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. Comments are closed.
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