Re: Beyond posting articles

At 12:01 PM -0400 8/22/03, community-request-yzvPICuk2ADJNcJ45EAw5ze48wsgrGvP@public.gmane.org wrote:
>I was wondering what we need to do to go beyond just individual
>consumption of articles?  Is there a way for us to share our ideas and
>thoughts across space and time?
>
>How do we truly build a community of scholars?

The question I would ask is, what are the dependencies between what 
we're individually doing that might be better managed by some new 
system? My view is that at the moment, we're mostly pursuing 
individual research projects, and so the main dependency is that I 
might want to know what you've done on some question so I can cite it 
(at least) or use what you've found to guide what I do next. For 
these purposes, a big list of working paper is probably sufficient.

I can imagine though developing community repositories of data that 
require more intensive kinds of interaction. E.g., if everyone tries 
to survey developers, it's not going to work--developers will answer 
one or two, then stop. So, a possible future development is to pool 
resources and do a large-scale survey that covers a range of 
questions and that can be carefully administered regularly (something 
like the surveys that ISR does at Michigan on subjects like consumer 
confidence, etc.). This could grow naturally out of some of the 
surveys that have already been done. To make this work though would 
require interactions around the design of the surveys (what should be 
asked) and maybe even some cooperation in the analysis. Similar 
repositories could include source code analyzed in various ways, 
coded interaction logs, etc. Obviously, there are a bunch of issues 
before something like this will happen, but it's a possible direction 
enabled by and demanding more intensive interaction.

Just my 0.02.

>One idea is to see what technology solutions are available for us to
>build community - beyond just mailman.

There are numerous projects (many OSS) floating around--we might not 
have to build one from scratch...
-- 

Kevin Crowston
Syracuse University			    Phone:  +1 (315) 443-1676
School of Information Studies		    Fax:    +1 (315) 443-5806
4-206 Centre for Science and Technology	    EMail:  [email protected]
Syracuse, NY   13244-4100   USA		    Web:    http://crowston.syr.edu/