"Your Relationship to This Case" should not be visible in sidebar & should not be editable

[scottofletcher]

From @davidascher on June 19, 2018 23:13

Sender: scottowenfletcher@gmail.com Comment: "Your Relationship to This Case" should not be visible in sidebar (and should not be editable unless we are capturing different data for each person that edits the entry) Open #217 in Usersnap Dashboard

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Copied from original issue: participedia/usersnaps#204

[jesicarson]

@scottofletcher @plscully,

@dethe and I have some questions/ comments to do with this field:

• people's relationship may change over time, can the original author edit their own relationship?
• if you don't make this a mandatory field, the data won't be very useful
• if you DO make this a mandatory field, some people may not want to contribute and/or it creates one more barrier to entry
• if you export the data, will you have access to other users relationships to cases? if not, who DOES get access to this info and is this a transparency concern? can relationship data be sensitive info in some instances?
• data is tied to the user, per article, which is an anomaly / we don't do that anywhere else in the site

Thoughts? Perhaps we should hold off on implementing this field? Thanks!

[scottofletcher]

@jesicarson @dethe Here's my take on this:

1. Yes, that makes sense but that means the field should show my original selections when I go to edit/update the entry. Right now, I fill it out, publish, and then when I go back to edit, all my selections are reset/deleted.
2. I guess not - would it be better to include questions like 'Profession', 'Industry', 'Organizational or Institutional Affiliation', 'Personal Website' (etc.) during sign-up (like on .net)? Not that all of them would have to be mandatory. @plscully hadn't we looked into re-doing the sign-up form borrowing from sites like LinkedIn?
3. Agreed - what if there were a 'prefer not to say' option? I guess it still doesn't make sense though since this field is only visible on the Full Version
4. Good question - could it be an aggregate? Like it would show how many people with such and such a relationship contributed to the entry? I think that's what the folks who advocated for this field wanted anyways - a sense of who's using PPedia and whether or not our content is being written by 'insiders'
5. Is that a problem? Does it take up extra storage?

[plscully]

Given all these questions/issues, I agree that we should hold off on implementing for now. I will have to go back to some early notes to be completely sure, but I think the request for this field came from Nancy Doubleday, a co-investigator at McMaster U and from Tiago Peixoto at the World Bank. Their concern was that we be as transparent as possible regarding whether a contributor had a vested interest in how they wrote their entry. Recently, however, Mark and I decided that we should approach our partners at UBC's school of information science and see if they are willing to conduct a thorough review of best practices in terms of balancing transparency and privacy for open-source research. Our questions related to this field could be part of that research.

Since we've already built the field, can we simply hide it for now?

[dethe]

We can hide it or remove it. Given that the data doesn't appear to be persisting, I think we never finished implementing it in the first place (and implementing will be complicated for reasons given above). So right now the fact that we're showing it should probably be considered a bug. I'll remove it.

[jesicarson]

Thanks all. Interesting research topic Pat, let us know what Ubc says.