Research talk:Open Collaboration Systems Workshop

Notes/Questions

• relationship to DERP? Join but maintain more focused separate initiative?

co-organized with DERP founders, focus is complementary: this event will help build out the DERP network, and help develop reviewing standards, common metrics, and identify Big Questions Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 00:26, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

• should we ask for position papers or other prep work to seed the conversation? Who from?
  • If the goal is to come up with open questions across OCS's, yes.

all participants will submit position papers, organizers will come prepared to present/articulate their own positions as well Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 00:26, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

• should we ask industry reps to give short presentations of their research needs?
  • This sounds interesting. I guess by "research needs" you mean "important ongoing open problems for which research might yield actionable insights"?

yes, that's a good articulation of it :) all organizers will give lighting talks, and industry participants with compelling position papers will also be invited to participate Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 00:26, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

• ask industry researchers to make their data resources available beforehand? (MVP: a summary page like Research:Data)
  • Do you want data to be available there? If so, why? Is that data to answer particular questions, or something more?

WMF, Reddit, Imgur (and possibly other organizers) will post some sample datasets on DataHub.io. These datasets can help anchor group discussion about shared top-line metrics, common challenges & important questions for OCs. They also provide a novel value proposition for attendees: "here is some cool Reddit data to play with, and here are some things you could do with it" Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 00:26, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

• " two communities of practice " feels awkward. I don't know what you'd replace it with, though.

has been replaced with less jargon. Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 00:26, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

• What does it mean to "support the work of these online communities through research"? Be more specific, if possible.

not sure how specific we can get in the space of the abstract. Mostly talking about the work that folks in Data Science/Community Manager roles do to understand community health, evaluate feature usage, etc. Agree that the proposal itself will need to expand on this. Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 00:26, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

• Similarly "a framework that...supports the work of the communities being studied" doesn't make sense to me. If the goal is to support communities, shouldn't community managers (rather than just researchers at particular PP-communities) be the target? I've added them (remove if that's not your intention!)

Community managers are definitely a target audience. Even those who don't do data science themselves will have important insights to share. Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 00:26, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

• "Datasets and APIs will be prepared in advance and shared between participants" <-- that's not a goal, that's a procedure

good point. changed it to "Pilot a data repository by publishing a small set of well-documented and compelling OC datasets". Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 00:41, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

• I'm not sure what "Nature" means to you -- maybe something like "Real-world problems/challenges"? A different term would be better.

I agree... any ideas of how we would re-organize our themes? Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 00:42, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

• Can you give an example of how technical innovation might be needed to contribute to Grand Challenges? I guess this is something about social and data translucence (e.g. usage statistics from an article being shown, which then informs priorities)

struggled with how to articulate this, but then ended up dropping "Grand Challenge" language altogether. We probably won't push the technical innovation angle at all. Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 00:41, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

• For a one-day workshop, on top of a framework, this sounds like a lot: "Participants will also partner to share methods, tools and data, perform analyses, and develop best practices for open collaboration research." Are you foreseeing ongoing collaborations, and how will they be fostered?

Truth be told, we probably won't perform much analysis during the workshop: it won't be a true hackathon. Sharing methods, tools and data will happen through lightning talks and during afternoon breakout groups. Developing best practices (and identifying key research questions/needs) will happen through a roundtable discussion after the lightning talks, and probably also through breakout groups. Subsequent collaboration will be facilitated through partner initiatives (Digital Ecosystem Research Partnership and Open Collaboration Data Factory) and through personal relationships formed during the workshop. Also, we will create a mailing list :) Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 00:41, 2 July 2014 (UTC)