Once again, I have to apologise for my absence at the last research network meeting. (I think weekends are problematic for getting everyone together, though I know we're in different timezones - it was saturday night for me - and there's probably no other solution than doing it on weekends - a bit Catch 22). Erik (M) noted we need more psy-soc input, which is definitely my slant on all this, and I feel bad about not contributing to something I'm very much interested in. I'd even assured Erik I was coming... bah.

I've responded to some ideas on m:Research, specifically Erik's (Z) idea on a general user survey, which I'd like to lend a hand to - also wikis in education, which is the focus of my masters. Which then got me thinking about that I'm currently restarting work on my dissertation, which is on "Wikipedia as a learning community" (and which I'm writing a paper on for Wikimania) and which raises a lot of issues on how information and experience is collated and used within the organisational schema of Wikimedia and what lessons need to be learned on an ongoing basis. Basically, I'm proposing that I could slant my dissertation to incorporate a study that was needed, broadly within the aforementioned framework. I'm happy to collaborate on this, ie. make my study a part of a wider one, or even a starting point to a survey/project, like testing a particular methodology for quality of data, response rate etc.

I'll be doing this in some way anyway (and you can get a picture of what I've been doing so far in my wikimania paper, link below) but essentially what I'm doing here is throwing it open to other ideas and see if we can work on anything together, or if there's something that you'd like to see done. No guarantees mind, and bear in mind that too much technical stuff tends to fry my brain :)

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikimania05/Paper-CL1

All the best,

Cormac / Cormaggio