After sharing a collaboration agreement (Okune 2019a) with the three research groups within the first few months of fieldwork (January through March 2019), I was given access to a variety of qualitative data, especially digital transcripts of one-on-one interviews and group discussions; photographs; coded summaries of data; final reports; and interview guides. Of this data, I selected one sample from each of the three organizations, anonymized the text (if it was not already), and uploaded it to the RDS platform with any available context as meta-data. I then used this data sample as an elicitation device for initial interviews (Okune 2019b) and found the exercise helpful to ground what can often end up as an abstract conversation about morals and ethics. Here is an example of such a “data interview.”
While I initially intended to start organizational archives for each of the research groups I worked with in Nairobi, I quickly came to realize that doing so was outside of the scope of what I could achieve during my limited time. There was also significant risk that, unless the work was done by those within the research organization itself, upon being handed over to the organization, such archival collections would quickly become static and unused. Thus, I did not focus my efforts on doing this but rather on engaging in dialogue and beginning to create a cross-organizational community of practice who could engage on these issues. One of the research groups I did fieldwork with did in fact become interested in running their own PECE instance and established it in the second half of 2019. However, it appears to have been hard for them to maintain their instance.
The RDS archive includes
Photos and Visuals (jpegs, pngs): photos from events; field snapshots taken by RDS members; found photos online
Video (mp4): video recordings of virtual RDS calls; links to youtube videos of Nov 2019 event; video recordings of tutorials for how to use RDS/PECE.
Audio (m4a): recordings of RDS working group calls; recordings from public events
PDFs: newspaper articles; blog posts; research reports
Text: fieldnotes from public events; anonymized transcripts of in-person research interviews; transcripts of online discussions of the RDS working group