Week 9: Challenge Activity

With the second rapid ideation session over, it appears weekly challenges are back on the agenda. With this week's focus being on Communities of Practice, it was little surprise the challenge followed suit:

Brief

This week’s activity borrows heavily from the field of social anthropology. According to discoveranthropology.org.uk:

“Social anthropologists conduct their research in many ways, but the method most characteristic of the discipline is that of fieldwork based on ‘participant observation’. This usually means spending a long period (a year or more) living as closely as possible with the community being studied; learning the language if necessary; sharing the activities of daily life; observing and participating in the texture of social interactions; and identifying underlying patterns. Through analysing this experience and exchanging ideas with members of the community, the anthropologist aims to gain a deep understanding of how the society works, including its inherent tensions and contradictions. Social anthropologists usually report their research in the form of ‘ethnographies’, which are detailed descriptions of the society in question.”

Obviously, we don’t have the luxury of months or years to complete this activity. This activity should take no more than an hour so it is important to monitor the scope and not get too carried away.

To complete this task:

Identify a community of practitioners that aligns with your interests and aspirations for the future.
Create an ethnography report, no more than 800 words long, that is based on ‘participation observation.’

The term ‘report’ is used here to align with the description above. However, we are not expecting a formal scientific report. Instead, this activity can be done in quite an informal manner and does not need to be too labour-intensive.

As suggested in the quote above, this report should include observations about:

The tone and language used by members of the community.
Activities and behaviours such as social gatherings and events.
The types and modes of interaction.
Patterns and rules of the community.

Unfortunately for me, I am not a member of any software or UX community groups, online or offline. As discussed in this week's other post, I did attend a web design/development group over a decade ago which put me off the idea. As time went on, my career shifted to marketing and my focus changed for a time. I was a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM, n.d.) for a time, but I really didn't capitalise on my membership, nor do I feel I could speak about the organisation from an anthropological or ethnographical standpoint with any insight.

I began to consider groups that I may be interested in exploring in the near future, as part of my course. Throughout this module, there has been a common thread that keeps appearing, my fascination with Extended Reality (XR), with a particular focus on Augmented reality for the web. I had previously experimented with augmented reality in week 3 while producing prototypes, using the Javascript framework A-Frame (A-Frame – Make WebVR, .nd) and AR.js (AR.js, .nd). As it happens, A-Frame has a thriving community of users and contributors as well as a variety of platforms and channels they communicate and collaborate on. I felt this would be the perfect candidate to conduct the study on.

Report

Chosen Community of Practice

Over the preceding weeks, I have become more and more interested in the world of XR on the web. I decided to write about A-Frame and its community of contributors and developers in this report. A-Frame is a Javascript framework for the development of VR, AR, and XR experiences in the browser, that uses a declarative style that is very easy to pick up; it was the framework I used for my week 3 challenge when prototyping AR for a pumpkin carving app. It has a thriving community of over 7000 participants on Slack who use the framework and 270 contributors to its codebase which is hosted on Github.

Activities and Behaviours

The community looks like it conducts in-real-life activities (IRL) such as user groups, events, and meetups in multiple locations around the globe, including both east and west coasts United States, Japan, Taiwan, and the UK in London. The London Group meet to discuss the state of webXR, experiment with the technology, and share their experiences.

Types and modes of interaction

The community operates a slack group, filled with channels to showcase projects and ask for and offer support and advice for beginners. There is also #aframe on the Supermedium Discord Server, by the core team behind the project. Here they champion AR, XR VR, and WebXR technologies and use the platform as a way to support the community directly.

There is a section on the A-Frame website called A week of A-Frame - a weekly series featuring fresh content from the community wishing to showcase projects and newly acquired skills.

There is also A-Frame Components - a place where community members post components so others can use them in their own projects, ranging from solutions that solve commonly encountered problems to edge cases.

Finally, there is an opportunity to work on the core framework via the GitHub community which currently has 270 contributors to the source code.

Rules of the Community

A-Frame has a Conduct Section on their Community page. They are committed to providing a friendly safe and welcoming environment for all and have a policy that requires the community to contact the core team if they are aware of the harassment. A-Frame also has a policy in place for those looking to get started contributing to the codebase.

Tone and Language

The tone seems friendly, welcoming, and supportive on the website, and the Slack channel specifically mentions newcomers. The slack channel appears full of instances of the community helping and guiding each other through certain obstacles.

The group has 7 channels with topics ranging from Projects, Issues, and Questions. The Discord server seems more focused on the issues surrounding the wider community of webXR in general but again appears to be friendly and informative.

Conclusion

A-Frame's community seems to have a great balance between those looking to get started in the field of webXR, to the those looking to give back to the community by supporting the framework's codebase. There are ample opportunities and platforms to collaborate, help, support, and meet up and the community seems friendly and supportive.

Reflections

I'm glad I chose A-Frame for the report. They are an active and open community with a multitude of ways to get involved, so they were an ideal fit for exploring the format of the report. Writing and researching the report help me to familiarise myself with the community. It forced me to both join the Slack and Disord groups and I could see the caliber of the support given to new members. I have set a SMART Goal in this week's other post to explore Augmented Reality. I find I have a reinvigorated desire to explore the topic further, which is partly thanks to this challenge activity. Realistically, however, I may wait until my assignment is complete before exploring the community and the topic further.

References.

A-Frame. n.d. A-Frame – Make WebVR. [online] Available at: <https://aframe.io/> [Accessed 1 April 2022].

Cim.co.uk. n.d. Marketing Qualifications, Training and Membership | CIM. [online] Available at: <https://www.cim.co.uk/> [Accessed 1 April 2022].

GitHub. n.d. AR.js. [online] Available at: <https://github.com/AR-js-org/AR.js> [Accessed 1 April 2022].