FAQ

Basic Questions

What does “FCT” stand for?

Futurescape City Tours

What are the Futurescape City Tours?

Public engagement activity based on a walking tour of an urban environment in which citizens set the agenda and use photography to explore that environment.

How will FCT take place in 2013?

Five partners plus Phoenix will organize coordinated tours.

Who funds the project?

The Center for Nanotechnology in Society.

Who is CNS?

http://cns-dev.asu.edu/about/history

Product Development Questions

How many citizens are in each group?/How many people will be participating at each site?

For the Pilot, we received about 50 applications, invited 20, and, at the first session, had 17 show up. Three groups of five or so seemed to work best. We had facilitators (students and faculty in our case) at every table to enable the discussion. This was structured and our agendas and the associated materials which guided the sessions are available you would get step by step information about how we structured all the parts of the session, our goals, challenges we encountered etc.

Are there criteria for selecting the participants (e.g., gender balance, etc.)?

We struggled with this quite a bit as there are benefits and drawbacks to the different approaches. In the end we tried to choose a group that was reasonably representative of Phoenix. However, this was of course limited by who was actually interested in participating. I think, actually, as long as it is tracked (both who was invited and why), this is an area where comparison across groups might be really interesting, if, for instance, one site decided to recruit only from one particular community group.

For us, and our interest in examining Phoenix moreglobally(not just from one perspective), we felt like a more diverse group would help us include a wider variety of interests, concerns, and voices and help us have a better idea of the sort of framing issues people were most concerned with in regards to urban sustainability. I think this is the approach we hoped would work for all the sites, but we are open to negotiating other approaches.

Are there incentives for their participation?/Will these people be awarded stipends? If so, is CNS covering those costs?

We thought we might need to offer some to encourage participation, but in the end received enough interest that we decided it wasn't necessary. Again, we were aware of how incentives might change the group dynamic. We are not telling people that they cannot offer an honorarium however you will have to provide it through localfund raising.

How are we defining “city”? A municipality? A metropolitan area? A part of a municipality?

We focused our conversations on downtown Phoenix around the light rail. The tour itself will be focused in this geographic area as well. The participants are from all over the metro area however. I would say that one aspect which is interesting to me is the very definition of a city and how that definition changes how we interact with it, what our concerns might be, and how we negotiate those concerns.

Given that, we are open to local interpretations of how to handle these strategics, knowing the need for practical solutions. In other words, no, it's not strictly walking. However, I would argue that it is probably most important to choose sites where you can walk a bit, and not just hop off a bus and hop back on. Again, the sites should be chosen around the participants interests and concerns so part of this decision will be made after you have a sense of what they are most interested in.

How much work is involved in hosting (e.g. do we do everything from invitations, coordination, etc.? or does CNS provide logistical support?)

We will supply you templates, but you would be responsible for recruiting and selecting participants, local logistics and making local tour arrangements (people and places). We have a process that will be articulated, but you would implement it locally, and adapt it as suits your research needs and local conditions.

Do we host in our own towns?

Yes.You run the tours in your own town.

What is our role in "hosting"--are we there as a resource, or again, are we do do everything associated with the events?

You would be responsible for running the deliberative process, yet within a larger nationally coordinated project. Each partner site will use the same method, materials and will share data across the sites. Each partner may have different research questions that they are pursuing, based on their own profile and research trajectory. In this way, you will have an intellectual role in interpreting data, publishing, etc.

CNS will collect data, but do we have an intellectual role in the project with helping to interpret data, co-author publications, etc.?

In the April training, we will present our approach and we expect that each of the partner sites may have slight modifications so as to incorporate their own research agendas into the national project. This may involve, for example, slight modifications to the method or the addition of survey or evaluation questions.

You may want to reviews some of the publications that came out of the NCTF. Similarly each site followed the same general method and shared data across sites. However, in our iteration, CNS is providing much more support, in terms of templates, promotional material, surveys, etc. which we hope will ease your load.

How explicit will the nanotechnology theme be?

During our recruitment we did not make the nanotechnology theme explicit on purpose. It was visible, but not key. It was included as an aspect ofinterpretingthe future of Phoenix, but it was not presented (or at least we hope) in such a way as to intimidate people who may not know anything about it. I do think a few people were interested BECAUSE of the emerging tech/nanotech theme, but most were more interested because they care about the future of Phoenix and the role technologies will play in that future.

We pushed nano to the background on purpose during recruitment but began to bring it out during the first session. It also heavily shapes our approaches to the sites we've chosen. Between the first session and the tour we are providing participants with a very concise set of readings/videos/other materials that look at the intersection of their interests and nanotechnologies in Phoenix.

Are the travel expenses to the training session in Tempe covered? If we have more than one site partner (like the museum representative), will each person's travel to the training be covered? Or are you only allowing one person per site to come to the training?

Yes. The trip to Tempe for training is covered for one person. At this point, we are not able to include additional partners, due to the current budget, though we would like to be able to do so. We will be able to let you know before the end of the semester if more than one person can join the training in Tempe. Either way, the honorarium would still be split.