Hi, I'm Delvin Varghese.
I'm a research fellow at action lab, an interdisciplinary HCI group based at
Monash university in Melbourne Australia.
The topic I'll be talking about today is peer mentoring through oral
discussions among rural volunteers.
How can we support digital practices around peer mentoring and how do we take
into account the resourcing challenges that nonprofits in the global south face.
We'll be looking at those questions within this presentation.
I met two trainers from Audacious Dreams Foundations, also known as ADF in 2017.
ADF is a nonprofit that engages volunteers from multiple south Indian states.
These volunteers were trained to go to different schools and deliver
awareness, raising campaigns around the sustainable development goals.
As these volunteers were spread across vast distances and often in areas with
limited internet connectivity, ADF wanted to look at ways of facilitating
remote mentoring and doing so in a way that acknowledged the lived
experiences of their volunteers.
So together with ADF trainers, we ran the study to unearth the volunteer
expectations of peer mentoring shows.
And now there's a lot of existing work within the HCI for development
space that has looked at you know, both types of audio, synchronous and
asynchronous for connecting communities.
We were particularly inspired by audio practices from the broadcast
radio talk show space scholars, like Kazakos, which we have referenced in
our paper have run community discussions over conference telephone calls.
Looking more broadly at the literature and professional development and mentoring,
we can see some trends, you know, there has been a desire to move beyond the
traditional understanding of mentoring which assumes a one-to-one and an
in-person mentor- mentee relationship.
Remote mentoring, or e- mentoring has emerged to fill that space.
The extant literature, however, has been looking mostly at emails
as the dominant form through which e-mentoring can be conducted.
In terms of richer discussions, some like Joshy et al.
have proposed platforms like Micro Mentor.
It's a video based platform, but it is challenging to implement that in areas
with limited internet connectivity.
So at the training workshop where we conducted the study, there were
28 participants, which included both young volunteers and junior staff.
They were between the ages of 18 and 25.
There was a 50, 50 male female participants.
And alongside me, there were three ADF trainers involved, in the training event.
Next I'll briefly describe the activities that we carried out.
We designed three mock mentoring show formats with the trainers.
And after a briefing, the participants were , recruited to play different
roles in these mock shows.
The first format was the expert led conversation.
And this was around the typical mainstream radio talk show, you
know, one host and one guest.
Um, and these were nominated.
These roles were nominated by the participants to take part in a 30
minute conversation at the front of the room while the others were sat
and listened as just audience members.
The second format was the facilitated discussion format modeling
previous work in HCI, uh, in which participants take part in, for
example, teleconferencing calls.
And there's a brief presentation by the host and the guest followed
by, uh, audience discussion.
So we simulated that in our workshop, by, asking by asking a nominated
moderator to pass along questions written down on a piece of paper
from the audience members to the host and the host then chose to ask that.
The final format was one around audience panel discussions.
And this is an open-ended discussion between a panel and audience members.
The host simply guides the discussion simulating a radio show environment.
The panel members were seated in a different room and discussed
via a phone call with the audience members in the other room.
In the second activity we asked the participants for their critiques on the
shows we presented and they took part in.
And as part of these critiques, they took part in, uh, five sub activities,
including creation of their ideal format for a show now that they had exposure to
a few different types, uh, designing a map of all the potential stakeholders,
they would engage for their audience.
Designing some initial future show content for the future, and also looking at,
um, presenting it to the other groups and getting feedback from each other.
In terms of our findings.
What we found was that format three was chosen by most participants as
their preferred format, due to its flexibility in accommodating diverse
opinions from different audience members.
They contrasted this with format two where the role of the moderator
was seen rather negatively.
And it caused a lot of frustration in terms of how their questions were
interpreted by the moderator and format one, um, was disliked the most
because of the propensity for it to become boring for the participants.
And overall a highly entertaining and engaging format was desired
by everyone in the room.
The volunteers were particularly concerned about the show's ability to
thrive long term and their thinking revealed a sophisticated model of
sort of audience engagement strategy.
This involved balancing participation costs of the host and balancing that
against listeners expectations of how often the show should be run
and how long the show should be.
And they also discussed the financial costs involved and
discuss sponsorship models and crowd funding from local support
sources, participants also reflected.
Through real time discussions, they could document their volunteering experiences.
Um, and the recordings could be used while they were in the field to share
this with non attendees through the other social media channels, this
they thought could be used to promote volunteerism, further field using
the recordings as a recruitment tool.
And all of this gave the volunteers opportunity to develop their
own media production skills as they sought to do this.
Let's look at a couple of, um, insights that we can glean from this for future
research and practice in this space.
Firstly, we noticed that for many participants simply having the
opportunity to access learning and peer discussions was not a strong enough.
The discussions needed to be entertaining.
And we see a tension here between the initial goals of the nonprofit that
we sought out to fulfill, um, and our changing expectations as we engage
volunteers on their own desires.
So there's a clear need here to understand culturally appropriate values
in each context and how to take them into account in community engagements.
Finally, another thing we want to discuss here is the importance of setting clear,
mutually agreed expectations between volunteers and the organizations to ensure
that volunteers are not overburdened by expectations of participation, because
we think it's important to think about risk management in such processes.
You know, how long can we sustain these processes?
How do we plug in resource gaps when volunteers dropout or certain
volunteers who are taking on key roles like hosts proved to be unreliable.
Thank you so much for watching.
Please do get in touch with me via this email.
, if you want to chat more about this research or brainstorm ideas related
to this, I'm always happy to talk.
Some of my other research involves co-design and participatory design
with multicultural communities and marginalized communities using social
and digital media, always keen on as.
Thank you very much.
Goodbye.