WRIT 3152 | Digital Community Analysis Activity

After completing Activity 1 in Weeks 3 and 4, you will have practiced the format for building a blog post. In this activity, you’ll work collaboratively with peers to research, compose, design, and publish an analysis of a narrow and concrete digital community.

This activity officially begins today (Wednesday, 9/4) and is due next Tuesday, 9/10.

Step 1: Form a team in the #general channel on Discord

Begin by wading into the #general channel to suggest digital communities or see what digital communities other students are suggesting. Eventually, you need to end up:

1. In a thread in the #general channel,
2. With 2-4 other people (groups of 3-5 only)
3. And a narrowly, concrete digital community to study
4. That has been approved by me (When you think your group has a good option, propose it to me in #general or in your thread by using my Discord @ name. I’ll either approve it or give you some guidance on a better direction.)
5. And confirmed in the thread by everyone else in the group.

Step 2: Team decisions

1. Once you have a defined team and an approved digital community, your work moves to research. Use your thread to decide where to collect your research and and draft the language for your blog post. You can use your thread, but will probably need to move some/all of your work into a Google or One Drive doc, but be creative and figure out what works best for the group.
2. Choose who will serve as Project Manager (PM) of your team. (A PM does not need to be a “leader”, though it’s fine if that person steps into that role. A PM is at the very least responsible for setting deadlines/goals and keeping the team accountable to both.)
3. Decide on at least one synchronous meeting time of at least 30 mins. The meeting can happen in the Discord voice channel, on a conference call, video call, or face to face gathering. Everyone should be accountable to being present, on time, and not distracted by other things during that meeting. Do not agree to a meeting during a time that you’ll be driving or completing other tasks; this is disrespectful of other people’s time.
4. Decide who will serve as Content Manager (CM). The CM is responsible for choosing images, designing/formatting/saving the WordPress post by the due date, and letting the team know that its work is complete. (The CM and PM cannot be the same person.)
5. Anyone not serving as the PM or CM is a researcher. Everyone is responsible for composing the text of the post, though group members should work to balance writing responsibilities with other duties in the group (research, PM, and CM).

Step 3: Research, writing, and editing

1. All of the composing work needs to take place in a common document, thread or channel on Discord, or somewhere else where all group members and I can see it.
2. Research the digital community to learn what you can about it, including (but not limited to): who belongs to it? where are the members (are they proximal/local to each other)? where can you see evidence of constructive community-building (trust, kindness, collaboration, support, goal setting, resource sharing, constructive debate/deliberation, goal-setting)? Where can you see evidence of engagement (frequency, prompting response, responding to)? Is the community platform-specific or does it spread out to other digital spaces? In what ways have specific members of the community (the leaders, perhaps?) demonstrate ethos (within your community or elsewhere)? How active or healthy is the community (thriving, succeeding, falling stagnant, suffering from infighting, expanding or shrinking too quickly)? Answering those questions (and others that might follow from them) is engaging in digital community analysis.
3. Write the text for a 500 word blog post on the digital community that, at the very least: a) defines the community; b) presents an organized and detailed analysis of the community; c) regularly includes hyperlinks and/or screenshots as evidence of your claims.
4. In addition to answering the above (or related) questions, your analysis text should identify and link to: a) at least two sources that your digital community values; these should be textual or video sources form important background or focus the work of the community; b) at least five artifacts (according to our definitions) posted by community members (these can serve as examples of claims made in answering the questions in #2 above).

Step 4: Design and format in WordPress

1. The Content Manager (CM) takes the text composing by everyone, opens a WordPress post on our class publishing site (as a reminder, here is where you go to log in), and begins layout for the post.
2. Use a header image that follows our ethical image selection guidelines and is modified with text specific for your post (using Canva or any other product you’re familiar with) like you did in Activity 1.
3. Include at least two other images in addition to the header image interspersed within the post. These can be other ethically chosen images or screenshots/embeds of artifacts from within the community.
4. Remember that every image we use in this class needs a caption or note underneath it that attributes its author/creator, acknowledges its title, and links back to the original so that a reader can prove it has public domain or Creative Commons license. Exceptions are: screenshots/embeds from a social media platform and images you have taken and own yourself (which you should still attribute).
5. When they are finished, the CM should save the post with a title like this: “Team Review: [Digital Community Name/Description]”

Step 5: Team review

1. Because every team member needs to sign off on the post, the CM should have their work completed for team review at least 24 hours before the due date of the activity (Tuesday, 9/10). All team members should be ready to look at the team review draft, suggest or complete revisions, and sign off on the work’s completion on Discord 5pm on Tuesday, 9/10.
2. By the end of the day Tuesday, 9/10, the CM should change the name of the the post to “Submission: [Digital Community Name/Description]”, signifying to me that the team’s work is complete.

Reminders:

PMs should be more available at the front end of the week; they should work quickly once a team is identified to suggest a schedule for team activities for the week.

CMs should be more available at the back end of the week; they should work carefully to make sure that the work of the team is precise, clear, academic, and correct.

Everyone works on writing the post. The group can decide to delegate sections/paragraphs if it wants to, but that should involve clearly agreed upon and communicated deadlines.

Everyone will be answering a survey next week reflecting on their contributions and the contributions of their team members. Approach this just as much as an activity in digital community analysis as an activity in practicing and analyzing group dynamics.