Qualitative interviews on GNOME
Hello, so recently a friend of mine came up to me and mentioned the concept of "qualitative interviewing" and how it is a thing he hasn't seen used in open source projects.
So after a bit of discussion with him I understood the definition of "qualitative interview" as something like: two people talking to each other, explaining their trains of thoughts and asking follow-up questions in a way that allows a back and forth of new ideas.
So, GNOME already has several ways the ways the GNOME staff can talk about their ideas and what they are working on. For example, there are blog posts and the GNOME Discourse. One problem though is that, unless explicitly asked, a person tends to not put into words some ideas behind how they think.
So here's a rough draft of the idea:
The idea would be to make small recordings of such "interviews" between two people related to GNOME.
These interviews could be between:
- Two people of the same team (but both working on separate tasks)
- Two people from different teams
- One person from GNOME and a noteworthy member of the community
The interviews could start with both participants having some questions they want to ask the other, but then it's mostly up to what they decide to ask the other during the interview.
Follow-up question are encouraged and the roles of interviewer and interviewee being switched is not considered a bad thing.
The objective would be to both know more about the two people, more about what they work on, and the interview being able to make the participants put into words ideas that they wouldn't put into words unless asked.
I would like to ask for some feedback on this. This first draft is probably not good enough to just work, so I would like to help and maybe even oversee this.