Brainstorming the Proportional Actor Influence Metric

2015 March 12, meeting at the University of Alberta Faculty of Extension

The campaigns carried out in Sri Lanka revealed to be worthy and the model for stewarding technology to be further examined. A question the ICTRaP [1] Research Team found was a need for a simple and easy to use evaluation metric that the Actors: Sponsor, Technology Steward, and Community could use in determining their strengths and weakness. Those factors would decide whether or not they should re-assess and re-design or simply continue on. It is ideal if the minimal set of inputs to the evaluation model would result in a simple green, amber, red output signal.

Gordon Gow arranged for us to meeting with Jason Daniels (Associate Director) and Stanley Varnhagen (Academic Director) from the Evaluation and Research Services, Faculty of Extension, University of Alberta. A challenge during the meeting was with breaking down the problem in a mathematically comprehensible way and second with arriving at a set recommnedations to pursue towards developing the stewarding technology evaluation metric.

ICTRaP team agreed on a plan based on the recommendations to pursue with a set of activities towards confirming the model:

1. Verify the currently perceived metric with campaign actors and identify good examples of those that are representative; Identify differences between the four quadrants, then develop characteristics for each of the quadrants; document case studies relating to the quadrant 
2. Formulate a structural equation model to confirm the theoretical model; develop the data collection and analysis procedures for testing the model
3. Simplify the model to such that 20% of the model would provide 80% of the evaluation requirements: a simplified decision metric.

hypothetical dependencies between the actors

There are certain dependencies between the four Actors, illustrated by the nodes in the graph to the left. It may be possible to identify common dependencies such as campaign is coherent between the Community, Technology Steward, and the Technology. There may be unique dependencies with making the Community  trust facilitating technology stewarding for knowledge mobilization. Treating the edges between the Actor nodes would result in a set of independent variables.

A team of Researchers in the United Kingdom [2] are beginning to quantify the term "effort"; more specifically additional effort and interpersonal communication. One may relate to the amount of "work", in the mechanical sense. However, effort is more related to human related collaborative work but taking in to consideration the efforts related to evading distractions. In that sense, perhaps simply considering the time put in might the simplest and effective way to consider the individual effort in each of the variables such as campaign, training, facilitation, so on and so forth.

[1] ICTRaP - Information Communication Technology Rapid Prototyping
[2] Ryan Kelly, Daniel Gooch, and Leon Watts. (2015). Is ‘Additional’ Effort Always Negative? Understanding Discretionary Work in Interpersonal Communications, Proceedings of the Computing-supported Collaborative Works (CSCW2015), Association of Computing Machinery.