WRA 453 Grant Proposal Writing Fall 2005 Bill Hart Davidson hartdav2 msu edu Session 14 Proposing as a social act PIP or proposal microstructure Communication Event Models Proposing activity can be seen as transactional intersubjective exchange of information thoughts and speech among participants Chains of communicative events One approach Visualize the chains 10 25 01 10 26 01 P E E f2f E E E Template for target document E f2f P E E 11 07 01 11 08 01 12 20 01 1 29 02 First draft of target document E f2f E E P Final draft sent E 2 01 02 2 20 02 f2f E P E How Why do we build them How Units used to construct visualizations are communication events taken from diaries Why Distributed processes of work can be presented in intelligible ways to foster both formal inquiry e g research and informal reasoning about practice for example CEMs for Two Student Teams Local team Distance team E mail IM f2f phone 27 0 10 1 38 57 5 2 0 64 Other Total These teams were writing a proposal for a new technical product Their task was to show that their design was state of the art Sort Coordination f2f f2ff2f f2f ph f2ff2f f2f ph f2f f2f ph ph New horizontal line for each event that did not include all team members The distance team was working with people out of the loop early on what if they had known here Syntagmatic Dimension Paradigmatic Dimension P E E E f2f E E P E E E E f2f E f2f E E Paradigmatic E E E f2f E E E E E f2f E E f2f E How do proposals get started at SpaceCo P Syntagmatic CAUTION How does a project that begins with a strategy meeting proceed The diagrams here and on the next slide are mocked up not models of real data Going deeper CIWC 04 report P E E E f2f E E E f2f E E f2f E P E E P ICTC 05 report LCT Spreadsheet E mail WC request CIWC Fall report P E E Each is a site of mediated activity too f2f E Event Description E mail to JP DD JG also used CIWC 2004 APP R report CIWC 2004 Fall activity report ICTC draft 2005 APP R report LCT spreadsheets DS s Writing Center recommendations requests submitted in Fall reporting process Goal of Event Acknowledge writing task float a plan for framing the recommendations Date 2 9 2005 Start Time 5 35 p m End Time approx 6 30 p m Location Mother in law s house dining room Reading or Writing Both but writing was focal Related to Project Y N Y If so how I framed a plan not quite an outline for the report to make sure that I was on the right track before I drafted a full version Technology Used iBook G4 Netscape mail client for writing MSWord MSExcel Adobe Acrobat for viewing files Participants Me various authors of the other documents scaffolding my planning process Summary I was watching Lily so I worked downstairs on this preliminary plan for the report that it was now clear I would need to draft on 2 10 so that I could circulate it for comments by the committee over the weekend I downloaded gathered all the documents I needed to draw on for precedent and put them in a new folder on my laptop desktop called CIWC My time was limited to about an hour for this because the dining room table was going to be used for dinner Studying Proposing Activity sources Prior P Shipka J 2002 Chronotopic laminations Tracing the contours of literate activity In Bazerman C Russel D Writing selves writing societies Research from activity perspectives http wac colostate edu books selves societies index cfm Faigley L 1986 Nonacademic writing The social perspective In L Odell D Goswami Eds Writing in nonacademic settings Gunnarson B L 1997 The Writing process from a sociolinguistic viewpoint Written Communication 14 2 Dourish P 2001 Process descriptions as organizational accounting devices The dual use of workflow technologies SIGGROUP 01 ACM Suchman Lucy 1984 Plans situated actions The problem of human machine communication Cambridge UP PIP A fractal organization scheme for proposing Persuad e Inform Persuad e Try it proposing an activity Persuad e Inform Persuad e To ensure that our visualizations are usable we will invite two expert reviewers from the field of information visualization to comment and give feedback on the design Paul Dourish Barbara Mirel are two leading researchers in the areas of information visualizationa and computersupported cooperative work Both have agreed to support this project by serving as reviewers We believe that with the help of Mirel Dourish our visualization tool can be integrated into the work practice of proposal writers who have not Scaled up PIP for methods slot Persuad e Line of Argument Here is a methodological approach that has been shown to be sound in these previous studies projects Inform Line of Argument We are using the methodological approach adapting for our specific project in these ways Persuad e Line of Argument Based on our pilot study and previous published work here are the positive outcomes we expect that match with the goals stated in the RFP e g replicability validity etc Scaled down PIP elevator speech Persuad e Some colleagues of mine and I are working on a way to improve proposal writing success by visualizing the proposing process Inform We depict proposing process as chains of communication events rather than tasks Persuad e Task based visualizations are not detailed enough we find because knowledge work tasks are themselves made up of communication events sometimes many of them Your PIP practice Persuad e Inform Persuad e Using the PIP structure can be a helpful ready to hand strategy for all parts of the proposing process Try it for yourself Draft an elevator speech for your P2 project using the PIP structure Post it to your project page Not only will this earn you credit for an in class exercise when you post it to your project page you might also find yourself using it for real when talking to someone about project 2 Next Time Guest Speaker Martine Rife RA for the WIDE research center will discuss her recent proposing work Her presentation will serve as an excellent example of the reflective approach I am encouraging you to take with Project 2