🎈 Public Lab: What makes a good activity?

Question: What makes a good activity?

In our continuing shift towards using the new Q&A feature and the new Activity grids as a framework for collaboration on PublicLab.org, we're encouraging people to post their work more in the spirit of Instructables.com -- "showing each other how to do something" rather than just telling people about something you've done. This shifts the emphasis from solely documenting what you've done, to helping others do it too. (image above from a Lego Technics kit)

There are several reasons we like this. A how-to guide (what we're calling Activities) must have extremely thorough and easy-to-follow steps (and may need to be revised if people get stuck). Perhaps even more importantly, its success (we hope) can be measured by how many people are able to follow the steps successfully, which exercises and fuels the power of broad communities and open science.

What's needed?

While there are various types of activities for various purposes, all of them ought to set out some basic information to help people get started:

a description of the purpose of the activity
a list of materials needed
a clear description of your conditions (e.g. lighting, temperature, or other relevant factors)
a detailed sequence of steps to follow
a description of how to confirm you've followed the steps correctly
a hypothesis or expected outcome
a discussion of your results
a list of questions to explore next (unknowns, or followup activities)
a request for input (there's always room for improvement!)

Speaking of room for improvement, can folks suggest other important parts of an activity? With an eye toward making it easy for anyone to write and post activities, and for others to replicate them, what's the minimum necessary?

image description

(IKEA Stonehenge. Justin Pollard, John Lloyd, and Stevyn Colgan designed an IKEA manual for Stonehenge, publishing it under the title HËNJ in the QI 'H' Annual)

Drafts welcome

We'd also like to suggest that people post things early -- to share ideas, solicit input, and acknowledge that most posted activities will go through some (if not many) revisions as people try them out and offer feedback. Could we even have a separate "Publish Draft" button so they're clearly marked as such, and people know they're encouraged to share early and often?

Break it up!

One important way we think will increase the chances that people will complete a replication of your activity is to simply write shorter activities -- perhaps breaking up a longer set of steps into several related modules. Instead of posting a long and complex activity, a few shorter ones -- each with a simple way to verify that the steps so far were correctly completed -- are much more accessible, and will tend to separate distinct possible causes of failure for easier troubleshooting.

Distinct modular activities can be linked and referenced to create a larger activity that might span, for example, building and verifying a tool functions properly, tool calibration, and lab or field tests of various materials using the tool. Even if the final activity cannot be completed without the previous activities first, breaking them out into distinct activities that build on each other will help the onboarding process.

image description (above, @cfastie shows how to swap a lens in a #mobius camera)

Supporting activity authors

Finally, beyond this overview, what more can we do to make it easy to write good activities? Some have suggested a kind of "assistance group" who could provide helpful tips and constructive critique to people posting on Public Lab. This sounds like a great idea, and potentially extra helpful to folks who are hesitant or unsure of what makes a good and thorough post.

Would "activity templates" be useful, to the extent that they can be generalized?

We're also, of course, posting some example Activities, such as this spectrometer calibration activity, which we hope will help set some conventions.

Next steps

We're also interested in how people could be introduced to other activities on a topic once they complete the current one -- maybe there's a "sequence" of activities that grow in complexity? Or we could display a mini activity grid of "related activities" at the bottom of each one?

Finally, we're trying to figure out how people can request an activity for something they want to learn to do, but for which there is not yet an activity posted. This'll be especially important as we're starting out, since we have very few complete activities posted -- but it'll also be a great starting place for people hoping to share their knowledge and expertise. Our initial stab at this is to list "limitations and goals" for a given kit, clearly explaining the problem we'd like to solve. This is actually a list of questions using our new questions system -- and we imagine people might post an activity, then link to it as a proposed answer.

We need your input!

This is all quite new, and we'd love to hear other ideas for how this could work. And of course, if you're interested in giving it a try and writing an Activity, please do! Activity grids are going up on many wiki pages across the site, so if you have questions about where and how to post, please leave them in the comments below. Thanks!