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/