Personal Takeaways from my Research Experiences

I had my very first exposure to ethnographic research or any kind of research back in late 2014. My interest in Digital and web literacy and active contributions in Mozilla projects gave me the opportunity to work as a Research assistant for “Mobile Opportunity” a research project conducted by Mozilla foundation in association with GSMA. Goal of the research is to understand usage of smart phones across different cities of India and to lower the bar for content creation using smartphones. Observations had been used to develop Mozilla’s app called Webmaker. It was an experience of life-time, challenging my strong belief’s and questioned lot of my assumptions on things that seem to be obvious.

My passion to be a social change maker from the grass-roots level and interest on Digital Literacy paved way to my first social enterprise F-infotech back in the mid of 2015. Goal of the enterprise is to work for the empowerment of common man by developing their skills to be self-learnable and sustainable with Digital Literacy as foundation platform.

Inorder to understand, people’s opinion, belief, thoughts, opportunities, barriers, etc we decided to start off with a qualitative research by running a public cybercafe where we can get to meet people with diverse background and need.

Truly, it was great experience over the last 1.3 years where lot of my self-belief, assumptions, trusts, emotional balance, etc tested out. I had sometime to reflect on what had happened and summarize into few points that can be of some use.

LEARNING:

1. Any sort of problem can be solved by going to its grass-roots and analyzing it
2. Always question your belief and assumptions if you don’t have the source from its roots
3. It is important to frame the questions right for a constructive and productive discussion
4. Share things in a simple and straight forward way
5. Listen more and talk less — ask the right questions and step back listen
6. Don’t take people’s word/action as such — take a step back and critically analyze
7. Always share analysis or observations supported by appropriate facts
8. Don’t always go with “YES” & “OK” — start questioning with “WHY”
9. Respect everyone no matter what they work or do
10. Have Empathy — put yourself in the shoes of the other person and feel it
11. Learn to take hard situations and failures professional not personally
12. Need for being Independent — by conscious effort you can make yourself not being reliable on anyone or anything
13. When working at grass root level learn to deal with people who see your social intentions as personal benefits
14. Learn to differentiate personal relationship and business relationships
15. Have humility and stay humble
16. Staying focus is the key but to do so you must have a burning desire and strong passion with the actual purpose
17. No job or work is inferior or superior
18. Always believe in yourself and stick to your own values
19. There is indeed a gap between education and actual skill development
20. Educational degrees has nothing to do in giving confidence to explore and experiment with some cases
21. Digital Literacy is a fundamental that can’t be avoided like alphabets
22. Only common sense is required to be able to use digital tools and become a digital literate
23. Generation of money at times can deviate us from the actual purpose intended
24. Always question your doubts and fears — more you aware easier to trash them
25. Avoid “I” where ever possible — “WE” is the key and holds the magic formula
26. Known is a drop, Unknown is an ocean

In case, if you want to discuss something in detail please say/ask we can learn better as a team than as individuals.