Re: Beyond posting articles

At 12:01 PM -0400 8/22/03, community-request-yzvPICuk2ADJNcJ45EAw5ze48wsgrGvP@public.gmane.org wrote:
>>How do we truly build a community of scholars?

>From: Kevin Crowston <[email protected]>
>Subject: [F/OSS-Community] Re: Beyond posting articles

> . . . 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.


If its possible I'd like diverse and active interchange of things other than
complete academic papers.  As a form of information across disciplines,
academic papers can suffer from being narrowly aimed at a particular
audience.  They have to be like that (I think) so I'm looking for something
different rather than a change in the existing form.  Here are some kinds of
things we could share which would strengthen the sense of community and at
least sometimes be useful:

- A list of projects in progress.  (We have already a list of interests, but
projects are more specific and give people a place to find somebody already
working on subject X.)
- Relatedly: early draft papers, which might be really scanty but represent
projects in progress.  (This could speed the product pipeline in the sense
that one could know a year in advance that when paper Z is done, I will want
to cite it.)
- Databases authors used or are using.   (for statistical work)
- Statistical programs that do something with a particular database
- Glossaries of terms used, e.g. in open source contexts
- What questions various people would want to see in a general survey of
open-source developers (as Kevin Crowston proposed above)

I do not have any software design or implementation to propose but if
there's a common effort to think this through I'd like to participate.

-- 
Peter B. Meyer     [email protected]    202-691-5678
Research Economist, Office of Productivity and Technology 
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Room 2180
2 Massachusetts Avenue N.E., Washington, DC 20212-0001