder in mind. For example, the outreach component of grant funding requires that research be applicable and usable. If you have a scientist whose been working on the bench on in the field, that person doesn't necessarily have to experience to know how to make their research applicable to people, make it useable.

What we're trying to do

s4s want to solve this problem by creating a resource for such scientists to learn about participatory methods so that they can better make their research usable by their target audiences. The project also hopes to create a community of practice (experts in the field of participatory methods) to the community of interest (earth science researchers).

Where we are

So far, we made a first version of a wiki to test a potential structure for making easy for contributors to contribute. We tested this with potential contributors and are now working on a version two to test again.

Key documents

• Problem statement
• Project hypotheses
• Research branch

s4s's Issues

Write intro content for s4s site

• rename (s4s is not clear)
• need better 'landing page, why am I here' info

Do landscape analysis of what's already out there wrt participatory research online

What content and information already available online?

Assumption: if I were a drylands scientists who wanted to add more of these techniques to their work, what are they finding now when they search?

Edit/approve site description

This description will show up when the site is shared in social media. I took a first shot at it, but this needs to be approved/edited. Right now, I have:

Description: A wiki of proven participatory approaches to stakeholder engagement that drylands Earth and environmental scientists can use to help increase the impact of their work.

Rename site

We should test new names for the site because "s4s" and "Science for Society Solutions" isn't clear to end users.

Current suggestions (from an email with Karen):

"On the other hand, I was thinking about title and URL, but after think, I consider that your proposed is good! Jeje. In any case I propose below some options. I found a web page with similar name and URL (www.participatorymethods.org)

• tools for participatory science. It could be abbreviated as: toolps-wiki; URL:
  toolsforparticipatoryscience.org
• Collaborative tools -wiki; URL: collaborativetools. org
• Tools for participatory community; URL: participatory community.org "

Recommendation in general: let's test at the current url with changing the title on the site before we commit to changing the url.

Google Analytics

Do we have a GA-XXXXXXX number already? aka, have we opened a google analytics account for this site yet?

If yes, plz send @meiqimichelle the number in Slack. If not, we need one :)

Write research plan for talking with drylands researchers

We need to know what's preventing drylands researching from using participatory methods in their work

Create template for content creators

Content creators need a pre-filled template to guide them when entering info. I've started this at:

http://s4s.wikidot.com/_template

Create stakeholder/user map

After this is done, we can target people in these groups to talk to for user research as per #2 .

Confirm next-steps with Barron

It seems like based on our hypotheses and thoughts in the wiki, we need to talk to more drylands researchers to understand what is currently preventing them from using participatory methods in their work before we invest too much time in energy in what might be the wrong solution (ie, right now, we assume that one of the reasons is that they just don't have a place to find this info, and that we should create that place).

We need to talk this over with Barron to get his input.

• can we collect the content for the site in a way that's easy for the contributors (word doc, google form, etc) and populate the site ourselves?
• ask Barron about #2 (ie, does he know anything about this research question?)