As the development of this project would require interviewing the key stakeholders and conducting surveys we submitted the ethics application form to the university via ERGO II. A confirmation of this application can be found at this link:
https://ergo2.soton.ac.uk/Submission/View/40608
Although we submitted our ethics application, we didn’t have enough time to get the application approved mainly because of the strikes. This is also the reason we haven’t conducted any surveys or interviews as it would be against university policy to do any research without approval from the ethics department.
If we had our application approved, we would have organised an interview with the FA’s director of Digital Engagement get some insights of how the FA could fund our project and help us promote it, In addition, to understand the user requirements and views on the social network we are developing, we could have organised some focus groups and interviews with players, parents, sponsors and other stakeholders.
In lieu of ethical approval, we have provided interview responses we believe to be appropriate.