Hello all,
first of all, big thanks to Dario and others who helped document the areas of interest at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee/Areas_of_interest
I find these pages very helpful in understanding the areas we want to explore together. I would encourage all of you, as individuals, to always feel free to promote the prominence of any one of these issues, or others, and begin a dialog with your peers on the committee about how to address it.
With that being said, I think it would be useful to identify a first shared problem that we can work on together. In looking at the areas of interest, it occurs to me that it would be useful to begin drawing up some high-level principles for research in Wikimedia projects, which could be recommended to the Wikimedia Foundation Board as policy (we may also decide not to try to elevate them to this level, but it seems to me that having a high degree of clarity would be desirable here). This policy could try to precisely define the parameters of some of the ambiguous issues such as subject-matter recruitment and open access.
This kind of articulation is probably also the best way to achieve some level of consistency across the many different languages and projects in the Wikimedia universe.
So, with that said, I've written up some quick first notes regarding the possible shape that such a policy and Board resolution could take, here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee/Draft_research_policy
I'd appreciate your thoughts, on-list or on-wiki.
Thanks and all best, Erik