From the report: This project report documents
an ethnographic assessment completed in collaboration with Quantified Self.
Quantified Self started in the San Francisco Bay Area, but has become a
worldwide community of people that practice “self-tracking” as a way to build
new habits or undergo beneficial change through generating self-knowledge.
Self-tracking projects are wide ranging, and Quantified Self has become the
main venue for self-trackers to share their personal projects in meetings that
follow a show & tell format. From the original group started in the Bay
Area in 2008, there are now more than 50 Quantified Self (QS) groups worldwide.
QS Labs (the central organizing group in the Bay Area) offers support and
guidance to people that want to start a new meetup. To enable leadership at QS
Labs to provide better support to emerging groups, an ethnographic assessment
was designed and conducted. The assessment sampled the experiences from a
variety of QS meetup groups, in order to understand the barriers and obstacles
for organizers, and to identify the points of innovation occurring in different
groups. Findings from the assessment were presented in a report to QS Labs in
March 2012. This project report also provides significant background
information on Quantified Self, self-tracking, and meetups. The client report
combines aspects of basic and applied research, as an applied ethnographic
description. Data collection for the client report followed a praxis approach
to applied anthropology as an orientation for research, from Warry (1992) and
Singer (1994)." Read more
