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External communications

Public communications are handled with care. While internal transparency is always an expection, sharing everything all the time externally can erode necessary trust boundaries. It's with this in mind that we limit public communications to critical milestones, while encouraging transparency and engagement.

Voice, authorship, and relationship to EAR

People communicating in relation to EAR should make it possible for readers to understand:

  • who is speaking
  • what knowledge or responsibility they’re speaking from
  • how the communication relates to EAR
  • whether they’re expressing a personal interpretation or an organizational position

Authorship should remain visible, including when the EAR account amplifies or republishes work.

Participants don’t need to use uniform language or repeat a shared script. Common positioning and narrative coordination provide continuity while leaving room for different voices and interpretations.

Personal, project, Program, and EAR accounts

Different accounts serve different purposes.

Personal accounts

Personal accounts carry an individual’s voice, relationships, interests, and experience. Participants can use them to discuss their work, share developing ideas, respond to public conversations, and locate their activity in relation to EAR.

Project and Program accounts

Project and Program accounts (should there be any) carry communications tied to a defined body of work. These may include research questions, findings, invitations, updates, documentation, and requests for participation or support.

EAR accounts

EAR’s shared accounts carry communications that belong to the organization and provide context across the wider body of work.

They may be used to:

  • publish organizational information and shared decisions issue invitations and resource asks
  • amplify work from participants, Programs, Services, and collaborators
  • connect related communications
  • provide context that helps people understand how different activity relates to EAR (or not)
  • direct people toward relevant conversations, Programs, Services, and publications

The EAR account should help people navigate the work and discover the people doing it. It shouldn’t replace their voices or claim their work as EAR’s own.

Media and channels

The form of a communication should follow its purpose, audience, and stage of development.

Bluesky

Bluesky supports timely observations, questions, updates, invitations, public discussion, amplification, and relationship-building.

It’s likely to be EAR’s main surface for regular social communication across personal, project, Program, and organizational accounts.

Leaflet and longer publishing

Leaflet and other long-form publishing tools support research notes, analysis, interviews, reflections, guides, documentation, and collaborative publications.

Long-form work may present completed findings or make developing questions and interpretations available for response.

Images and visual communication

Photographs, diagrams, maps, annotated screenshots, visual summaries, and illustrations can make people, systems, findings, and relationships easier to understand.

Accessibility, consent, attribution, and alt text should be considered as part of producing and publishing visual material.

Audio, video, and Streamplace

Audio and video support interviews, discussions, demonstrations, public working sessions, documentation, and live learning.

Streamplace can provide a space for live and recorded conversation. Recordings may also lead to transcripts, clips, summaries, or written follow-up when those forms add value.

EAR should remain open to other media as new formats become relevant. The strategy doesn’t require every communication to appear in several forms, but it is known practice that diverse multi-media strategies help information be more accessible and understandable to different people.

Developing public communications

EAR shouldn’t rely only on participants arriving with completed drafts or major announcements.

The strategy proposes a shared planning space where people can:

  • bring forward an activity, question, finding, need, or idea that may benefit from public communication
  • identify the people closest to it
  • clarify what the communication is meant to accomplish
  • consider the most useful form and account
  • request or offer support
  • identify a next step and a working date
  • keep track of what has been published and what response it receives

A calendar view can help maintain momentum and coordinate timing. The calendar wouldn’t establish a posting quota or be treated as a hard schedule.

The group will need to decide how this planning space is tended. The responsibility may be shared, rotate among participants, or sit with particular people for a defined period.

Consultation

Consultation should be proportional to the goals of communication and its possible side effects

Participants generally won’t need approval to speak from their own work or experience. Consultation becomes important when a communication:

  • represents another person or group
  • includes personal stories, research participation, or sensitive information
  • claims to express an EAR position
  • communicates a shared decision
  • creates financial, legal, safety, or partnership commitments may substantially affect people who haven’t been involved in preparing it

Consultation may involve people directly affected, the person responsible for the relevant Program or Service, Steering, or someone with relevant knowledge to the topic being discussed.

Its purpose is to improve judgment, identify concerns, and clarify responsibility. It shouldn’t become routine group approval for ordinary communications.

Relationship to Programs and Services

Programs and participants determine what they’re investigating, developing, or organizing. Communications begin from those activities and from the ecosystem conditions around them.

Services can contribute according to what a communication requires. For example:

  • Editorial may support writing, editing, framing, or publication.
  • Convening may support interviews, public discussions, or working sessions.
  • Commons may preserve published knowledge and connect it with related work.
  • Care may help a public response develop into a relationship with EAR.
  • Development may help connect public needs and opportunities with resources.
  • Systems may support accounts, tools, access, and technical production.

These are available relationships, rather than required stages that every communication must pass through.

Relevant agreements: Communications