Hi Pine,

that's correct, we discontinued the bi-monthly meetings for a number of reasons even though many activities that fall within the scope RCom continued silently over the last months (project/subject recruitment request reviews; monthly publication of the research newsletter; open access and open data policies; expert engagement initiatives). At this stage RCom is an entirely volunteer-driven effort with little to no support from WMF (I am myself helping during my spare time). For RCom to fulfill its mission we need to find a better collaboration model, make it more self-sustainable and open up participation to community members in its various areas of activities. To this aim I posted a reorg proposal [1] that was introduced and discussed last week at a workshop organized by Mayo Fuster at Wikimania. Part of this reorganization includes a new policy proposal drafted by Aaron Halfaker to replace the current review process with a new one with a strong community engagement component [2]. We'd love to hear your thoughts on how to move forward, I expect we will be sharing updates on research-l once we've reviewed these various proposals.

Best, Dario

[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Committee/Reorganization [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Recruitment_policy

On Jul 19, 2012, at 1:55 AM, ENWP Pine wrote:

Hi Dario,

I have a couple of questions.

Are the RCom pages still being updated? I’m seeing some outdated stuff there, and http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/RComMonthlyReports2012 seems to indicate less activity since March.

Did RCom ever reach conclusions about standards for recruiting Wikimedians to be research subjects, and the Subject Recruitment Approvals Group? We had a discussion about those issues on this list in March, and I got the impression that RCom was planning to take action on that at the next RCom meeting. There was also some activity at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Committee/Areas_of_interest/Su.... I’d appreciate RCom bringing some finality and clarification to these procedures as written on Meta before the next US academic year starts, and/or starting some sort of formal working group.

I’m cc’ing this email to Research-l because I feel that other members of the list might also appreciate an update on subject recruitment approval and on RCom’s work.

Thanks very much.

Pine