I mentioned a month ago the remarkable save of our Theodora Ghana project. Now a month in, we not only have started our formal training process but we have embarked on servicing a most ambitious work project. It has provided our six women with a crash course in listening to American business English, learning how to take notes and transcribe conversations, arrange a schedule, and handle the management of workflow to get a finished product.
The project itself is something I convinced the networking group I formed 12 years ago, Trusted Advisor Network, to do. Since this group is based on a 'give-to-get' philosophy and our community is going to need great assistance to aid its small business community to recover from the enforced shutdown, I recognized a need to focus the knowledge we had in a form that our business community could use and use quickly. So the project is a toolkit for how businesses can navigate this drastic change. And it involved getting information from a group of individuals and synthesizing it.
This led to Theodora Ghana's six women setting up 23 interviews over a 10 day period, sitting in and transcribing those interviews, and getting the information back to all the participants for their review, then assembling it into a composite document. When we started this none of the women had ever sat and done transcription. They had minimal understanding of the American business. They didn't understand the jargon. They had a lot of trouble even understand 'white' as they call our dialect.
And yet, they cranked out the 23 interviews. We gathered the critical information we needed. Some interviewees had major changes to what was transcribed. Others hardly any. By the end of the week and a half, they were understanding more and more and we are set to hit our deadline of getting the summaries of the interviews done.
We made a ton of mistakes (I most of all as I never did anything like this!) but in the end, we accomplished the mission and gained composite knowledge to promote the goal of the project that we never could have without their work.
It is really very cool!
2 comments:
It is good to reflect on setbacks and especially nice when we have overcome them!
I have transcribed MANY hours of video tape in my years as a researcher. I cannot imagine doing that in a dialect I was not fluent in. I am impressed!
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