I don't think there's cause for you to be concerned, Stu. FWIW, we've
talked to Tim since launch, and after we expressed our concerns he assured
us that the model of DERP is still just facilitating connections in a
non-exclusive way, rather than playing a role as a reviewing body or a data
broker of any kind.
There were other reasons we decided to be a little more cautious about
committing to this kind of initiative. As Toby Negrin pointed out
recently: There
is one major difference between the companies involved in DERP and
ourselves -- they all use data collected from their users to make money and
we explicitly do not. This is frankly a point of pride for many members of
the foundation and certainly the community.
More pragmatically, the last week of organizing for the DERP launch just
happened too fast for us (and happened during Wikimania, to boot!). Those
of us in research-y roles hadn't had a chance to discuss all the evolving
details as a team, and on the eve of the launch we didn't all feel we had a
100% clear idea of what commitments we would be making by joining.
But we're still on the DERP mailing list, and (if the review gods are
merciful) we plan to co-organize a CSCW workshop with Tim Hwang and Max
Goodman at CSCW 2015.
We like DERP! Don't stop DERPing!
- Jonathan
On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 3:31 PM, R.Stuart Geiger <sgeiger(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all, thanks for all the info. I'm a DERP
fellow, which means I was
planning on participating in this as a researcher (I'm doing some work on
reddit, too) as well as serving as an advisory board. I apparently haven't
been involved in the same threads/calls with the DERP organizers that
Aaron, Jonathan, and Dario have been on, and I'm kind of shocked at what
I'm hearing. I completely believe you guys, it just runs so opposite to
what I've been told that I'm dreading the e-mail I think I'm going to have
to write to the DERP folks.
This is the first time I've heard anything about DERP being much more than
an informal communication broker between organizations and academic
researchers. DERP was pitched to me as a big signaling mechanism to
researchers, platforms, and the public that there are spaces outside of
Facebook and Twitter to do research. Wikimedia obviously doesn't need
DERP as much as some of the smaller platforms do, but I thought it would be
great for Wikimedia's presence (yes, the logo) to be there, standing in
solidarity with the lesser-researched platforms. As it was explained to
me, all that was supposed to be involved in a platform joining DERP is 1)
a public declaration that they are open to receiving requests from
researchers via DERP and 2) a commitment to review and respond to proposals
that were e-mailed from researchers to DERP. In one of the fellows calls,
I actually think someone asked whether DERP would be like an
Institutional Review Board that would independently approve/reject studies,
and we all thought that it would be better for these to be done on a
case-by-case basis between the researcher and the platform(s).
Early on, I actually suggested adding some language about ethics. I
suggested that as we started these projects, it would be great to develop
an ongoing, informal set of best practices for doing computational social
science in an academic/industry partnership -- particularly in the wake of
the Facebook emotion contagion study. Something like a series of blog posts
about the various ethical issues we encountered in the course of doing this
kind of research across a bunch of different platforms, and ways that they
were resolved. Perhaps that might synthesize into a mini workshop
culminating in a whitepaper, but it wouldn't ever be binding. As I was told
about it, DERP's direct role ends once the researcher has made successful
contact with the platform, aside from very high-level community organizing
things like discussions about best practices. Same thing with data
standards -- it is a fool's errand to mandate those, but I was told that
DERP might one day be a hub where people could talk about how to integrate
data from different platforms.
I did see the language that "All research supported by DERP will be
released openly and made publicly available," but I interpreted this as
something even weaker than Green OA -- that even if you publish in a closed
access journal, you have to write something up about the research. Kind of
like what Aaron did with our ABS paper. [1] The idea was that you should't
be able to do studies in the dark without anybody ever knowing about them.
The fellows were told that this wouldn't apply to datasets at all. And
given how many qualitative researchers are fellows and planning on doing
interviews, the concern that we would have to release full interview
transcripts was specifically brought up. Again, the idea was that DERP
might later develop some optional, guiding best practices to make things
easier, but any conditions of data access were supposed to be negotiated
between the researcher and the platform. I remember asking if DERP was
supposed to be some kind of central repository for storing data, and that
was resoundingly rejected.
So if DERP has shifted beyond this, that would be a pretty serious matter
of concern for me.
Best,
Stuart
[1]
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/
On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 2:32 PM, Joe Corneli <holtzermann17(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 10:14 PM, Kerry Raymond
<kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
It would seem that DERP needs to permit at least
two levels of
participation, one of which allows information to be provided about
data set
availability but retains separate control on
access.
<lol> ... To boldly go where GIT has gone before. </lol>
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Wikimedia Foundation
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