meeting 3 October to discuss combining "open" interests... - OpenAccess

2 Oct 2013


      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
herehttp://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20131003T1500
)
- 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/wikiSOOconfhttps://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/launch/meeting.jnlp?sid=2008170&password=M.7EF1419357E089BCE412FAEDFCA8C2
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 -
- One project called "WikiProject Open" acts as the hub of all open
   efforts
   - WikiProject Open Access and Communicate OER are flagship-sub projects;
   other subprojects welcome
   - Project tagging on all pages changes from "WikiProject Open Access" to
   "WikiProject Open"
   - This mailing list, the "openaccess" mailing list, because the mailing
   list for all notices about anything related to "open" on Wikimedia
   projects, and not just "open access"
   - One forum becomes the talk space for all "open" projects - communities
   combine there
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
206.801.0814
lane@bluerasberry.com