Publish research for free, access research for free.
Personas are a thought exercise in thinking about potential contributors and users to look at how they would engage with the project, helping to identify any barriers to entry and/or contribution so they can be removed. These personas where created as part of the Mozilla Open Leadership Series and are completely fictitious.
Saanvi Chavan is studying a Master of Arts in Ancient Indian History, Culture and Archaeology at Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute in Pune, India. Saanvi loves the scooter she saved up for and bought for herself when she started studying, it gives her a sense of independence from her sometimes overbearing family. When not studying she enjoys spending time with friends at ABC Farms. Saanvi heard one of her lecturers talk about research a colleague was set to publish that's pertinent to her masters, after getting the name of the journal she checked with the university library. They said they don't carry a subscription to that journal and Saanvi isn't terribly confident in her technical abilities, if she can't find the journal from a basic search she's resigned herself to the fact she won't be able to access the research. Saanvi found the journal online, but to purchase the article from the journal directly costs roughly $50 US, she can't afford it herself, doesn't want to burden her parents by asking for money, and doesn't know how else she could source it.
- Discovery - Saanvi's Google search for the article returns the Aletheia page.
- First Contact - She downloads the client and sees there is are community functions for voting on Aletheia's content.
- Participation - Saanvi participates in votes.
- Sustained Participation - She starts telling everyone in her study group about Aletheia and how anyone can paricipate in the community.
- Networked Participation - Saanvi encourages some of her lecturers to use Aletheia for peer reviewing research.
- Leadership - She runs Aletheia community events at her college around evangelising the platform, onboarding people into the Aletheia community to participate in votes and runs content generation sessions where people look for scientific research not under copyright and submit it to Aletheia.
Klaus Müller is a lecturer at Justus-liebig-Universität Gießen, teaching as part of the school of Mathematics and Computer Science, Physics and Geography. He has a wife and three kids, tells terrible dad jokes and constantly embarrasses his children at parent teacher conferences. His family don't understand his fascination with computers and he spends a great deal of time contributing to opensource projects. Klaus publishes his research at great cost and sees open access journals as inferior to closed journals, anything that doesn't have a cost attached just isn't right. He tells himself the reason he has to pay great sums of money to be published is science is expensive and must be maintained, he believes Sci-Hub and other websites that pirate scientific research are killing academia. To Klaus, blockchain is a fad, it has not proved itself yet and anything built on it offering scientific research for free will go by the wayside.
- Discovery - Klaus sees a blog post written by an Aletheia community member retweeted in his twitter feed.
- First Contact - he looks over the website and is initially disdainful, but Klaus looks into the problems with academic publishing pointed out in the rationale for Aletheia. Slowly as he talks to colleges about these issues and does some reading himself he agrees there is a problem.
- Participation - to see how legitimate Aletheia is, Klaus looks over the GitHub repo and sees a number of issues he feels he could contribute to. He makes a small contribution to see how he is received by the community.
- Sustained Participation - Klaus suggests a feature that he, as a researcher looking to publish work, would like to see as part of Aletheia. He works on this feature with other developers.
- Networked Participation - He uses Aletheia as the example project in the opensource development class he teaches, using his feature as a case study and encourages students to participate.
- Leadership - Klaus comes onboard as a GitHub repository maintainer, overseeing the contributions of his students and others.
Jean Elokobi is a social worker living in Garoua, Cameroon. In his spare time, he enjoys playing the saxophone, subbing in for a number of local bands. He is fluent in French, English and Fulfulde and has a burning desire to travel. Jean has found through his work he often interacts with children or with young families, and he often wonders what can be done to support education in Cameroon. While only having a small exposure to coding, an out of school elective in C++ while studying at Université Catholique de l'Afrique Centrale, Jean is looking for ways to engage primary and high school students with technology to contribute to Cameroon's pool of technical profesionals in future. However, he finds a lot of tech communities to be alienating, not welcoming to people with non-technical backgrounds, and he's mindful of giving students positive interactions with technology. Jean knows if students don't feel engaged and welcome they will switch off and might not pursue a technical career down the track.
- Discovery - Jean searches online for inclusive tech communities and sees a forum post mention Aletheia.
- First Contact - He looks at the Aletheia website and emails the contact address asking what resources Aletheia has for people looking to get involved. He gets an email back outlining the introductory material for onboarding people onto the project.
- Participation - Jean downloads the client and interacts with people on the forums discussing various votes.
- Sustained Participation - He runs a session at a local school on inclusive online communities and profiles communities like the Rust community and Aletheia.
- Networked Participation - Jean obtains some introductory progamming materials and runs afterschool sessions on programming with an option for students to contribute to Aletheia as real opensource project, looking over issues flagged as good for beginners.
- Leadership - He contributes to onboarding materials and coordinates the onboarding process for Aletheia.
Cai is a marketing director working for a fortune 500 company in Haiphong, Vietnam. She never went to university, started working straight out of high school, and Cai feels she had to work inordinately hard to get where she is in her career. She wants things to be easier for her two children and actively encourages them to do well in school and go to university. To compete with other candidates that had degrees when going for promotions, Cai coupled her marketing experience with technical knowledge to be an all-rounder that can get things done. She is a self-taught programmer, having taught herself Python and is learning Rust. Cai is looking for something that will help sharpen her technical skills, look good on a resume, and at the same time allow her to give back to the community and help with her children's education.
- Discovery - Looking over GitHub under educational projects Cai comes across Aletheia.
- First Contact - She shares the Aletheia website in her mothers group for educational projects to support and possible things to help introduce programming to high school age children and give them some real hands on coding experience.
- Participation - Cai looks over the pending issues for Aletheia and sees the project could use some marketing experience along with further technical experience.
- Sustained Participation - She writes to the school her children attend, along with the prospective universities they are considering, and tells them about how the library could save money by using Aletheia rather than pay for paywall journals.
- Networked Participation - Cai writes to the Aletheia maintainers and organisers a call for local volunteers to head out to the local schools and universities to talk about Aletheia, how students can use it and how they can get involved in the Aletheia community.
- Leadership - She oversees the global marketing campaign for Aletheia.
To ensure we have a diverse range of personas and pathways, Aletheians are encouraged to create their own personas with complete pathways and add them here. Images should be taken from creative commons or be images you have rights to.
Use this rough formula to create your persona but feel free to add whatever you think is pertinent for the exercise.
- One sentence naming your persona and covering what they do for study, employment, etc.
- Two sentences listing some facts about our person to make them believable, covering things like family and pastimes.
- Three sentences explaining why they might want to use Aletheia, including reasons why they may be predisposed towards or against Aletheia
Use this formula to create your persona's pathway
- Discovery
- First Contact
- Participation
- Sustained Participation
- Networked Participation
- Leadership
The point of pathways is to identify barriers for entry into the community of contribution to the project, so feel free to list out identified barriers and if you like add possible suggestions around their removal.