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.
Dario
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.
-Aaron
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