Project Admins:
As administrators of your conversation campaign, you are responsible for planning and executing the entire project from start to finish. The time commitment will vary based on your project scope and timeline, your participant recruitment process, and the number of conversations in your campaign.
Conversation Facilitators
Facilitators play a crucial role in guiding participants through the small-group conversations that are central to your project. They act as hosts, using active listening skills to connect with participants and steer the conversation. Depending on your project scope and included workshops, facilitators may attend a 90-minute Orientation led by Cortico. Each conversation is designed to be about 90 minutes, and the time commitment depends on the number of conversations facilitators plan to host.
Conversation Participants
Fora Conversations are designed to last about 90 minutes, but a participant's time commitment depends on the conversation length you set. If you want to include participants in the sensemaking process, their time commitment will extend to include that phase.
Sensemakers
Sensemakers are those involved in highlighting, coding, and tagging conversations. Anyone can be a sensemaker regardless of profession or background due to our ability to discern, apply and negotiate meaning from our interactions with other humans.
In the context of a Cortico project, sensemakers will use our Fora platforms to dissect conversations and surface concepts and themes. Depending on your project scope, sensemakers might attend a 90-minute highlighting workshop, a 90-minute codebook co-creation workshop, and a 90-minute narrative writing workshop.
If you are collecting a large amount of conversations, consider having multiple sensemakers. When thinking of who may be a good sensemaker for your project, consider who on your team is an active listener, has an open mind, and can interpret stories from various lenses or perspectives.
Sensemakers will also complete asynchronous work, and the amount scales with the size and length of your campaign. While Cortico provides training, the majority of the analytical work is done by partners and their teams in their own time. Listening and analyzing can be time intensive, so it is crucial to carve out dedicated time for your team to highlight, code and tag, regardless if your team is working with you on a volunteer basis or are being compensated for their participation.
Portal Design and Narrative Writing team
If you’re creating a portal as part of your project, there are a unique set of workshops and tasks related to the design and drafting of its contents.
The team members working on the portal will attend a 90-minutes narrative writing workshop and/or a 60-minute portal design meeting. Much of the narrative writing and portal design work is done asynchronously, although Cortico team members are available for consultation and support. Drafting the narrative entails filling in a 20-30 page guided worksheet, with writing portions ranging from short section titles to 500-800 word sections. The portal design work involves organizing branding materials (e.g., photos, logos, preferred colors) and deciding how to display any demographic information you’ve collected.