Session: User Education & Trust-Building

Open Ag Technology GOAT 2022 Conference
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Participants: @AmberS , Dorn, @tysonwynne, @courtney.king , @mushi-shi , @JeffPiestrak, @Elhenriq , @nat

Current Challenges

  • Lack of accessible information
  • Fear – people see “data” and the mind goes to information being compromised in some way
  • Need education for the full potential of digital tools – tech often introduce many functions and features, but users often only use a tool for their specific purpose
  • Creating space for learning (language, culture, and acronyms)
    • Tech conversations often use a lot of acronyms, making these conversations inaccessible to users
    • Need to create trust for learning by first setting the space to be open to questions
      • Different people have different learning styles (synchronous or asynchronous, digital or in person, good moderation, etc.)
  • Distrust in tech
    • Open source vs open data
      • Tension between private enterprise and a shared benefit of public data
        Agriculture manages private enterprise, but the whole group can benefit from shared data
  • Need to be transparent with what happens with data
  • If not seeing value from a tool immediately, users start to question who is getting value (is someone else benefiting from a user’s data input?)
  • Language around the big picture, storytelling, and the language used is at the crux of this challenge

Possible Solutions

  • Learn from each other (within GOAT community and beyond)
  • Build trust with farmers through complete honesty
    • What information is being collected, who is it going to, and what will be done with the data
    • Show the farmers what will be done and the benefit they will get (showing instead of just telling builds trust)
    • Need to engage in storytelling / larger narrative (vision) to provide the context, before trying to get the community to engage
      • Cannot just ask people to trust us without a clear intention and expectation for the benefits and outcomes
  • Name recognition within a community can help build trust (example: signs on the fields)
  • Participatory design – make everybody a stakeholder, so everyone has a say and all design decisions are made through consensus (a type of human-centered design)
    • Ensure partnerships benefit both parties
    • Before getting someone to commit to the process, need to see it’s worth their time
  • Hippocratic oath
    • Important for storytelling – who are you, why are you here, what do you believe in, etc.
    • Shows that you’re being held accountable

Next Steps

  • GOAT training on participatory design
  • Documentation
    • Core elements of a story template (these are the things that should always go to users at the get-go)
      • Who you are, what you want from them, and show examples of what the outcome will be
    • Hippocratic oath template (agreed upon statement of trust)
      • There’s an organizational statement and an individual statement
  • Need to find a balance between focused (individual) user onboarding and documentation or group onboarding calls
  • User Journey! (what do we need for storytelling (1st meeting / engagement), oath (parallel trusted agreement), and onboarding (have commitment, now what?)