Purpose
This guide defines the structural architecture for primary research interviews. It specifies what every interview must produce and what training an interviewer requires to execute the workflow correctly.
The interview surface area is defined in Primary Research. Recruitment targets and access channels are documented in the Stakeholder Recruitment Plan. Category-specific probes live in Question Packs.
Three-Layer Architecture
Primary research evidence passes through three layers:
Implementation-level patterns for ingest are documented in the Resolver Examples.
Note: Details for ingest will be co-designed with support from Prisma in project phases 2-3.
Interview Roles
Interviews are sourced by teams. The interview is conducted by either the team or the hub representative. The post-interview account (ingest) must be completed by both, assuming the hub representative is there.
The following guardrails are created by this role distribution:
- It requires hubs to invest in the quality of team training for the ingest workflow.
- It requires team and hub representative to debrief effectively after the call, generating further shared learning and understanding.
- It supports higher-level role differentiation:
- Hubs can continue to focus on stewarding the narrative layer: the relationship between use-cases and regional developmental potential
- Teams can deliver team-level implementation effort.
All interview participants must also take care to uphold the following standards:
- Conducting conversations aligned with decision gates, compliant with ethics, data and bias terms of agreement
- Flagging ingest schema gaps or other adaptation needs
Interview Economics
The following table offers an example hub costs modelling, but hubs may very well like to model costs differently and are encouraged to do so as suits their needs.
| Cost | Budget allocation |
|---|---|
| Training | 10% |
| Interview time | 5% |
| Evaluation | 10% |
| Curation | 5% |
Hubs are advised to aim for engaging 3 teams for this project, across different use-cases. Any remaining budget may be offered to teams to help overcome inertia for the training and interviewee sourcing. However, given many hubs have direct connections to existing local teams, care should be given to highlight the innate alignment of interests:
- Local teams are building locally-informed projects
- Locally informed projects need to develop a clear understanding of the role their project plays in their region
- Engaging local stakeholders is likely to be a pre-existing need for their project’s own viability
This caution is offered because introducing any kind of “X-to-earn” framing risks misguiding teams from their pre-existing political will. It may therefore be more effective to frame team funding as complementary to the trajectories they are already seeking to develop, and, consequently, the work they already need to be doing.
With this framing, it’s clear to see how disadvantaged of an initial invitation to teams it would be, to invite them on the basis that they will get paid for the interviews they organise. Instead, the offer is more akin to a (non-dilutive) micro-investment into their own sovereign project.
Training Requirements
Completing the training is a pre-requisite to conducting interviews.