Dear all,
first of all a short reminder, if you are planning to attend the 2nd RCom Meeting this week but you haven't given your date/time preferences yet, please respond to this poll as soon as possible: http://doodle.com/rp4dryfrdph5a96g Proposed dates for the meeting are: Wed 15, Thu 16, Fri 17 and Sat 18. Further details will follow.
An informal pre-meeting discussion took place on Friday with Daniel and Giota (thanks so much for your help guys). The goal was to think of how to best organise work within the Research Committee by reconciling different individual interests with the need to produce some tangible output in a relatively short timeframe. To get the ball rolling we would like to propose the following plan:
Prioritising RCom's areas of interest The current list of areas of interest on Meta [1] is unprioritised. The lack of prioritisation makes it hard to tell which of these areas may have an impact in the short-term as opposed to areas that may involve an ongoing discussion and more long-term goals. We need to focus on simple and realistic short-term goals to showcase the function and value of the committee both to the Wikimedia community and the research community. The following 2 areas already saw some preliminary activity and it looks like they could produce valuable output in a short timeframe.
Research Committee/Areas of interest/Open-access policy Research Committee/Areas of interest/Subject recruitment processes
Daniel, Giota and myself also started putting together some ideas for a new area of interest (triggered by Erik's post on Wikimedia's collaboration with EOL) which may also lead to some preliminary output in the short run:
Research_Committee/Areas_of_interest/Expert_involvement
There are other suggestions for short-term/high-impact activities in other areas (e.g. organising a panel at a major research conference to discuss "high-value research contributions to Wikipedia" or organising a data contest to highlight research priorities ) but there hasn't been much discussion in the corresponding pages so far.
To help prioritise work within different areas of interest we suggest to identify coordinators for active areas and start brainstorming ideas for possible short-term tasks:
Step forward as a coordinator If you marked a specific area as close to your research interests (e.g. if you ranked it (1) or (2) in your personal priority list) and you think the area may have some short-term/high impact potential, then we would like to ask you to act as a coordinator for this area. Coordinators will help animate the activity within each area and define its objectives and expected output. An area of interest can obviously have one or more coordinators and in some cases there will be no need of a coordinator at all if the activity within the group is sufficiently sustained.
Defining short-term tasks for each area of interest Coordinators should help each group formulate 1or 2 tasks that they believe would be achievable within a 3-6 months timeframe. Examples of such tasks are: - drafting the first public version of Wikimedia's Open Access Policy - running a survey about obstacles to expert participation in Wikipedia and publishing the results (see [2-3]);
Some areas may not have any foreseeable short-term goal, in which case they will not be considered for top priority action. Hopefully this plan makes sense to you all, please let me know if you have any comments or ideas you wish to discuss before the meeting.
Dario
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee/Areas_of_interest/ [2] http://friendfeed.com/scholarly-wikis/65583af6/top-ten-reasons-why-academics... [3] http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Top_ten_reasons_why_academics_do_not_contribu...