I´ve been out in the ”field” for about one month now, interviewing, observing, reading and researching. The first one and a half week was dedicated to a mapping of various communities and social media platforms online. I wanted to find my ”field”, that is – a platform which corresponded to TFF:s vision about The ProPeace Platform. This vision states (among other aspects) that:” the platform should enable constructive thinking, ways of seeing, ideas, information and concrete proposals of our time. The central core to the idea is to ”give peace a visibility”, something that would be reflected in the content of the platform, in forms of eg: videos, photographs, arts etc. [...-...] Another central aspect of the vision is that it bridges academia and cultural production, [...-...] that various groups and intitatives in society should meet on this platform, and together form a global movement for peace” (for further information, see projectdescription).
With this vision in the back of my mind, it was obvious that not just any social media based community or webpage would be a worthy candidate for netnography. I made a set of criterias to narrow down my search, and these criterias were as follows: it had to be a page with a diversity of users (global, interculturally, interdisciplinary, different ages and so forth), it had to have the mechanism of a community (networking, inviting etc.), it had to be based on a cause or theme (e.g: social change, peace, sustainability), it should be a resource (with texts, photos, videos and so on), users should be encouraged to contribute, users should also be encouraged to collaborate and ”solve” problems together and finally – users should be mobilised, triggered to do something, to act. The question was; did such a platform exist and how would I find it if it did exist?
To start with, I found out that there are a lot of different concepts in Web 2.0 which correlated to the ideas above. In my research I came across a dozen concepts (some interwined with each other):
commons-based peer production (CBPP or social production), Collaborative Innovation Network (CoIN), Social Collaboration, Open Access, Crowdsourcing, Wiki, social networking site.
All in all, I probably found 25 different pages which could be described by using one or more of the mentioned concepts. Out of them I selected 11 to look closer at (and sign up to):
- www.mypitch.com (crowdsourcing)
After yet another closer examination and comparison to my criterias I narrowed down the list to nr 2, 7, 9, 10 and 11. After reading more in Kozinenets book, I came to a critical point in selecting one, maximum 2 platforms to perform my netnography: (I´m willing to admit that I planned to follow all 11 but that I came to my senses and realised that I only had 10 weeks, and 8 more to go). Kozinets (p. 89) added the following criterias in choosing the appropriate candidate:
”You should look for online communities that are:
- relevant, they relate to your research focus and questions
- active, thay have recent and regular communications
- interactive, they have a flow of comunications between participants
- substanstial, they have a critical mass of communications and an energetic feel
- hetereogeneous, they have a number of different participants
- data-rich, offering more detailed or descriptively rich data
According to these (plus my own criterias) only one platform stood out, namely WiserEarth.
Later on (in part 2), I will describe what WiserEarth is and also tell you more about my fieldwork, how I organized it, some results and something about the future....
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