Gabber: Collaboratively record and analyse audio conversations
Digital Social Innovation
Collaborators Monash University
Abstract
Capturing and making sense of audio capture for non-experts
Method
Gabber is a phone app with a website where people can structure, record and analyse their recordings.
Takeaways
Gabber has been used by the IFRC, the NHS and Disability North to capture conversations about their organisations.
Listening to the experiences of staff or volunteers can be difficult for organisations as they have limited resources or skills to meaningfully engage with this rich content. People who share their experiences are seldom involved in the analysis of data they provide, which can leave them feeling that their voice is not reflected in the feedback process.
Gabber lets people record conversations on topics of their choosing, then comment and analyse them together afterwards. People can then create playlists of relevant content, much like a Spotify playlist.
Gabber has been used by several organisations across a number of research projects including the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), Disability North and the NHS to gather data about their organisation and to inform organisational change.
Gabber keeps the voice of stakeholders integral to the collection, understanding and dissemination of their feedback and experiences. By designing with this in mind and working with different communities, we were able to design a methodology that engages service-users in all aspects of the feedback: sharing, collecting, analysis and dissemination.
There are two software components to Gabber: the mobile application allows people to collaboratively structure and capture an audio recording around topics they want to discuss, and the website is where participants of the recording can review and consent to how the recording is used, and comment on their conversations afterwards.
How it works
Anyone can set up a project and can create topics to structure capturing conversations.
When recording, a list of project topics is displayed to prompt discussion – tapping one of these indicates what people are talking about.
Once the conversation is uploaded, participants can listen to recordings and create comments directly on the audio to have discussions with other project members and (possibly) the public.
Gabber can be downloaded on the Apple store or Google Play.
Visit the Gabber website to find out more and try it for yourself.
Highlights
- Gabber was used by 600 participants over 82 countries to feed into the Strategy 2030 for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) as part of TalkFutures in 2018 which was published in a paper for ACM DIS 'TalkFutures: Supporting Qualitative Practices in Distributed Community Engagements'.
- Members of Disability North, a charity which promotes inclusion, independence and choice for disabled people, used Gabber to capture and analyse conversations to understand their shared experiences. Disability North then used these to create bespoke training for staff and new members within the organisation in 2019.
- The NHS staff experience team is using Gabber to capture weekly feedback from 320 junior doctors as part of a larger funded project over 2019/2020.
- PhD student Rosie Bellini worked with national charity Barnardo’s who delivered training workshops to perpetrators of domestic violence. Barnardo’s used Gabber during these sessions to gather feedback about the delivery of content during lunch and at the end of the day.