Week 14: More Class Feedback
Last week I presented my prototype progress to the class, our thesis advisor Eric Forman, and our guest critic, Graham Letorney. It was a quick presentation, just 3 minutes to present and 2 for feedback. We didn’t find out about the guest critic until just a few hours before class, so I did the best I could to add in some context about my problem area and restorative justice. As usual, the class completed brief worksheets and Graham and Eric gave brief verbal feedback.
After reviewing the feedback I received from the class, it’s clear that I need to show what the process would look like, not just explain it with words and diagrams. I was hoping the blueprint I had developed would help with that. I developed it in an attempt to make progress towards having something more concrete to present, but after hearing from the class perhaps it wasn’t as effective as it could have been. I don’t know how much of it was that, and how much was the speed at which I was trying to get through it all. Regardless, the more concrete I can get with this the better.
A few people felt that what I was presenting was till too high-level, and that I needed to figure out what the thing is, implying they wanted to see more than a diagramed process. They suggested that I should just start rapid prototyping or paper prototyping things and then share them with community moderators. I agree with this recommendation, but I’m also feeling a lot of insecurity in my thinking so far and ability to explain it — which is admittedly holding me back a bit.
Graham seemed to understand conceptually what I was proposing. I’m not sure if he was making a suggestion or thought I was proposing this, but he said my value proposition was that my process was taking all of the moderation and conflict resolution out of the hands of the platform, and passing it off to my platform. So in a conflict, the users get removed from the platform where their community exists and sent to my platform, where they participate in a restorative justice style chat; my platform “makes sure they check-out” before sending them back to their community. He also suggested that it could be a plug-in (a software component that adds a specific feature to an existing program), so it could be implemented on any community. In this way, it would be a solution that a community could choose to use or not, as opposed to something that necessarily becomes part of the enforcement action procedures.
Eric said he’d be interested in seeing how my concept could be integrated into a platform like Disqus, a comment plug-in for publishers. This would work similarly to what Graham was talking about, except that with Disqus or a plug-in modeled after it, the moderating is still done by a member of the community or an owner of the group or website, wherever it is that the community exists, as opposed to a third party.
I am intrigued by the plug-in idea because it feels both concrete (i.e. I can tell you what the thing is) and logical (i.e. it might actually make sense in practice).
