NarraFirma

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?

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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?

• 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.)

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.