🪸coral
Research tools for humans
Coral – researchers, coders, artists and participants with lived experience creating new research tools and building a community around them.
Since the start of Covid, we've been developing the tools and methods needed to do gold-standard social research remotely and humanely.
The last five years
Researcher dashboard
Participant app
Public website
Some of the things we solve for researcher
✅ No technical knowledge needed
✅ Stores data securely, including participant info and consent forms
✅ Pose questions, collect responses and publish research all from one dashboard
✅ Send emails to participants and subscribers
✅ Track engagement
✅ Logistics for vouchers and postage
Cost to Ruth as project lead
📆 Months
💷 £7k-15k developer or designer time
Other drawbacks of current approach
Key components like video questions
and researcher dashboard are built on
third-party software-as-a-service.
🚫 Vendor lock-in 🚫 Price hikes
🚫 Uncertainty around data location and use
Many people don't like the tools they are being made to use
🚫 Closed source  🚫 Participant data located in
multiple unknown locations  🚫 Obscure terms  🚫
Ads-based business models 🚫 Distracting interfaces
  🚫 Enterprise pricing costly  🚫 Vendor lock-in
  🚫 Too general  🚫 Geared for managers and
administrators
Eno – our first tool
✅ Open source ✅ Human-scale ✅ Made by researchers
✅ People join for free, large institutions pay ✅
Builds best practice ✅ Respects privacy
Next five years
The model
1 – Eno is published and maintained by 🪸coral
as free and open source software (FOSS).
2 – Coral offers hosted version, free
forever for researchers to sign up,
join projects and publish their research.
3 – Funded research projects pay per project
per year by their research institution,
usually out of project funding.
4 – Larger organisations can transition
to a self-hosted instance of Eno later.
5 – Both hosted and self host routes can
avail of methods training and tech support from Coral.
