1. WRA 453 Grant & Proposal Writing Fall 2005 Bill Hart-Davidson hartdav2@msu.edu Session 14: Proposing as a social act; PIP, or proposal microstructure

2. 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 E P EEE E f2f E E E P Template for target document First draft of target document E 11/07/01 – 11/08/01 E f2f E P E E E P Final draft sent 12/20/01 – 1/29/02 2/01/02 2/20/02

3. 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… How & Why do we build them?

4. E-mailIMf2f/ phone phoneOtherTotal Local team 27010138 Distance team 5752064 CEMs for Two Student Teams These teams were writing a proposal for a new technical product. Their task was to show that their design was state-of-the-art.

5. ph f2f ph The distance team was working with people out of the loop early on…what if they had known here? Sort = Coordination New horizontal line for each event that did not include all team members

6. P EEE E f2f E E E E E Paradigmatic Dimension E f2f E E E E E P EE E E E E E E P Paradigmatic How do proposals get started at SpaceCo? Syntagmatic How does a project that begins with a “strategy meeting” proceed? Syntagmatic Dimension CAUTION The diagrams here and on the next slide are mocked up, not models of real data

7. Going deeper… E P EEE E f2f E E E P E E E P E E E P Each is a site of mediated activity too E-mail CIWC ‘04 report CIWC Fall report WC request ICTC ‘05 report LCT Spreadsheet

8. 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.

9. PIP : A fractal organization scheme for proposing Persuade Inform Persuade

10. Try it: proposing an activity Persuade Inform Persuade 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 computer- supported 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 previously used self-analytic tools to improve their performance.

11. Scaled up: PIP for methods slot Persuade Inform Persuade Line of Argument: Here is a methodological approach that has been shown to be sound in these previous studies/projects. Line of Argument: We are using the methodological approach, adapting for our specific project in these ways. 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.)

12. Scaled down: PIP elevator speech Persuade Inform Persuade Some colleagues of mine and I are working on a way to improve proposal writing success by visualizing the proposing process. We depict proposing process as chains of communication events rather than tasks. Task-based visualizations are not detailed enough, we find, because knowledge work tasks are themselves made up of communication events - sometimes many of them!

13. Your PIP practice Persuade Inform Persuade Draft an elevator speech for your P2 project using the PIP structure. Post it to your project page Using the PIP structure can be a helpful, ready-to-hand strategy for all parts of the proposing process. Try it for yourself! 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!

14. 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.