research

Kaliya Hamlin, who has volunteered to help with the unconference topic, has an interesting blog on unconferences.

On the home page, she (?I think) describes unconferences as

the space between talking heads and a cocktail party with participant interaction around a theme or purpose....

There are also many references to people involved in unconferences. I think Kaliya would be the perfect person to write the final feature on unconferences, as well as to get people to do research.

*from kaliya's blog

I read a lot of blog entries and discussions on this site. And I can't help but think we'd learn a lot from Participatory Action Research (PAR) when it comes to crowdsourcing journalism.

PAR is basically when a group of people, or students in many cases, take on a research effort that normally would have been completed by one person. The goal is to turn activists, or students, into active research participants, instead of passively listening to a teacher's "wisdom." This allows for a richer learning experience and, in many cases, leads to social change.

For example, a group from UMass-Boston facilitated PAR to study the causes, and solutions, of women's homelessness called the The Roofless Women's Action Research Mobilization. Formerly homeless women were included in all stages of research. PAR was used in the case, as in all, to both empower the reacher, and researched--which isn't always the goal of tenured professors. Also, the women who worked on the study had an intimate point of view on the topic and where able to interact in a way with the homeless women they interviewed people who've never been homeless could not.

Another example of PAR is the participatory budgeting campaign in Lawrence, Massachusetts. There, a group of activists, students, and professors, used PAR to create the People's Guide to the Lawrence City Budget. Using PAR was important in this case because the activists involved wanted to eventually participate in the city's budgeting process. In order to do so, they needed to understand the complex terminology and procedures of city budgeting. The community activists learned, and retain, more information because they were actively involved in researching and interviewing. The impact of the guide would have been much smaller if students and professors wrote and researched the guide on their own, then presented it to the activists.

We can take some insight from both of these examples. Including, things take longer when there's a group. Marie Kennedy, a professor at UMass-Boston, said, "Initially, we envisioned RWARM as a one-year project, but quickly learned that that timeline was unrealistic.” But getting things done quickly isn't as important as empowering participants.

Direct link to RWARM article: The Roofless Women's Action Research Mobilization (RWARM) by Elaine M. Replogle
Helpful source: 16 Tenets of Participatory Action Research by Robin McTaggart

A worthy link, well worth exploring in depth, is Barbara P. Semonche's [ http://parklibrary.jomc.unc.edu/staff.html ] well-organized Web presentation, "Smart, Safe and Efficient Fact Checking" [ http://parklibrary.jomc.unc.edu/factcheckers2004.html ].