I don’t remember Project Runway enough to remember if there was someone down on the ground with the contestants, prepping them for their meetings with Tim Gunn… but I swear that was a role, and I am certain that Dan Melton is that character.
We had a “GroupMe” conference call with him today at noon, on our cell phones, in some sort of mini-mall in the middle of downtown Seattle. Dan told us that Team D.C. had already interviewed 4 people.
I wish we had a film crew, because I would totally tell the camera this: “Well, they have a time difference.”
We talked to a lot of people today. First the Seattle City Club - an organization that promotes civic dialogues. They are really cool, and have pushed through some amazing work - for example working on a Public Voters Guide. They told us about a lot of amazing organizations that interact in the civic space here in Seattle.
We then met up with Chris and Saf from Socrata. Socrata’s motto is “making data social.” They provide embeddable data sets of public data provided by cities, counties and federal. They showed us how their work was recently seen, in screenshot form, during Obama’s State of the Union address (video.)
We traveled …(our google map in our phones was our best friend today)… to the Phinney neighborhood and toured a really great community center. They have two big buildings, and have a lot of events and programming. We learned about how they send out mailings and keep in touch with the residents in their neighborhoods. They are a really amazing neighborhood hub.
I learned that I want to meet the people who organize Pea Patches (the name of community gardens.) I also learned, through Starbucks free-wifi that they have a program called Patch, which presents community news.
We went to the Neighborhood Council Community meeting. There were about 20 people in the room, representatives from all neighborhood districts, people from the Department of Transportation, and the Mayor’s office. This was really interesting, we heard about civic engagment and outreach efforts, and heard everyone tell stories about some of the staff who are retiring. I was very impressed with how much everyone was grateful and felt very lucky to be able to do the work that they do.
We rushed back home to chat over Skype with our team advisor, Wendy Owen, of GetSatisfaction fame. We are formalizing our interview process, and we have been making transcripts. This is a lot of data. We are using Google Docs, and we were very annoyed that Google changed the interface today right when we were in the middle of interviews. We were pretty good about downloading our folders, as internet connections were spotty.
I started highlighting the transcripts, and think I will add comments to the transcripts in places where I see themes emerging. Ultimately, we will create User Personas of civic leaders, city staff, and stakeholders… and I can tell that with the volume of our interviews that we will have so much data, and flagging themes now will make it a lot easier.
Wendy suggested that we put themes on some sort of surface where we can all see. I can’t wait to get to this point.
Props to Anna for driving us around all day. Seattle is HUGE. We’re traveling several miles in between meetings.
Overall, we met lots and lots of people, who have told us about people we should talk to.
Much more of this tomorrow!