6. Community engagement

Chapter 6 overview:

This chapter is for project managers and community engagement officers. It’s also for anyone who is trying to get communities involved in collecting voice data.

We will cover how to:

• find the right contributors

• onboard contributors

• keep them involved over time

• motivate users with ethical methods

• use feedback to keep people involved

Note: This section is practical. You don’t need any technical skills.

Community engagement means the process of getting speakers of marginalized languages involved in your project. They then contribute data that will later be used to build language technology. It will also be used for research, training and even to assess existing language models and AI.

For TWB Voice, this process was the key to success for voice data collection and validation. In this section, we share our learnings and the approaches that we tested in the TWB Voice project. We offer practical help with finding, onboarding and supporting community members and keeping them involved so we can collect as much voice data as possible.