TERP was originally designed to support the NSF grant, “Indexing Energy Vulnerability.” And as I say below, I think I was cautiously hopeful that the platform could have a public user community -- collaborators in the nonprofit world; other energy experts in Philadelphia; and even community members who participate in the research. But I had mostly imagined it as, prioritized, its identity as a research archive (read: storage) with potential for collaborative analysis and publication. Part of me wouldn’t allow the rest of me to hope for more than storage. I’ve worked on enough digital projects over the last eighteen years to know that making a digital space is its own separate project. TERP as platform was always secondary to “Indexing Energy Vulnerability” as social science study. This is my project manager part speaking.
But, in December 2019, as we began surveying community members, they began to ask what this work (the survey) was good for. Like, really coming after the research team members during the surveys themselves (Philadelphia is overstudied so people are sharp on research ethics). So, we thought, we’ve got to spend more time making TERP public and accessible to community members. So that’s become a priority for us the last three months -- its public useability. So, people who participated in the survey can see the data visualizations from individual questions and excerpts from the survey. People we interview can point people to their transcripts (like the Executive Director of a CDC we recently interviewed, who really wants us to make our work and his work visible by curating an essay around the transcript). In other words, the more research we do, the more opportunity there is to make TERP the platform public and useable to a wider community of energy rights stakeholders. But we weren’t prioritizing this until we began the survey and people expressed interest in it.
Had you asked me six months ago, or eighteen months ago, if I could see myself making a PECE essay that would serve as a public resource going into a public hearing on water affordability, I would have said, maybe but it depends on doing a significant amount of design work --- things we should have done long ago maybe (About page, research bios, etc.)
In sum, the project’s identity has evolved from “Indexing Energy Vulnerability” NSF grant and housingenergy.info as the URL, to “The Energy Vulnerability Project”, a name I was never happy with (nor the housingenergy.info -- but it was a placeholder until the project could figure itself out) to “The Energy Rights Project” and related URL, a revision in our identity that was fueled by our desire to have a public interface that had a social justice platform -- energy rights -- which is more forward thinking that documenting energy vulnerability. So, by my account, there has been a sizeable shift in the social and discursive context that the platform is situated in: the pandemic, our increased collaboration with nonprofits and community organizations through the research over the last six months, and from our desire to push this idea of energy rights.
The platform is funded with a three-year standard NSF grant. We allocated $10,000 for PECE and I think we have used about $7500 of that in the first two years. Of course, TERP also depends on the labor and financial support of other PECE projects, the PECE Design Group, and all of the labor/money that went into developing PECE over the last decade.
As for labor, Revax and Renato are doing all system admin work, and Renato is training me in a piecemeal fashion on site admin tasks; since September, prior to that a Drexel grad student was doing this work for $15/hr. At that time the site was hosted on InMotion.
The site also depends on my labor as PD; over the last month I probably spent about 10-15 hours a week working on PECE. It also depends on the labor of three paid undergraduate research assistants. I’m not quite sure how many hours a week they spend working on PECE itself, but probably 75% of their work ends up on PECE at some point. James Adams (UCI) has been working with us since last June and his labor is unpaid. He has been conducting surveys and interviews, and working on the media briefs, as well as attending all meetings.
The platform also depends on administrative support at Drexel -- folks who help me with paperwork, invoices, applications, the budget, and timesheets; all of which are necessary for grants.
We also could not do the survey project without BJ McDuffie, who is our community outreach coordinator.
TERP has hired Revax with the NSF grant money and Renato does all our systems admin, and teaching me how to do site admin. The platform is hosted at Digital Ocean, our domain name is purchased through godaddy, and that’s about all I know. In other words, Renato or someone else from Revax would need to answer that part of this question.
I will say that we use Canva EXTENSIVELY to make images and other visual content, but this isn’t integrated, there is no interface. We don’t use zotero, either.
To be honest, I really don’t think I am trying to produce reflective critique of the design and operation at this point. I could see this work happening in a year… but if we’re doing any critical reflective work on PECE design, it’s not explicit nor intentional.
I think that this is not something we’re doing well at all. The platform provides no way to connect users. I would not say that the platform supports and encourages any kind of collaboration -- any and all collaboration needs to be coordinated outside of the platform. OK, maybe it support collaboration by allowing multiple contributors on a single object (artifact or essay), but that's it. Collaboration is very passively designed in PECE.
The platform is designed to support archival work primarily: collecting artifacts, both in basic and applied ways, for lack of better terms. Basic in the sense that whenever we find something interesting but unrelated to the task at hand, it gets uploaded. Applied in the sense that 90% of our work is very directed: we are uploading and analyzing data related to utility moratoriums or water affordability, or increased energy usage. But I think the platform is designed to support a wide range of tasks and practices.
As for workflows, it’s funny: This is something I have given zero thought to explicitly, the style of our workflows. And now that the TERP research team is putting together the collaboration protocol, there is so much that RAs want to put in there related to workflows, documentation, and protocols. This signals to me that, while I think I have good documentation, it’s disorganized in google drive, hasn’t been updated in over a year, and doesn’t account for new forms of work (like the survey and interviews).
I would 100% say that the workflows the TERP team currently uses are linear and efficient. I think later on down the road, if we were to use TERP in other settings (courses, workshops) or take on new research team members, I would design work practices that are more exploratory and experiential. I guess my feeling is, you have to build the thing first… Even the workflow practices that might seem exploratory -- “search the site using keywords first to see what comes up, i.e. similar artifacts or the exact same artifact” -- I would still say that protocol was put in place to bolster efficiency.
But few things are written down. We have a tagging protocol, we have an interview processing protocol, we have guidelines for survey data write-ups, and that might be about it.
So, the platform has served as a tool for The Energy Vulnerability Lab; students collected and analyzed artifacts here, used the work of other students, and built PECE essays for their final projects. We’ve also used the platform to archive the course itself.
Right now we’ve also prepared a PECE essay for the Philadelphia Water Rate Case public hearings that are happening this coming week. The essay provides information from the Water Department, the public advocate, research and media coverage on water affordability, and also data from our research on water affordability in the city. I’m also going to provide comments/testify at the hearing on Thursday and my statement will be posted on the essay afterwards. People will be able to see the survey data that I refer to, as well as quotes from study participants.
The other two examples that tack between platform and nondigital activities is the Energy in COVID-19 essay and media briefs that that group organizes, and the survey we’re conducting. We make the survey instrument, data, consent forms publicly accessible; but recruitment happens through workshops and the survey happens over the phone.
This is a good question that I can’t say I’ve thought that much about. In part because I think of TERP as a research space for our team first and foremost; everything and anyone else is secondary. It might not be good to think of users in that kind of hierarchical way, but I think it’s necessary for me as a PD. But I also think the platform is designed that way. It’s a research space and archive.
I don’t know if the platform is discoverable. If you search for energy rights project, the first several items are TERP. But if you search for energy rights, we’re not even on the first page of a google search. Otherwise, the platform is listed in my email signature and through other PECE projects. I think those are the only really ways its known at this point.
We have quite a bit of open, public content for people to access. And we try to put things that would be most useful to users beyond our research team in the slider: The water rate case; Philadelphia news you can use; information about the survey; the most recent media brief; and the Energy in COVID-19 page.
For interview transcripts, where there are links to these artifacts we state that they are for IRB approved researchers only and to contact us for access. I think we are moving in the direction of, if someone wanted to access the restricted spaces, they would have to join the research team, they would have to be interviewed by myself and agree to the TERP collaboration protocols.
We did not imagine it at the time, of course, but the platform is designed to preserve and remember discourse, policy, and experiences of household energy use during the pandemic. Our media briefs document what’s in the news each month, related to COVID-19, for example. The surveys especially are designed to capture how people were thinking about energy during this time. Interviews with Neighborhood Energy Center counselors and ECA staff really hone in on what the pandemic has done to social service work, of which energy assistance is a part.
I think we’re also hoping to document what I’m called ‘energy service disruptions’ caused by a range of factors; storms certainly but also routine maintenance issues and financial hardship, for example.
I think to a lesser extent we’re tracking developments and discussions around renewable energy in Pennsylvania.
The platform includes peer-reviewed articles, interview transcripts, image artifacts with results from our survey, videos, images, event flyers, reports and also fieldnotes. We include peer-reviewed articles for teaching and for research team discussion and analysis; we include survey data for other people to use, and also for us to use in presentations; we include interview transcripts so that we can collaboratively analyze them; we include interview excerpts to make specific points about an issue (the NEC model, the federal poverty guidelines, conservation education, water bills, and workforce development are some things that we’ve used quotes to highlight). I actually don’t think we’ve uploaded any videos yet, but we have about fifteen of these that could be uploaded. We have a collection of flyers and ppts posted right now, as a lead up to the water rate case hearings March 16th and 18th; this is information sharing rather than data, but it will become data at a later point.
The data is almost always presented as artifacts. Usually we embed artifacts into PECE essays. I think one of the things we’re trying to think through right now is, how to present data. I would not say that users are encouraged to “interact” with the data in any way… Though I think this is something interesting to think about. Particularly with our survey and interview data, which we hope people will draw on.