Update on Project Activities
Today we had a phone call with Danny and Michelle from The Tech Museum to discuss our progress. Our discussion primarily focused on the struggles and successes we have faced over the past couple of weeks in engaging with various organizations. We have not received many responses from organizations, and while some do reply, they are usually only for a quick phone chat or referral to another person. Some of these phone calls have been fruitful, however, and have pointed us to organizations and events from which we can collect stories more easily. We’ve had successful conversations with the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, Acterra, Sierra Club, and a couple more. Additionally, we talked about the possibilities of uploading the audio files we collect onto a website and giving free museum tickets to members of organizations and communities that we interview. The website would include the whole length of the stories we collect in order to provide more information to interested individuals as well as increase accessibility. We would give free tickets to individuals as thanks for sharing their stories with us. While Danny and Michelle are encouraging of these ideas, they told us they'd have to talk over these ideas with other Tech Museum staff first. After bringing up the challenges we had encountered since our last meeting, Danny suggested we involve he and Michelle in our communication more. With more transparency, they can help us overcome struggles and accomplish our project tasks more efficiently. They have a lot of experience and connections that can guide us, especially through the process of finding potential stories and improving accessibility. What We Observed and Learned In reaching out to organizations over the past week and a half, we have learned that cold-emailing can be tricky - it’s hard to get a response, and sometimes we get caught in a delaying process of referrals, in which one contact will refer us to another who will refer us to another. Developing contacts sheets is a labor intensive and time consuming process, and through our conversation with Danny and Michelle this week, we found ways to improve our process. Our phone call with Danny and Michelle was very productive and informative, giving us clear steps for going forwards. Upon talking, we realized that Danny and Michelle were not up to date on our activities. Initially the relationship we developed with The Tech was more business and client-like - we were conducting our groups communication in independent channels and only occasionally filling them in on our activities when we felt like we had met larger tangible goals. We now realize that Danny and Michelle felt like they were being more or less kept in the dark. For example, we have reached out to some organizations without knowing that The Tech already has contacts and existing relationships with these organizations. Going forward, we would like to approach our partnership in a more collaborative and egalitarian way. Danny and Michelle are not our bosses, but our team members. We can bounce ideas off of them, approach them for possible contacts in organizations we’re looking into contacting, and express our concerns to them as they arise, to address issues in a prompt and productive manner. To fulfill this goal, we will now be conducting all our official communications in a Groupme with Danny and combine our working doc with the Tech’s working doc, so that the process of contacting and interviewing community members is transparent and collaborative on all sides. We will also be sharing our email template with The Tech to get feedback and advice on reaching out to organizations and community members. In our phone conversation, we also brought up our desire to get these stories online, in order to increase accessibility and affordability of The Tech’s content. Both Danny and Michelle were on board with this idea, but explained that it might be difficult to get a website up and running by the opening date. For The Tech, an online page is an eventual goal, but they do not currently have this budgeted into the 2020 release. They hope that by year 2 or 3 of the exhibit, they will have the funds to create a proper interactive online exhibit. However, this does not mean that our group can not release the stories we collect online on our own website. Danny and Michelle both would like to help us do this, but first there are some legal hoops to jump through. First, we must check in with The Tech’s marketing team and see if having The Tech’s brand attached to our website is acceptable. Next, we must figure out under what license we would publish the content. Danny had the idea to use a creative commons license, which would make our content available for non-commercial reuse with attribution. This is a great way to make the work we produce more accessible and productive - it’s part of a larger movement and conversation, and giving other individuals and organizations access is one step towards a more equitable project. We also brought up the idea of offering the communities we work with free or subsidized tickets to The Tech. This would increase access to the exhibit, make our project more equitable, and foster deeper community connections with The Tech. Danny and Michelle were enthusiastic about this proposition, but need to check in with the development department at The Tech to make sure it is possible. We agreed that physical paper tickets would be preferable to putting people’s names in will call, as physical tickets motivate people to visit The Tech and likely make them more comfortable than approaching will call. Critical Analysis / Moving Forward While our emailing has not been received as well as we would have liked, we have managed to make a couple of connections that we hope to follow up on and interview. In this vein, we have been thinking about the Empathy Field Guide that we read in class last week - we will be going into people’s spaces to interview them, and we will be asking them about their work, and want to do so in an intentional and respectful way. The field guide reading has some really helpful interview tips, which we will be drawing upon heavily. Some tips, like leaving silences and not suggesting answers to our questions, are critical to allowing our interviewees to be in control of the narrative. We want to amplify their voices, not impose our own. Moving forwards we will also be more intentional about looping in Danny and Michelle to our progress, and what we are doing when we are doing it. Hopefully this way our partnership will be more reciprocal, and they can provide us with help and advice when we get stuck. This is particularly important now as time goes on and we have to start utilising their connections and resources in order to create our material, since we are slightly behind schedule with the number of people we have scheduled to interview. They will also be useful in giving us feedback about our process, and our wording in our emails, which will perhaps help improve our response rate. Some feedback they provided to us was calling organisations on the phone instead of emailing, so they cannot ignore us. The process of calling can be a scary one, especially to those of us who haven’t had experience making these calls before, but Danny, Michelle, and Cameron have all had success with this in the past, so in the future we will be trying to call instead of emailing so we can have that immediate connection. Danny and Michelle will also be providing us with feedback on our first audio edit, the interview with Anja at the Tech Museum. We will be able to use this feedback as a guide for the following interviews. Tomorrow there is an East Palo Alto Revitalisation Event, where many different non profits and community leaders are going to be planting trees, cleaning sidewalks, performing solar energy installations, and making repairs in homes, which we will go to. There, we hope to be able to talk to different organisations about the project, and if they are interested, set up an interview slot. Depending on the length and intensity of their stories, we might even be able to record some interviews on site tomorrow. However, we mostly want to build rapport at the event tomorrow, and build connections with people who may be able to provide us with stories. Since it is a big community event, there will be lots of people from different communities and different focuses, so we hope to be able to meet people who want to talk about a breadth of subjects in regards to climate change adaptation. We also have a couple of leads outside that - one from a beekeeper who wants to share the story of how climate change is affecting bees, and a couple of people at Jasper Ridge who are working on the Climate Change Impact project that has been going on for many years there. We hope to get these interviews together within the next week. There are also more contacts that we hope to get in touch with, including Dr Sally Benson of Stanford’s Sustainability Energy Institute, and the farmers who work at the Tressider farmers market on Tuesdays. In regards to the online exhibition, we would like to be able to factor creating a website and uploading our audio and images onto it into our timeline, as we do not think it will require too much on our end, however we need to wait for permission from the marketing team before we can make any progress on that. Update on Project Activities
On Friday, 10/12 we went to the Tech Museum to meet with Danny and Michelle. We were able to get a feel for the museum and see where the “Sustainable Cities” display will be held. We learned about the other exhibits that will surround the “Community Voices” exhibit that we are working on. Overall, the exhibit will be 6x3 feet and will display more than just the San Jose area, it will include most of the bay. This gives us some more flexibility when collecting stories because we do not have to dismiss a lead based off of geographic location. Along with seeing where the exhibit plans to be, we went to the backroom where the prototype is being created. There is a more cartoon-like map as of now but we spoke with Danny and agreed it should have a more landscape type of look, but then have bodies of water and green areas brightened and bolded in order to provide clarity of location. We spoke about having background noises from the places we interview playing on the map and Danny showed us how as of now there are “water” sounds in the rivers and a news cast playing in an area where there was a story about climate change. Beside from the planning of the visual aspect of the map, we spent a lot of time speaking about who we should be interviewing, how to get access to them, and what questions or prompts to ask. We will create a “how-to” list in collaboration with Danny in order to be on the same page when interviewing others. As of now, a lot of the interviewee list is tech companies or bigger organizations that have been doing mitigation. We spoke about getting local orgs that could connect us to community members in order to broaden our group of stories. We collected our first story by interviewing Anja Schulze, a coworker of Danny and Michelle from the museum. She spoke to us about the use of mushrooms to build materials such as plywood, bricks, and even styrofoam. We will continue to interview others and begin reaching out to organizations this week in order to conduct the interviews in the coming weekends. Our next meeting with Danny and Michelle will be a conference call just to check in on our progress with stories and interviews. What We Observed and Learned During our visit to the tech museum on Friday, 10/12, we were able to observe the atmosphere of the museum, and spend some time walking around, noticing how people interact with the space, and who these people who visit the museum are. We noticed, and heard from Danny that a large percentage of the visitors are student groups, and field trips from local schools. We got to see the exact location in the museum where our project will be housed - within the larger exhibit which is about how technology is being used to combat climate change. The exhibit has a definite positive undertone - an emphasis on hope and inspiring collective, constructive action. We were also able to take a look at the prototype of the project, back in the office area / work space. We had a good talk about the design of the project, and how it will work, technically. Mapping seems a great way for people to engage and connect the issue to their own communities and landscapes. They can see where they live and the places they frequent in their neighborhoods in relation to climate issues. They can also learn about members of their communities that are taking action and get inspired. After the tour of the museum and taking a look at the prototype, we met in a meeting room for a discussion where we clarified the expectations for our project with the community partner, smoothing out wrinkles, and making sure that we are all on the same page. During this discussion, we expressed our concerns and strategized altogether on how to complete our project in an ethical and impactful manner. We learned that our group has a lot of discretion in choosing the stories we wish to collect/pursue - our community partners have created a spreadsheet with some contacts (mostly tech-related companies and groups) and ideas for who to contact and interview… during our discussion, we did some brainstorming, and added some more ideas onto this spreadsheet. We definitely got a better idea of the types of stories our community partner has in mind, and we also talked about respectful ways of reaching out to interviewees, and the types of questions we want to ask them. After our discussion, Danny introduced us to Anja Schulze - a biotech developer in charge of an interactive exhibit in the museum on the process of turning fungi into sturdy bricks for building, etc, potentially replacing materials like styrofoam and plastic. Cameron gave us a quick lesson on the equipment, and provided a great example of how to listen, record, and ask questions at the same time - emphasizing the importance of adapting to your interviewee and trying to maintain a natural flow of conversation. We had a good conversation about how to prepare for interviews as a group, and how to create guiding questions beforehand, but also being able to adapt during the interview if the conversation goes off track. Critical Analysis / Moving Forward After reading “To Hell with Good Intentions” and class on 10/08, we began to really question the ethics of our project in terms of who we are going to interview. We have come to face the ethical issue of interviewing people impacted by climate change without actually helping their situation nor being able to offer some type of solution. Although we know we are giving their story a platform and amplifying their voices, the exhibit may not directly help impacted people nor may it even be accessible to them given that the Tech Museum's entrance fee is $25. However, we acknowledged that this is a long-term project for the Tech Museum and that reciprocity may come in the long term. Finally, we also see how this all fits into the grand message of the museum in that we wish to inspire hope for action when visitors learn about how their own communities are being impacted by climate change. Moving forward we plan to research political community orgs and focus on grassroots, community solutions/mitigation in order to find regular community members to interview. The Tech has many connections and leads with big tech companies and corporations, and while they are important players in climate change mitigation in the bay area, they can not be the only stories being told since we want visitors to be able to relate to them. We believe that focusing on community orgs and community grassroots movements would allow us to achieve this goal. Moreover, we want some stories that focus on political systems and corporate accountability instead of centering too much on individual mitigation/adaptation stories. We recognized individual action, but we don’t want to neglect the larger issues of corporate complicity. We also want to highlight the importance of pro-climate candidates in the area in order to drive home the fact that government regulation is vital for a sustainable future. Although we are still figuring out the ethics of interviewing marginalized affected communities, we do want to find stories that show the intersection of race,class, and the environment since these communities tend to face the brunt of climate change. Examples such as the stories of flooding victims/ areas that flood easily but aren’t receiving enough public $$$ to restore and prevent flood damage. Lastly, we created some action items as we begin to dive into our project. We want to create a flexible script and list of best practices for interviewing people. Additionally, we want to prep for our interviews with a training session with the audio recording equipment. Finally, we hope to move along and start interviewing our first round of subjects within the next week. Update on Project Activities
During Monday’s class, we met with the Tech Museum for the first time. We introduced ourselves to Danny and Michelle, and learnt about their roles - Michelle is project lead for the exhibition and Danny is in charge of realising the ideas of the exhibition. When going around the circle and outlining why we wanted to be involved with this particular project, we realised that one area of overlap was that we wanted to share stories from the community. We talked about the idea of climate change being the concern of more privileged people, and low income people and people of colour not having a voice in the conversation around climate change, as we spoke about in class. We all emphasised how much we want to use this project to elevate the stories of people affected by climate change who may not otherwise be represented in the fight against it. We discussed this more among ourselves and wanted to think more about how we can uplift these voices, and engage with communities that aren’t our own in a way that isn’t voyeuristic. We spoke a lot about what makes an effective story - neither Danny nor Michelle are storytellers, or have any experience in storytelling or podcasting, so we discussed briefly how they were envisioning the stories. We talked about where to draw inspiration from, and shared our favourite podcasts such as Planet Money, This American Life, and Snap Judgement. We are going to meet Danny and Michelle next Friday at the Tech Museum itself to get a feel for the space and see how the exhibition fits in. What We Observed and Learned Our project entails collecting audio stories from members of different communities about their personal experiences with climate change impacts and resilience. In 2020, the Tech will open a new exhibit that features these voices. Visitors will maneuver a puck around a map, prompting the audio recordings as they hover over the respective communities of the individuals we interviewed. We learned that the idea for such a project stems from research about climate change awareness as well as the efficacy of sound for communicating information. While the majority of people in the U.S. agree that climate change is happening and that it will affect other Americans, many do not think it will affect them personally. The goal of the exhibit is to convey through storytelling, which studies show to be a powerful tool for conveying important messages, that climate change is already affecting the lives of local residents. As such, we discussed with the group what we each think makes a good story. Some members shared that ambient sound, emotion, the personality of the interviewee, and the moderate use of expert voices make for effective storytelling, which we will keep in mind in the process of collecting and editing stories. Critical Analysis / Moving Forward Our readings over the past week have helped us reflect on our project and think critically about serving the community through it. Melissa Checker’s essay “Wiped Out by the ‘Greenwave’” made us consider how we approach the communities we are not a part of. We would like to avoid being perceived like the GreenX:Change project in Harlem, and must make sure that those we talk to are fully on board and maintain power and autonomy over their stories. We are not the ones telling stories, rather we are the facilitators, giving our interviewees a platform to tell their stories. We also are thinking very critically about the type of sustainability ( or sustainabilities) we will be addressing in our project. Mariam Greenberg’s “What on Earth Is Sustainability” identifies multiple modes of sustainability. Our project is concerned with climate change, and thus most most immediately associated with eco-oriented sustainability. However considering the rather white and eurocentric history of eco-oriented sustainability narratives, we would like to engage other modes of sustainability, with a specific emphasis on justice and equity. Will this be possible in the scope of our partnership with the Tech Museum? How can we pursue more intersectional narratives without diluting the message our partners are pursuing? These are important questions that we must answer. While going forward with our project, we will face numerous challenges, and planning for them is very important. We feel that our biggest obstacle will be creating meaningful and genuine connections with various communities in San Jose. Forging strong connections and building trust between the interviewer and interviewee is essential for capturing and telling compelling and equitable stories, so this will be a major focus for our project. For some individuals living in the silicon valley/ bay area, especially working class communities of color, “tech” has become a bad word. Many people are being displaced and their neighborhoods are being gentrified due to the tech boom, so having the word “tech” in the name of our project will be a challenge when reaching out and talking with folks. One way we can address this is by being very clear, transparent, and communicative in regards to our project’s goals. Emphasizing our interest in equity and highlighting that we want to give their voices a larger stage and reach may help make people more comfortable. Additionally, we anticipate that finding and reaching out to potential interviewees will be a challenge. Our topic of climate change impacts and resilience is very broad. Where do we start? Who do we talk to? How do we find individuals with compelling stories and how do we contact them? In discussing this, we felt reaching out to community organizations and nonprofits would be a great start, especially in trying to get voices from marginalized communities. From our past experiences, we have found that community organizations and nonprofits are more than happy to tell their stories and engage with well meaning projects. We are very excited to carry our project forward and begin engaging with the diverse communities of San Jose. |
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