Establishing conventions for publishing reports

All,

Last time I counted, we had 203 published web reports. This is 
absolutely amazing! Even more amazing is the breakdown by months:
Dec: 38
Jan: 126
Feb: 39 in the first 10 days!

However, prosperity has its downside. We will soon start experiencing 
"information overload". If you receive a report notification every few 
days, you are likely to check it, and maybe even respond. If you get one 
every 10 minutes, you're more likely to turn notifications off.

To avoid erosion of our medium, we must concentrate on quality vs. 
quantity. Now, that doesn't mean students and researchers should 
hesitate before WRITING a report - only that we should all think 
carefully before PUBLISHING one. I have probably been guilty of a slight 
finger on the "publish" button more than anyone else. Its perfectly OK 
to use a report to jot down some musings, and share them with your 
friends. You don't need to publish for that - just leave them a msg with 
a link to the report. However, publishing means you think this would be 
of interest to ANY project member registered with the report's topic. 
Before you do that, make sure that the report is well thought and well 
written.

Please bring these issues to your students' awareness. Again, do not 
discourage them from writing reports and sharing them with friends - 
just note that publishing is not an automatic part of the process. Also, 
next time your students are engaged in writing or reading reports, try 
to get them to go through their old reports and retract those which were 
not intended to be widely read.

Another issue is language. Should we enforce a common language for all 
published reports? I'm not sure. I think having multiple languages on 
the system is a virtue. Yet, we should strive to have all published 
GROUP reports translated to English, and I think we can request that all 
published personal reports have at least a summary / abstract in English.

One more thing about group reports: please note in the report 
description that it is a group report, and link in the body to all the 
personal reports used in its preparation.


best,

- Yishay

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Yishay Mor
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