TalkToMe – user inputs & polls vs NarraFirma

WHAT IS IT? A plugin that lets you gather user input directly from your WordPress community. WHY USE IT? Out of the box, WordPress has only one way to gather user input: comments. If you wan’t to interact more thoroughly with your community, comments are not enough. Therefore, we created this plugin. WHAT DOES THE PLUGIN DO? You can create a so called ‘Input Card’ where users can answer a question and provide valuable feedback. Furthermore, the plugin provides a ‘Poll Card’ that you can use for surveys. Finally, there is also a third type of cards ‘HTML Card’ that allows custom html input to create your very own card. HOW DO I USE IT? Once the plugin is activated, navigate to ‘Crowd’ and then click on Cards. Here you can create a New Card and choose the type of card you are interested in. After creating your card, you are able to attach the cards to your WordPress post.

NarraFirma is companion software to the textbook Working with Stories in Your Community Or Organization: Participatory Narrative Inquiry. Participatory Narrative Inquiry is a form of Participatory Action Research in which groups of people share and work with their stories of personal experiences to understand each other and to make collective sense of complex issues and situations. You can use it to help the people in your community or organization discover insights, catch emerging trends, make decisions, generate ideas, resolve conflicts, and connect people. What is NarraFirma? It’s a checklist. NarraFirma provides practical guidance as you work, with questions for you to answer, recommendations based on the conditions you describe, activities that help you make decisions, and just-in-time advice. It’s a journal. NarraFirma helps you keep careful records about what happened in your project, and it gives you places to reflect on what happened. This reminds you to keep learning as you work, and it helps you to document your project for future reference. It’s a kiosk. NarraFirma helps you collect stories, on-line and/or off-line, based on question forms you design (with sample questions you can copy). Because story collection is integrated, there is no need to export or import data. It’s a workstation. NarraFirma helps you explore and interpret patterns in your data (stories and answers to questions about stories), creating annotated visualizations you can use to make sense of the stories you collected. Why choose NarraFirma? It’s portable. You can install NarraFirma anywhere, as a WordPress plugin or a Node.js web application. Web hosting is inexpensive, popular, and well supported. You can also install NarraFirma on your local computer and use it off-line. (Whichever installation method you choose, we strongly suggest that you set up SSL security on your web site before collecting or entering confidential or important information. Many hosting providers can help you with this task.) It’s a team player. With NarraFirma your team can work on projects together in real time without having to hand files back and forth. You can plan your project, collect stories, discover patterns, and reflect on what you’ve learned – together. It’s an open book. NarraFirma is open source software. So if you have a question about how something works, you can just look at the source code to find out. If you need the software to do something it can’t do, you can add new functionality yourself or ask someone else to add it. It works in the real world. One NarraFirma installation supports multiple projects, forms, data sets, and reports. Why? Because real-life story projects are rarely simple or predictable. So go ahead and make a mess. NarraFirma is ready for it. Donations We have spent a lot of time developing NarraFirma. We appreciate donations, and will use them to keep working on it. You can donate at PayPal. Need some help? I offer training in the use of NarraFirma and consulting for PNI projects. If you are interested, check out my web site at cfkurtz.com, or send me a note at cfkurtz at cfkurtz dot com.