Hi all,I am a bit late in the game, but since so many questions were raised about RCom, its scope, its goals, the source of its authority etc. and I helped coordinate it in the early days I thought I’d chime in to clear some confusion.Is RCom an official WMF body or a group of volunteers?RCom was created as a volunteer body to help design policies and best practices around research on Wikimedia projects. People who joined the committee did so on a volunteer basis and with a variety of interests by responding to a call for participation issued by WMF. Despite the fact that the original initiative came from WMF, its membership almost entirely consisted of non-WMF researchers and community members (those of us who are now with Wikimedia had no affiliation with the Foundation when RCom was launched [1]). RCom work was and remains 100% volunteer-driven, even for those of us who are full-time employees of the Foundation.Is RCom a body regulating subject recruitment?No, subject recruitment was only one among many areas of interest identified by its participants [2]Is RCom still alive?RCom stopped working a while ago as a group meeting on a regular basis to discuss joint initiatives. However, it spawned a large number of initiatives and workgroups that are still alive and kicking, some of which have evolved into other projects that are now only loosely associated with RCom. These include reviewing subject recruitment requests, but also the Research Newsletter, which has been published monthly for the last 3 years; countless initiatives in the area of open access; initiatives to facilitate Wikimedia data documentation and data discoverability; hackathons and outreach events aimed at bringing together researchers and Wikimedia contributors. Subject recruitment reviews and discussions are still happening, and I believe they provide a valuable service when you consider that they are entirely run by a microscopic number of volunteers. I don’t think that the alternative between “either RCom exists and it functions effectively or reviews should immediately stop” is well framed or even desirable, for the reasons that I explain below.What’s the source of RCom’s authority in reviewing subject recruitment requests?Despite the perception that one of RCom’s duties would be to provide formal approval for research projects, it was never designed to do so and it never had the power to enforce formal review decisions. Instead, it was offered as a volunteer support service in an effort to help minimize disruption, improve the relevance of research involving Wikimedia contributors, sanity check the credentials of the researchers, create collaborations between researchers working on the same topic. The lack of community or WMF policies to back subject recruitment caused in the past few years quite some headaches, particularly in those cases in which recruitment attempts were blocked and referred to the RCom in order to “obtain formal approval”. The review process itself was meant to be as inclusive as possible and not restricted to RCom participants and researchers having their proposal reviewed were explicitly invited to address any questions or concerns raised by community members on the talk page. I totally agree that the way in which the project templates and forms were designed needs some serious overhaul to remove any indication of a binding review process or a commitment for reviews to be delivered within a fixed time frame. I cannot think of any example in which the review process discriminated some type of projects (say qualitative research) in favor of other types of research, but I am sure different research proposals attracted different levels of participation and interest in the review process. My recommendation to anyone interested in designing future subject recruitment processes is to focus on a lightweight review process open to the largest possible number of community members but backed by transparent and enforceable policies. It’s a really hard problem and there is simply no obvious silver bullet solution that can be found without some experimentation and fault tolerance.What about requests for private data?Private data and technical support requests from WMF are a different story: they were folded into the list of frequently asked questions hosted on the RCom section of Meta, but by definition they require a direct and substantial involvement from the Foundation: (1) they involve WMF as the legal entity that would be held liable for disclosing data in breech of its privacy policies and (2) they involve paid staff resources and need to be prioritized against a lot of other requests. There are now dedicated sections on private data on the Wikimedia Privacy Policy [4] and Data Retention guidelines [5]. Many people, including myself and other members of the Foundation’s Analytics team, believe that we should try and collect the minimum amount of private data that we need in order to operate and study our projects and make all those types of aggregate/sanitized data that we can retain indefinitely publicly available to everyone under open licenses. We’ve already started a process to do so and to ensure that more data (for example, data collected via site instrumentation [6]) be exposed via Labs or other APIs, in the respect of our users’ privacy.How can we incentivize researchers to “give back” to the community?In the early days we drafted a set of requirements [3] to make sure we could get back as much as possible from research involving WMF resources. It’s been hard to implement these requirements without policies to enforce them. The suggestion of having more researchers apply for a slot at the Research Showcase to present their work is an excellent idea that we should consider. In general, the Research team at WMF is always interested in hearing about incentives to drive more interest towards actionable research on Wikimedia projects.DarioOn Jul 29, 2014, at 6:49 PM, Aaron Halfaker <aaron.halfaker@gmail.com> wrote:_______________________________________________Either [RCOM is] functioning or its not, surely?Well, I explained that there are functioning sub-committees still. In other words, there are initiatives that RCOM started that are alive and successful, but we no longer coordinate as a larger group. I don't know how else to explain it. I guess you could say that RCOM is still functioning and that we no longer require/engage in group meetings.As Kerry noted earlier on, the policy as it stands [1] says that researchers "must" obtain approval through the process described. If the wording now needs to be changed to "ought to" then surely this requires more consensus than your single message here?That's a proposed policy. Until it is passed by consensus, the "must" is a proposed term. I think that it should be "must", but until that consensus is reached, I'll continue to say that it "ought to".Regarding researchers stating what should be regulated, I think there is a big difference between deciding what should be regulated and being involved in the discussion of *how* it should be regulated. Hence why I welcome participation. What I'm saying is that you have a vested interest in not being regulated, but I'd still like to discuss how your activities can be regulated effectively & efficiently. Does that make sense?b) Pine suggested a board decision on this earlier one to obtain clarity and I supported this but it was met with silence, which is why I followed up.I welcome you to raise it to them. I don't think it is worth their time, but they might disagree.But what is clear is that clarification is required - especially on the distribution of tasks between Foundation employees, the research community and Wikimedia editors. And this is *especially* true for people outside this list.I think that the proposed policy on English Wikipedia does that quite well. That's why I directed people there. Also, again, I am not working on RCOM or subject recruitment as a WMF employee. I do this in my volunteer time. This is true of all of RCOM who happen to also be staff.if you want process to be more clearly documented, you also have to address people like Poitr who would rather not have processes described in detail. When you guys work out how clearly you want a process to be described, please let me know. I'm tired of re-spec'ing processes. This is the third iteration.If the policy is incorrectly described on the policy pages, then someone from RCom (or whatever it is now called) should be the one to change this - preferably with some discussion.Heather, that is a proposed policy page on English Wikipedia. It is not part of RCOM. It would render RCOM irrelevant for subject recruitment concerns. That's why I started it. I don't think that RCOM/WMF/researchers should own subject recruitment review. I think the community being studied should own it and that RCOM/WMF/researchers should participate.Also, I am not your employee. This is my volunteer time. I don't have much of it, so I focus on keeping the system running -- and it is -- and improving the system -- which is the proposal I linked to. If you want something done and other volunteers don't have time to do it. Do it yourself.-AaronOn Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 10:23 AM, Heather Ford <hfordsa@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 10:25 AM, Aaron Halfaker <aaron.halfaker@gmail.com> wrote:
RCOM is not functioning as a complete group anymore.I'm a little confused why this wasn't made clear right at the beginning of this thread e.g. when others suggested this might be the case and you refuted them? Also, I'm not sure what 'functioning as a complete group' actually means. Either its functioning or its not, surely?However, we split into sub-committees while we were still a functioning group. The subject recruitment sub-committee and newsletter sub-committees are performing vital functions still.I never stated that research recruiting needs RCOM approval. I definitely said that it "ought to" have RCOM approval.So, does that mean that is what the policy *ought to* be now? And do you believe that this should this be the way that the policy gets decided? Because it isn't right now as far as I can see. As Kerry noted earlier on, the policy as it stands [1] says that researchers "must" obtain approval through the process described. If the wording now needs to be changed to "ought to" then surely this requires more consensus than your single message here?re. the comment that I (and the other researchers?) on this list shouldn't be the ones to decide what the regulation should be, I disagree on two counts. a) It seems on the one hand that you want this to be "self-regulation" i.e. you invited researchers on this list to join R-COM at the beginning of this thread, but that you don't think that the researchers here should be able to determine what to regulate. I know that you're looking for an inclusive process but you can't have it both ways: if we are going to help regulate, then we need to at least help decide how to regulate. b) Pine suggested a board decision on this earlier one to obtain clarity and I supported this but it was met with silence, which is why I followed up.There are also more than two "review coordinators" (not not "reviewers") -- it's just that DarTar and I have accepted the burden of distributing work. When people are busy, we often coordinate the reviews ourselves.I can understand your frustration; I really can! I know that you've done a lot of really great, prior work on this and I don't think any of us are saying that we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But what is clear is that clarification is required - especially on the distribution of tasks between Foundation employees, the research community and Wikimedia editors. And this is *especially* true for people outside this list.I welcome your edits to make it clear that review is optional. As you might imagine, I have plenty of work to do and I appreciate your good-faith collaboration on improving our research documentation.I'm frustrated by this response. If the policy is incorrectly described on the policy pages, then someone from RCom (or whatever it is now called) should be the one to change this - preferably with some discussion. I find it frustrating that WMF employees are often the ones who make the final policy pronouncements but then tell others to implement it. And if we don't do the work, then we're apparently not assuming good faith.This is a great opportunity to rejuvenate the process; hopefully it will eventually be seen that way :)Best,Heather.-Aaron_______________________________________________
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