Hi Pine,
that's correct, we discontinued the bi-monthly meetings for a number of reasons even
though many activities that fall within the scope RCom continued silently over the last
months (project/subject recruitment request reviews; monthly publication of the research
newsletter; open access and open data policies; expert engagement initiatives). At this
stage RCom is an entirely volunteer-driven effort with little to no support from WMF (I am
myself helping during my spare time). For RCom to fulfill its mission we need to find a
better collaboration model, make it more self-sustainable and open up participation to
community members in its various areas of activities. To this aim I posted a reorg
proposal [1] that was introduced and discussed last week at a workshop organized by Mayo
Fuster at Wikimania. Part of this reorganization includes a new policy proposal drafted by
Aaron Halfaker to replace the current review process with a new one with a strong
community engagement component [2]. We'd love to hear your thoughts on how to move
forward, I expect we will be sharing updates on research-l once we've reviewed these
various proposals.
Best,
Dario
[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Committee/Reorganization
[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Recruitment_policy
On Jul 19, 2012, at 1:55 AM, ENWP Pine wrote:
Hi Dario,
I have a couple of questions.
Are the RCom pages still being updated? I’m seeing some outdated stuff there, and
http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/RComMonthlyReports2012 seems to indicate less activity since
March.
Did RCom ever reach conclusions about standards for recruiting Wikimedians to be research
subjects, and the Subject Recruitment Approvals Group? We had a discussion about those
issues on this list in March, and I got the impression that RCom was planning to take
action on that at the next RCom meeting. There was also some activity at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Committee/Areas_of_interest/S….
I’d appreciate RCom bringing some finality and clarification to these procedures as
written on Meta before the next US academic year starts, and/or starting some sort of
formal working group.
I’m cc’ing this email to Research-l because I feel that other members of the list might
also appreciate an update on subject recruitment approval and on RCom’s work.
Thanks very much.
Pine