April 2018 - Core Group Meetings

Jack Harich

Administrator
Staff member
#1
Here's our agenda for this April 15 at 8:00PM EST. I've taken some guesses. During the agenda check we can finalize the agenda.

A. All
  1. Agenda check. What should we put on the agenda?
  2. While it's fresh in our minds, what did we learn from today's meeting about the videos? After Scott and Montserrat left the call, we watched the 24 minute video. Chris and Sam both strongly liked it better than the first, because it better addressed why we need democracy, why democracy is endangered by deception, more detail on prototype, omits the potentially upsetting graphic of Republicans and Democrats levels of deception. Sam said he kept getting lost in the 11 minute video.
  3. Montserrat and Scott, what's your feedback on the 24 minute video?
  4. The meeting was unusually high level. Lots of system level thinking. Why?
  5. Beth Ely and Chris Sirmans both said they want to attend our weekly 8:00PM Skype meetings!
  6. I wonder if two meetings on one day (the second Sunday of each month) is too much, like today. It seems that if we have important collaboration to do in the evening, it could be done earlier in the day at the monthly meeting. We don't want to waste time in unnecessary meetings.
  7. We really need an online collaboration tool, like what Montserrat suggested, Slack , or something else, like what Scott suggested long ago for task management. What are out requirements here? Jack will be glad to take action on this, as it will become central to our collaboration success and efficiency.

B. Montserrat
  1. Report on how the practice writing is going.
  2. Report on how the proposal is going.
  3. What else would you like to discuss?

C. Scott
  1. What would you like to discuss?

D. Jack
  1. I will develop a Kickstarter Campaign plan, including how to complete the videos. Done, this is the plan:
    - Get a video on How Structured Argument Analysis Works done, get feedback improve.
    - Get feedback for the 24 minute video, improve. We won't use the short video.
    - Once the two videos are looking strong, rewrite the Kickstarter page.
    - Get feedback on the page. When it looks strong and we have a community supporting the project, we are ready to launch the campaign.
  2. The next phase of video development is testing what we've got on friends. How can we best do that and manage it? We need a system.
  3. I will work on the online collaboration system. Done. Have created a new forum using Xenforo, a modern forum with great features like rich text editing, notifications that work, a clean non-cluttered user interface, fairly intuitive and very efficient administrative panel, etc.
  4. Scott, I was wondering if you would like to start a General Discussion thread on your Candle vision. I don't want to see a terrific vision like that get forgotten as we get all excited about the hot little Politician Truth Ratings project.
  5. Found an article today on "Why people lie and what you can do about it" by Mollie Simon. She's a senior at the University of Georgia (UGA) and knows the people with the International Fact-Checking Network. I've been gradually planning how to start contacting people in the fact-check community. This seems like a good place to start. But I wonder, Montserrat, if it would be better for you to initiate contact, since you are more her age and are a lady. There's also the option of Sam contacting her, since he's studying at UGA.
 
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Jack Harich

Administrator
Staff member
#2
Unusual but very productive meeting, with just Jack and Montserrat. Instead of covering the agenda, we discussed something much more important.

Montserrat has concluded that the most productive thing she can be doing now is working with Thwink.org on a internship basis, in order to deeply learn the Thwink concepts and tools, and to develop a research plan and proposal.

Montserrat shared why she came to this conclusion. She would be able to focus on just one thing, learning and applying the Thwink paradigm, instead of the multiple things she's doing now that compete for her attention. The result is it's impossible to do what matters most well.

The new plan is for Montserrat to move to Atlanta in the summer, to intern with Thwink.org. During that period she would more thoroughly survey masters/phd programs, and apply, to begin study in 2019.

Our action plan:
  1. Visa - Jack will research the visa aspect and report his finding to Montserrat. At her end, Montserrat will contact the local US embassy to see what's best.
  2. Internship - This will be designed around Montserrat's goals and Jack's appraisal of what will help the most. Montserrat will start a forum thread on the Thwink internship, her goals, her personal strategy, and various considerations. Then we will develop a written, productive internship plan.
  3. Where to stay - Jack and Martha's house is a possibility, but for a 3 to 6 month period that might be seeing too much of each other and not give you enough space. Or it might be a great thing! Jack will look into housing, such as at a local university like Emory. This has the benefit of hanging out with people her age and educational bent. But that's probably only available for the summer. We shall see what else is possible, like a rented room. It may be a combination of some time at our house, several months at a university, and a room. We are very flexible.
We will handle the important agenda items, especially video feedback, on the forum or at the next meeting.

Montserrat, I was thwinking about our Skype video quality problem. Was anyone else in your house using the internet? Would a reboot help? Can you think of anything we can do here? I realize you have a slow connection. If it happens again, maybe we could both run internet connection speed tests, to test servers in the other's city.

See you next week!
 

Jack Harich

Administrator
Staff member
#3
For Skype, here are recommended connection speeds. Click on "How much bandwidth do I need for calls?" and see the column for recommended speed. For two people we seem to need at least 500kbps for down and up, which is about .5Mbps.

Using SpeedTest.net, I get 119Mbps down and 12Mbps up. This is incredibly fast. What a lucky guy!

I couldn't figure out a way to use test servers in another city. Years ago I remember doing that.

Maybe the problem is WiFi. This article talks about how an Ethernet cable is faster than WiFi:

For example, my download speed at midday yesterday was 74.4Mbps when measured using a desktop PC with a direct connection. The speed dropped to about 25Mbps when using a WiFi-connected Windows 10 laptop, and to 15Mbps on an Android smartphone.
BTW, if you would like a call during the week, that's fine!
 
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Jack Harich

Administrator
Staff member
#4
Here's our agenda for our April 22 meeting at 8:00PM EST. Montserrat won't be there due to an out of town wedding.

A. Scott
  1. Progress on weighted ranking app.
  2. Thoughts on Analytical Activism group's purpose.
  3. Circle back to Monse's note about establishing a social media presence in the Mar 31 agenda.
  4. Additional issues?

B. Jack
  1. Report on Kickstarter campaign progress. Completed another video. The campaign page will have two videos. The campaign plan is to complete the videos, including feedback and improvement. Then rewrite the campaign page and rewards. Along the way we need to convince ourselves we have an active interested community of enough people for the campaign to take off rapidly and succeed. How to get that community is something to discuss.
  2. Report on Politician Truth Ratings software progress. Talked to our developer on Wednesday. He showed me an idea on article markup and had a few questions. Took an hour. They (Applied Imagination) are rolling, but I would like to see more interest and communication. I spent about two days improving the prototype to use a much better format for marking argument nodes in articles, plus other small things. You can see some of this in the new "How Structured Argument Analysis Works" video. You will see slightly more in the redo of the other video on "Restoring the Health of Democracy."
  3. Discuss plans to contact the fact-check community soon. Due to the very positive reply from Daniel Funke of the International Fact-Checking Network, I thwink we can contact him once the Kickstarter campaign page is ready for review. We need user experience testers for the prototype, and soon the very first versions of the actual software. I can ask him about that, as well as introduce the project as something to collaborate on. Of course, I will research what else they are working on so we can fit in smoothly. Plus I can see I'm ready to take the fact-checking training. Does anyone else want to take it?
  4. Scott, I was wondering if you would like to start a General Discussion thread on your Candle vision. I don't want to see a terrific vision like that get forgotten as we get all excited about other projects.
  5. Personal feedback on the new video, the good stuff that's so hard to write down and put in a thread!
 

Jack Harich

Administrator
Staff member
#5
Another productive meeting. Scott reported on:
  1. Progress on weighted ranking app - The Excel prototype is working well. Scott and Robyn are using it for planning. It's leading to good conversations and better decisions. As expected, app problems are surfacing, nothing big. Will eventually develop it as an android app. It be a great way to apply the concept of Weighted Rankings. Looking forward to applying more tools from The Thinker's Toolkit book.
  2. Thoughts on Analytical Activism group's purpose - Might be useful to ask why people who dropped out lost interest. Scott hypothesizes is they are coming in hoping they can apply a new analytical approach to whatever they already care passionately about. When they can't do that for some reason, they lose interest. Suggestion: Refocus the Meetup group on we are here to pool our resources and work together to help each other along on various projects. We talked about similar organizations, like Makers and the Atlanta MASS collective. People are drawn to organizations like these so they can build their dreams.
  3. Circle back to Monse's note about establishing a social media presence in the Mar 31 agenda - This was a good suggestion. In the Kickstarter campaign, we need a strong social media presence. To create that we need someone experience in organizing social media. We need someone to take this on as a project. People will be looking for this, for our social media presence.
Jack reported on his agenda items as already written up above. The major thrust right now is to finish up the videos, do the Kickstarter page, and then use that to contact the Fact Check community. Once we get their interest and support, we will be ready or very close to launching the campaign. We should not launch until we have a strong community of support, who will buzz the campaign along on the day it begins.

Scott will be out of town next weekend and so will miss next week's meeting. Scott will work on starting a high quality forum thread on the Candle vision. This has a lot of long term potential.
 

Jack Harich

Administrator
Staff member
#6
Here's the agenda for our April 29 meeting at 8:00PM EST. Scott is out of town.

A. Montserrat
  1. Report on how the Earth Day event with her activists organization went.
  2. Report on potential masters programs, what selection criteria is being used, etc.
  3. Discussion of her Research Proposal Management Plan.
    1. Goals
    2. Discuss time on each task.
    3. Jack's feedback.
  4. Discussion of internship with Thwink.org.
  5. Anything else?

B. Jack
  1. Report on 5 hour working meeting with Sean at Applied Imagination on Friday. He presented his work on the UX (user experience) design and requirements collection, using a sophisticated wireframe system. As we talked he updated the wireframes on the spot. A wire frame is a rough illustration of how a web page will look, with no color, no final arrangement. Only the data and labels are shown. There were about 20. The hardest deal with the ratings workflow. One stumbling point was how to handle marking claims in texts when it might be a direct or an implied claim. Later when I came home I found a solution. We can go with Potential Claims in the text marking step. Later in the argument analysis step a Potential Claim becomes either a claim, an intermediate conclusion, a reusable claim, a fact, or is declared to be an invalid claim. Problem solved!
  2. Describe recent improvements to the prototype. Added a third panel. Now that it's done, it's wonderful. It provides so much more information so easily. Also improved the node markup style used in the text editor. Yesterday and this morning I modified the Claim Check dial to automatically show the Claim Confidence Level for the argument map. As we talk we can be looking at the prototype.
  3. Describe how Jack plans to contact the fact-check community soon, after the workflow design and other work by Applied Imagination is complete. This is a critical task. We absolutely must succeed here, and generate interest in the Politician Truth Ratings project. I play to contact Daniel Funke with the International Fact-Check Network first, after I've done my homework. This will be determining where current fact-check research is, how our research fits into it, and why our research fills a large need. How to frame that is a question. In addition to Daniel Funke I will contact other organizations, like the Duke Reporters Lab, which does fact-check research. I may contact the Wikimedia Foundation, who is behind Wikipedia.
  4. Possibly discuss the two updated videos. Impressions, feedback. So many prototype improvements have been made that I need to redo the second video. Do we need a third, very short video for the Kickstarter campaign? I don't know yet, but we probably do.
 
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Jack Harich

Administrator
Staff member
#7
Good meeting. Montserrat had some very interesting things to cover. Things are going well with her big project, putting together an overall approach for research that's going to make a difference on what is commonly considered an insolvable problem. Jack covered his items as described and showed Montserrat the prototype.

Montserrat feels that when Jack contacts the fact-checkers, they will be interested. We both hope so! She can contact German and Spanish speaking fact-check organizations.
 
#8
Hey Jack,

thanks for the meeting yesterday. I just wanted to add that during this week I'll be spending some time on:
- reviewing the new versions of the videos
- thinking about the format & content of the "very short" video
- keep looking for good masters options and organizing those (more on this below)
- contacting the US consulate in my city to start arrangements for next semester

Also, by reading past meetings agendas I had an idea that I'd like to discuss with you and Scott next time:

Progress on weighted ranking app - The Excel prototype is working well. Scott and Robyn are using it for planning. It's leading to good conversations and better decisions. As expected, app problems are surfacing, nothing big. Will eventually develop it as an android app. It be a great way to apply the concept of Weighted Rankings. Looking forward to applying more tools from The Thinker's Toolkit book.
From reading this I thought I could also use Scott's Excel prototype of the app to decide which master program will be best! It's a win-win situation: I don't have to build a system from scratch to make a decision, and Scott can get some user's experience feedback from myself!

Also:
Circle back to Monse's note about establishing a social media presence in the Mar 31 agenda - This was a good suggestion. In the Kickstarter campaign, we need a strong social media presence. To create that we need someone experience in organizing social media. We need someone to take this on as a project. People will be looking for this, for our social media presence.
For the next meeting we could discuss the social media presence again too. If there's no one else to do it, I'd be happy to manage some of that, but we have to keep in mind that having high-quality social media accounts that are acutally a useful ressource for the followers, does take a lot of time and effort. I'd suggest a Twitter account to begin with. That alone could be enough (quality > quantity).
 

Jack Harich

Administrator
Staff member
#9
Those four items sound very good! I appreciate this and look forward to the results.

Nice catch, seeing the ability to try out Scott's weighted rankings app on your own decisions. Perhaps send him an email and get him to show you how it works over Skype, unless you've already done that. I hope his weekend went well, setting up a large art installation with Robyn, as I recall.

About establishing a social media presence: I'll have to plead a lot of ignorance here, since I don't use any social media other than texting, which doesn't really count. I agree this project could take a lot of time. Why don't we first contact the fact-check community and see how they respond. If they show high interest in the Truth Ratings System, then we may not need to invest time in a social media presence.

Love that "quality > quantity" !

Also, why don't you start a thread in General Discussion about creating your research proposal? We can discuss all kinds of things there, including my review of your Task Management Plan. And you may want a separate thread on your internship program with Thwink.org. We have a lot to design and cover there. Wow, such opportunity! Here we come!!!