Hello,

Sorry for the late notice. It seems that I never cross-posted this.

On Thursday 3 October - tomorrow - there will be a meeting of Wikipedians who support "openness". This is organized by some people at the Communicate OER WikiProject (for open educational resources) and I will be there as a member of WikiProject Open Access.

Thursday 3 October 2013

15:00 UTC, for one hour (some sample local times below, or see here)

  • 8:00am Los Angeles
  • 11:00am New York
  • 16:00 London
  • 17:00 Cape Town
  • 22:00 Jakarta/Indochina Time
  • 01:00 FRIDAY Brisbane/Sydney/Melbourne

Format: Blackboard Collaborate (Java-based webinar software): j.mp/wikiSOOconf

Optional 2-hour parallel work session to build out the project pages, immediately following the call: we will continue to use Blackboard Collaborate, and/or tools like IRC.


The topic of discussion is deciding scope for the two major established efforts to promote "open" on Wikipedia, WikiProject Open Access and Communicate OER.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Open_Access>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Communicate_OER>

 When I set up WikiProject Open Access, I took the task of tagging various Wikipedia article as being within the scope of interest of that WikiProject. This means that if someone comes to the WikiProject and wants to see its covered articles, they can get a list and enjoy the articles or hopefully contribute to them. I was thinking of open access as a concept which could be tied to all other kinds of openness, so I tagged every kind of "open" article - open science, open educational resources, open data, open source - with the "WikiProject Open Access" tag. This means that the precedent on Wikipedia is to associate anything "open" with open access.

This is a bit of a problem now because this open educational resources community is not so interested in open access - it consists of teachers, librarians, and educators who want classroom materials, and the concept of "open access" is a bit removed from their immediate thoughts. I would like to connect this community into the infrastructure which already exists at WikiProject Open Access, and I would like to draw together all supporters of "open" movements, so in this upcoming meeting and future talks some of us will be discussing how to do this.

There are two proposals on the table now. One is that separate WikiProjects - like Open Educational Resources and Open Access - each have their own main pages and send their communities to those main pages. This is how things work now. An alternative is to have one landing page - "WikiProject Open" - then to present any active communities as flagship projects of WikiProject Open.

My proposal -

My rationale for wanting to combine communities is that many people outside of academia are fans of "open" but the concept of open access is a bit inaccessible. I think that the open access community would do well to recognize non-academic outreach efforts to other "open" activism as being a reasonable way to quickly grow non-academic support for the concept of open access, and that the concept of open access adds a lot of respectability to other demands for openness.

I also like the idea that anyone who ever did anything "open" would see and be guided to use and understand the concept of "open access", even if it seems not directly related to the "open" project they are doing.

Thoughts? This will be a continuing discussion. I am not sure what is right and do not feel comfortable with my proposal but it is a starting point. I do not want to dilute promotion of open access but I do want to do something to increase active participation on Wikipedia.

yours,

--
Lane Rasberry
user:bluerasberry on Wikipedia