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Plugin Description
NarraFirma is companion software to the textbook Working with Stories in Your Community Or Organization: Participatory Narrative Inquiry.
Participatory narrative inquiry is an approach in which groups of people participate in gathering and working with raw stories of personal experience in order to make sense of complex patterns for better decision making. PNI focuses on the profound consideration of values, beliefs, feelings, and perspectives through the recounting and interpretation of lived experience.
What is NarraFirma?
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It’s a checklist. NarraFirma provides practical guidance as you work, with questions for you to answer, recommendations based on the conditions you describe, activities that help you make decisions, and just-in-time advice.
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It’s a journal. NarraFirma helps you keep careful records about what happened in your project, and it gives you places to reflect on what happened. This reminds you to keep learning as you work, and it helps you to document your project for future reference.
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It’s a kiosk. NarraFirma helps you collect stories, on-line and/or off-line, based on question forms you design (with sample questions you can copy). Because story collection is integrated, there is no need to export or import data.
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It’s a workstation. NarraFirma helps you explore and interpret patterns in your data (stories and answers to questions about stories), creating annotated visualizations you can use to make sense of the stories you collected.
Why choose NarraFirma?
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It’s portable. You can install NarraFirma anywhere, as a WordPress plugin or a Node.js web application. Web hosting is inexpensive, popular, and well supported. You can also install NarraFirma on your local computer and use it off-line. (Whichever installation method you choose, we strongly suggest that you set up SSL security on your web site before collecting or entering confidential or important information. Many hosting providers can help you with this task.)
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It’s a team player. With NarraFirma your team can work on projects together in real time without having to hand files back and forth. You can plan your project, collect stories, discover patterns, and reflect on what you’ve learned – together.
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It’s an open book. NarraFirma is open source software. So if you have a question about how something works, you can just look at the source code to find out. If you need the software to do something it can’t do, you can add new functionality yourself or ask someone else to add it.
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It works in the real world. One NarraFirma installation supports multiple projects, forms, data sets, and reports. Why? Because real-life story projects are rarely simple or predictable. So go ahead and make a mess. NarraFirma is ready for it.
Donations
We have spent a lot of time developing NarraFirma. We appreciate donations, and will use them to keep working on it. You can donate at PayPal.
Need some help?
I offer training in the use of NarraFirma and consulting for PNI projects. If you are interested, check out my web site at cfkurtz.com, or send me a note at cfkurtz at cfkurtz dot com.
Screenshots
This is the main page of NarraFirma. The sections of the software (and the phases of PNI) are shown in the diagram. Clicking on any of these buttons leads to that section.
This the main page for the NarraFirma planning section. Links to all the pages in that section are listed. You can enter reminders for any page; they show up on this page.
Here the NarraFirma user is describing the groups of people who will be participating in their project. Describing your groups helps you think about how you should collect stories and what you should do with them.
Here the NarraFirma user is doing a little sensemaking exercise based on some stories they told about what might happen when they do the project. Thinking in stories during project planning helps to make better decisions about how to carry out the project.
Here the NarraFirma user is deciding how they will collect stories. They are looking at recommendations the software is giving them based on the answers they gave to the questions about their participant groups (see screenshot 3).
Here the NarraFirma user is creating questions they will ask people about their stories.
Here is the NarraFirma survey form participants see when they tell their stories (or NarraFirma users see when they enter the stories they collected off-line).
Here the NarraFirma user is looking at stories as they come in to the collection. They are looking here only at stories told by older people who said the person in their story wanted to be heard.
Here the user is looking at patterns in the data (answers to questions) collected. The selected row of the table of patterns (at the top) shows that the questions “How do you feel about this story” and “What is your age” are being compared, creating a contingency (bubble) graph. The user has written an observation about that pattern (“People under 35 more positive”) and two interpretations of what that pattern might mean (“More weight on older shoulders” versus “Younger people have lots of energy”). The user has selected some stories on the graph to read; the stories appear in the table at the bottom of the image.
Here the NarraFirma user is designing a plan for a sensemaking session, where people will work with the collected stories and patterns to make sense of the topic being explored.
Here the NarraFirma user is ansewring questions about the outcomes of the project for each participant group. Those outcomes will determine recommendations for interventions.
Here the NarraFirma user is reflecting on the entire project, to learn from it and to keep good records for the future.
