October 24, 2017 Partners Meeting

Alan, Colin, Gregor, Juliana, Liam, Michelle

Discussion

  • Juliana is going to travel to Medellin at the end of November for an activity called Casa Abierta ("open house")
  • Identified a group that would be the best to work on our project, which is a group of teenage girls who will work at the Jaquer EsCool
  • The idea of storytelling is really powerful and people are responding to it
  • Difficulties for areas with limited or no internet connectivity
  • Hector has been in Fresno his whole life, so he's seen the technology arriving from the very beginning, gives him a good perspective of how the area is changing
  • A lot of organizations who try to help by sending devices or funding don't really understand that the lack of connectivity affects how useful those are
  • Alan is going to share a link from Hector, assuming he's okay with it
  • Contracts are finalized, any next steps we need the partners to do?
    • Nothing as far as we know
    • The money can start to flow, the invoicing can start to happen
    • If there are any issues, they can let us know
    • The Colombian partners can invoice TIG and TIG can invoice OCAD (?)
  • <a brief feline-related digression>
  • The role of animals in reintroducing people with learning differences into....
  • Therapy animals?

Storytelling tool

  • Online storage and offline functionality
  • Tools that work without a persistent internet connection
  • Continuing to refine the experience of it and applying design to it
  • Testing it with the partners and some youth
  • Meeting last week to talk about some infrastructure about how we can deploy it
  • Enter the story in one context, but then have the choice of how to publish it, which context
  • Transcribing voice/audio recording application to generate transcripts
  • Purely graphical tools for storytelling
    • Drawings
    • Photos
    • Symbols 
    • Good for multilingual communication
    • Picture boards
    • May enable communication for people who are nonverbal
  • CC licences as a reference point for publishing
    • Maybe have that as the default since people often don't know what to at that point
  • Licencing and publishing in general
  • Production of OER's from story tools, compiling stories to use them as a teaching tool
  • Translations and other languages
    • Indigenous languages
    • Farsi
    • Spanish
    • Cree and Inuktitut may be easy to facilitate
  • http://www.enmodop.com/
    • People send voice messages to respond to a political question
    • Translation is not only about languages but also about feelings
    • Map of feelings in the stories
    • How to implement it? A tag?
    • Like a chorus, you can hear and feel the emotion about the answers
    • Did they categorize the feelings after they got the stories or did they have the users select from a list?
      • People send their audio clip and people from the project categorize it with the feeling
    • Open platform is there, but it's not very popular. So they're holding events in various parts of the country to share the idea with people and asking them to send their audio in
    • This site is very specific to the Colombian experience, but the idea can translate well
    • A good way to take the temperature of the conversation
    • Is there a way we can change or use the tagging system to accommodate this? Does it already?
    • A set of fixed tags that people can choose from, but then people can add their own.
    • "How does this story make you feel?"
  • Enabling the contribution of translations
    • Translations in a JSON file is not especially friendly but we can create some documentation around that
    • Google spreadsheet?
    • We need to provide documentation/instructions around this
  • Technical issues around using Cree or Inuktitut online? i.e. Unicode, etc
  • TIG operates in about 14 languages
  • A design challenge around creating local networks for a WAN where there isn't easy connection to the internet at large, this is an issue experienced in Colombia and in Canadian indigenous communities
  • Communities that are separated from a centre
    • Technologically
    • Geographically
    • Linguistically
    • How do we model services and tool development and work with communities that are 'off from the centre' to help them with their needs?
    • E.g. Seaside communities in Ireland that Lizbeth spoke about
  • We're having a community meeting next Wednesday about design for multilingual UI's, Alan will forward that info