Recap From Nov-20-2103 MVP Clinic

Overview: This MVP clinic helps two very different people facing analogous situations: one is a researcher looking for action research topics in the KM4Dev community, the other is an entrepreneur who wants to make athletic contests more engaging for contestants and the audience by providing more information that is mobile device friendly.

(You can also download from http://traffic.libsyn.com/skmurphy/MVPClinic131120.mp3)

Commonalities between the two cases that were presented on November 20, 2013

• Challenges in understanding the embedded (often invisible) interests, incentives and assumptions of different groups
• Assumptions about boundaries of organizations that interact with those communities
• Change management perspective is necessary but is challenging to apply in a community context — it is more of an organizational term, based on a high degree of control
• watching a school of fish trying to determine how they decide to change direction
• both were familiar with communities but may not have appreciated impact of incentives

Panelists for today:

• Howard Silverman http://solvingforpattern.org
• John Smith http://Learningalliances.net
• Sean Murphy https://www.skmurphy.com

Presenter #1: Phillip Grunewald

• PhD student researching how knowledge exchanges can be best facilitated in the international development sector.
• Have been working on this for 1.5 years now and have another 1.5 years  left to conduct studies
• Before starting this PhD, worked in various organizations  on Marketing, Corporate Communications, Monitoring and Evaluation and  customer relationship management.
• Hold a bachelor’s degree in corporate communications and a masters degree in international studies.
• LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/philipp-grunewald/6a/4ba/82/
• Blog: www.thoughtfordevelopment.com / twitter: @thought4dev

Situation: 

• Attempting to find a mutually beneficial way of facilitating researcher-practitioner interaction.
• Usually a (social) researcher  (from an external institution) is perceived as an “outsider” that sees  his collaborators as either “means to an end” or as the objects of the  study.
• This is due to a generally perceived separation between  researchers and practitioners. In this model the practitioners usually  deliver or are themselves the data for analysis.
• The findings of  research then either stay within the realm of research or are  distributed back via, for example, reports.
• This not only makes learning  cycles very long but also means that there are things the researcher  “is blind to” by not being closely embedded in the context that is being  studied (this has its advantages and disadvantages).
• In  the particular the present situation involves a community of practitioners in a collaborative manner.
  • Have  offered 2 hours a week until next May to spend on research projects of  their choice.
  • An initial survey (http://www.allourideas.org/grunewaldtopics/results ) was used to generate and poll ideas. This generated considerable interest and a surprising list of ideas that  the community is interested in.
  • However, since then discussion on the  most popular topic started and participation rates have been low.
  • Part  of the reason might be the internal dynamics of the community, which are hard to completely understand but there are many other potential issues.

Ideal outcomes:

• High levels of engagement on both sides
• Mutual learning about content and process
• Continuous feedback to the research process so that further research can incorporate (reiterative process)
• Personal development of researcher
• Basic research – exploration of impact of academic work
• Experimenting – developing experience for questions that are motivated by practitioners concerns

 Criteria for acceptance of a project

• Poll the community for popularity
• Within the KM4Dev concerns (broad thematic area)

Alternative frames:

• Researcher has to be in both worlds
• Researcher has to be intimately involved with the research subjects
• Framed within the KM4Dev topic

Alternative next steps:  

• Abandon the whole idea as “too difficult”
• Make questions more specific/have a clearer thematic focus
• Have more explicit objectives
• Make people aware that there is a free resource that they are not using
• Ask people if they question researcher’s ability/capacity to come up with valuable contributions
• Ask community members if they have no capacities to dedicate to the process (mainly time)
• Ask why they do not prioritize this activity vis-a-vis their other activities
• Drive  topics that have been chosen and only have low levels or participation  constrained to specific points in time (rather than ongoing)

NOTES Not much response after the initial survey.  Lots of ideas and votes in the survey, but the social network site (Ning) has had little or no participation

Sean: offering service at no charge, letting them set the agenda.
Howard: trying to get an understand what an ideal research project be?  what kind of research design?
Philipp: participatory action research.  looks at matter, gathers data, comes up with findings, brings it back. assess changes.  Then the cycle repeats.
John: what does research mean to this community, 2-3 hours a week for 6 months may not match their expectations for a project, consider offering a research-related task (as opposed to undifferentiated “research”) e.g. data cleaning so that you avoid the challenge of not matching expectations or running up against problematic ideas of “research.”
Sean Is there a concern about asking for credit in results? There IS a problem on the academic side with a self-assessed view of academics that are irrelevant.
Sean: making a comparison with Eugene’s case: trying to make things easier, but not changing behavior. Assessing speed. making things go farther.
Philipp: KM4Dev is focused on practice; other communities dominated by academics.  Research might be out of the norm; people are oriented toward peer-to-peer exchanges.

Using Barb’s question: why should people change?  is there a clear blockage or missing piece that research can address? Originally this was just a probe: “what would the reaction be?”  So far: any outcome is interesting.  but not prepared to give up. Payoff given the challenge of understanding Philipp’s process. How do open source management of volunteers? Is there a pattern for organizing volunteer labor that could be harnessed / re-purposed for KM4Dev? Challenge of figuring out how to leverage 2-3 hours a week may mean focus don’t invest effort in engaging if payoff is small/problematic

Howard: in a nonprofit where GIS data described a watershed that was intact in BC.  Tried to engage community around protecting the watershed.  When leaders from the nonprofit traveled there and met with community representatives, they found potential interest, but more interested in issue of teen suicide — a much more immediate threat than the logging companies coming in.  That was a real learning experience for the non-profit.  Shifted the organizations focus to partnering with them through a focus on their issues.

[Added post-call: My quick summary of this nonprofit experience glosses over the fact  that, for the nonprofit, the discovery that community members had  completely different priorities represented / might have represented an  enormous challenge for the organization. The nonprofit had no expertise on the issue of teen suicide, and this issue could easily have been seen as beyond the scope of the organization’s mission, which was at the time more environmentally oriented. It was the willingness to listen to community needs and to be flexible in responding that enable the organization to move forward.]

• What does the community view as a key problem ?
• Where are KM4Dev’s priorities and how does Phillip’s expertise and experience align for best contribution.
• Philipp’s  feeling of pain and surprise means he has learned something.
• Complexity of the KM4Dev ecosystem that Philipp is working with.  same thing for Eugene.  In both cases, people see the offer through very different lenses.
• How tp open up receptivity to alternative ways of working together? The challenge is getting a group of people to change.

Questions from the audience : First question is what’s research in many organizations where KM4Dev members work research is a restricted activity takes a certain status and has some inherent separation from “work in the field.”  So the first suggestion is: how about offering elements of research but not calling it research?  That could include data gathering and analyzing data, or a literature search or many many other bits or pieces that would be useful but are dis-aggregated. Second suggestion is that: KM4Dev members come from many different organizations and they play different roles in those organizations.  Getting them to agree on one research agenda or on one perspective going forward is an impossible feat.  The community will never “agree.” So what’s behind both suggestions is the idea of dissolving as a strategy: to breaks down research tasks into elements on the one hand and to break down the KM4Dev community into sectors with distinct interests.

Presenter #2: Eugene Chuvyrov

• Have 14  years of  programming experience, with 3.5 of those being an independent   consultant.
• Built many web-based and several mobile products – love technology, not just programming, and I can see myself programming robots or wearable devices just as eagerly as I do mobile dev.
• Ran a Software Architecture group in Florida and I help organize a  cloud  computing group here in the San Francisco Bay area.
• http://www.we-compete.com/

Situation: 

• A  year ago, Eugene and two former colleagues from Florida broke  ground on what I wanted to be a new way to engage the competitors and  fans in amateur athletic competitions.
• As a bodybuilding competitor of 6  years, it always bothered me that:
  •  the process of registering for  competitions was archaic,
  • there was no way to see who was competing beforehand, and that sometimes competition results would not be posted for weeks.
  • I also thought that the competitions were boring for the  audience, since many were not familiar with competition rules or competitors.
• I wanted to start with the sports I am very familiar with  (strength events) and expand into other sports from there.
• I showed a  simple prototype of my mobile app to one of the more prominent  competition organizers and he stated they’d use it. (Face palm) that was  all the validation I needed to get going on executing the idea.
• It took us 6 months to build a website and a mobile app, and I have been promoting it for another 6 months now.
  • I promoted http://we-compete.com  via contacting competition organizers who I knew directly, or via  friends who are also competitors.
  • I also contacted many competition  organizers whom I didn’t know, after noticing that
    • they still had either  .pdf files to download for competitor registrations,
    • or they tried to integrate EventBrite/other ticketing software into their offering with an interactive form
  • I established contact with heads of federations that have 50-100  competitions each year and solicited their feedback.
  • I also invested in  Facebook and Google ads, but those generated close to 100% bounce rate.
• We had half a dozen competitions created on the  platform. Since we waived all fees for the initial batch of users, I  cannot reliably say people would use us  if we had charged them our 2.5%  fee per registration/ticket sold.
• I expected our offering to go viral  after the initial batch, but that did not happen.

Next Steps:

• Currently, I resorted to more traditional  marketing.
• I am organizing a competition myself in June in the East Bay  area, and will use http://www.we-compete.com  exclusively.
• I am helping a few competition organizers pro bono with  basic web/technology stuff. I sponsored bodybuilding federations,
• I am  getting more active on social media and doing promotions in e-mail  newsletters/magazines.
• I am also weighing executing on a consumer play  related to We Compete via creating mobile apps for competitors, and  having those mobile apps feed data into the centralized database (if  competitors choose to share the info, of course).
• I am also evaluating  partnership with competition content creators (video, photo, general  information) and seeking ways to get on podcasts and YouTube channels.
• I  am very passionate about this space and would love to continue  executing on my ambitious vision, but not if I have to live under the  bridge while doing that.

NOTES Sean: does the app enrich the experience for an audience.  (business model would have to follow) Eugene: lots of pictures as a form of engagement, no centralized location.  Notice LOTS of mobile devices at any event. The idea is to function like a meetup. Competition is emotional experience… Eugene is connected in the competition space…  direct approach response has been good.  But so far people won’t pay. Business model is like http://eventbright.com

•     the price/payment is before
•     the benefit comes afterward

Consider attending a high school re-union to compare behaviors, rituals, and business models for somewhat different kinds of events. The app is really changing some of the dynamics of competition – knowns and unknowns for participants – what is the value of changing that, how to position it going forward and eat own dog food in organizing a competition – that might be a business How to characterize users / clients

• heads of established federations and contests – they may not be in much pain (yet?)
• people considering a new contest for fun or profit – organize a competition “in a box’ similar to how Meetup lowers cost of coordination
• Notice the monopoly structure of the business… populated by people that are not very tech-oriented

What is the mobile app about:

• pictures?
• stats?

Typical event:

• 90 competitors
• 500 fans/participants

Barb: I’m also thinking that this needs some change management theories applied to it… I think that Eugene is right in showing the benefit  Why should people change the way they do things, when they work so well so far? Sean: more like meetup than eventbrite. Can you provide unique or more curated content?  or just additional content? …so that profiles persist across competitions… Could competitors be encouraged to pay for the profile? What’s the value of a profile to other competitors? Can other sites be integrated?  Do those other sites support the mobile side?  And what are their business models?  and do people look at those other sites during a competition? status quo; organizing iframing eventbrite. in some ways we-compete is a threat, in others a collaborator: complex ecosystem of organizers, athletes, audience Howard: “Create a competition in a box” may be inadvertently taking position of disruptor, so a threat. What you are hearing is that you should continue to explore, more by making offers than writing code

Questions from the audience: ? unique content vs. basic mobile app with pictures ? transition from “probably not a good idea” to “late” Philipp: What about assessing information needs ground up?