Hey /r/IndianCountry,

Hope everyone is weathering the pandemic. We know many people have been impacted by it in many ways and we pray that better days come soon.

This has been a long time coming and the recent orders to stay at home for some of us have provided opportunities to work on projects. Today, I would like to present this community a new form that the moderators have created to receive and review research requests with our subreddit.

Click here for the form.

In the name of transparency and being accountable to our community here, we would like for users here to review the proposed form and offer feedback. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, critiques, or adjustments to make, let us know in this thread. Your replies are important because this form will be used to help safeguard our community here.

Details about the form

The form will collect the data from respondents to be analyzed by the moderators. If they provide the necessary information, meet expected ethical standards, and demonstrate knowledge of appropriate research practices (including knowledge about Indigenous values), it will be approved. The information will then be written up and posted to our sub's wiki page that will document all requests. This page in question is still under construction, but will be finished soon.

Any relevant documents a researcher may have, such as an IRB/HSR approval letter, will be sent to my Reddit-affiliated email and will be made available upon request from any user.

The form is bent more toward those wanting to do academic/professional research with our community, but this can be used for amateurs and hobbyists that we want to vet more. Filling this out will pertain to rule 8 violations (excluding violations that fall outside the category of research, which will still be vetted via modmail requests). We often get a number of visitors requesting help with feedback and character development for writing novels/worldbuilding. This form is not necessarily meant for them. We want to use this to protect the subreddit from more immediate harm and abuse in the form of formalized research. But mods may use discretion in determining if a post will need to utilize this form before the post may be approved/removed. The link to this survey will not be made publicly available outside of this post (and may be removed at a later date) so as to avoid misuse, but any user here may request it from the moderators. It will be given to those making requests via modmail.