TalkFutures

About TalkFutures and Strategy 2030

TalkFutures was developed as a component of Strategy 2030, a research project within the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (IFRC) which aimed to understand the issues and challenges which the Federation will face in the near future. Through workshop engagements with teams and individuals throughout the IFRC (from volunteers in Mexico to leaders in Geneva), several key themes and issues were identified which members believed the Federation should prepare for. These included topics such as the impacts of rising sea levels due to climate change, and mass migration with the increasing trend of urbanization.

Once these issues had been identified, the next step of Strategy 2030 was to collect ideas of how the IFRC needed to change in order to best prepare for them. The TalkFutures app was created and deployed to collect these ideas from IFRC members across the globe.

We produced the TalkFutures application in Xamarin Android and Xamarin iOS, as part of a small team based in the Federation’s office in Geneva. Based on the existing open-source project Gabber (developed by Jay Rainey at Open Lab), TalkFutures makes it easy for participants to contribute semi-structured, qualitative audio data (e.g. in the form of interviews). The application also makes it easy for participants to control others’ access to their contributed audio recordings, with participants within a conversation being able to withdraw their consent, even after it has been uploaded.

Once uploaded, audio recordings are made available on the TalkFutures website, where they can be filtered by discussion topic or even which National Society the participants work in. By the conclusion of the Strategy 2030 investigation, members from 86 different National Societies contributed recordings using the application.

Resulting Publications

• TalkFutures: Supporting Qualitative Practices in Distributed Community Engagements

  Jay Rainey, Juan Carlos Alvarez de la Vega, Dan Richardson, Daniel Lambton-Howard, Sara Armouch, Tom Bartindale, Shaun Hazeldine, Pamela Briggs, Patrick Olivier, Kyle Montague

  2020 | Designing Interactive Systems | DOI | PDF