All,
as some of you may have seen, a young researcher from UMN is requesting feedback for recruiting a large number of participants (1K) for a survey on Wikipedia participation:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Participatory_Motivation_to_Commons-based_Pee...
As he was trying to bulk-mail 1K editors for this study we temporarily disabled email feedback functionality for his WIkipedia user accounts and explained that these requests need to be reviewed by the Research Committee and community. The detailed description that he posted is a good example of how straightforward it is to obtain extensive information on a proposed recruitment strategy if we start systematically channelling these requests to Meta.
In exchange of the effort researchers put into documenting their research methods, I would like to ensure that we don't keep them on hold indefinitely to obtain community approval if there's no need to. I believe the RCom should play an active role in assessing on behalf of the community whether a given recruitment proposal or data collection method is acceptable or potentially dangerous, so that once the proposal has been cleared by the RCom and we do not hear from the community within a given number of days, we can give the green light to the researcher. I am confident that such a lightweight model can work as long as we have community members on board who can help us identify issues we may not be aware of. I shortly discussed these ideas with Aaron and he will help draft a proposal to submit to the RCom for discussion during the next meeting.
In the meantime please post your feedback on the above proposal via its discussion page if you have any concerns with the methodology.
Dario