[Wikimedia-l] Research Committee

Hi - copying this under a new subject that makes the topic more clear to anyone skimming their inbox. Beyond the edits made below to clarify the current practice, I was curious about the success and value of the RCOM in general. First, I'm not aware of how active the committee was in the past in reviewing proposals, and it's certainly possible a great deal of work was done in this area. But reading the "charter" for the committee and looking around meta for related documentation, it appears that almost none of the elements of the charter have been accomplished. Despite this, in an e-mail last year to the RCOM list, Dario suggested that the continued operation of a membership committee was no longer a priority. (Nor has it been for some time - the last documented meeting was in 2011, the IRC channel has been mothballed, and the last monthly report [issued in 2012] is no longer even available). I gather that individually the members of the committee have created research-related initiatives that are valuable, and that part of the impetus for this work may have been collaboration through the vehicle of the committee. However, the charter lays out some pretty worthwhile goals: policies for conflicts of interest, guidelines for recruiting subjects, a process for requesting non-public data, supporting research projects with technical resources, creating an open-access policy, releasing a "starter kit" for researchers, etc. At least from the links within the orbit of the main RCOM page, it's not clear to me that any of these goals have been achieved or even that substantial progress has been made. If it has, then the RCOM is definitely selling itself short by not making that more public. If indeed these are all still outstanding goals, it's disappointing that the committee is basically wound up without any hope or plan or achieving them. On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 3:53 PM, Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote: