Re: [RCom-l] RCom: Moving forward

Hi Dario & all! Happy new year! Thanks for the e-mail. This is fine for me. Sorry I do not understand these two sentences (might be the English). What do you mean by ceased?. In any case, I agree that the list of achievements are good. I would like to add and highlight also the http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Index, I found it very useful resource. Then, the substantial increase of research activity performed or developed with the involvement of chapters. Only to mention the area of Active Aging and ICT, I know Swisses, Germans and Catalans are involved on important national research projects or/and Europeans projects. Additionally, Chapters recurrently develop surveys Wikipedias, and such as in the case of Catalan, we use the OAP and recruitment suggested practices by Rcom to select the projects we support. That is Rcom actions also has helped and orientate what Chapters do on research. I know this because I am personally involve, but these might also apply to other Chapters. Finally, I also would like to highlight that it is very useful to have a “research” node or reference subject to be able to have a contact point and interlocutor for research projects, such as Dario as part of WMF research team is in the Board of a just started very large European project on “Techno-social platform for sustainable models and value generation in commons-based peer production in the Future Internet” http://p2pvalue.eu/ of which I am directing the empirical research. It is very good to have a way to connect and synergy such a projects with the Wikimedia world. On future actions, I plan to attend London Wikimania. I would be happy to co-organize with others some activity there to give visibility to research actions and help promote networking. Cheers to all! Mayo On 12/23/2013 11:29 PM, Dario Taraborelli wrote: Hi everybody, I received a few days ago a request to merge and redirect the almost inactive #wikimedia-rcom IRC channel to #wikimedia-research (a public channel open to anyone but primarily operated by the WMF Research and Data team). I agreed with this proposal but I’d be happy to put it on hold if others think that a dedicated RCom channel still serves a purpose. A little bit of retrospective. The Research Committee as a group with a fixed membership and a regular meeting schedule has been inactive for a very long time. However, a number of RCom initiatives have continued to grow organically over the years thanks to the effort of individual members. These include: (1) the monthly Research Newsletter [1] has been continuously published since July 2011 and is now close to completing its 3rd volume, thanks to Tilman Bayer’s commitment and unwavering dedication and a number of occasional or recurring contributors; (2) the @WikiResearch handle [2], originally designed as a companion to the newsletter, today is followed by almost 1.5K users and brings together a large community of editors, researchers, journalists and members of the public interested in research on Wikimedia projects; (3) Subject Recruitment requests [3] have kept trickling in. If they received timely support and an adequate response, it’s primarily thanks to Aaron Halfaker’s effort. Aaron joined WMF a few months ago as a full-time member of the Research and Data team but he is still investing some of his time in supporting these requests, despite the lack of formal legal or community policies backing the RCom approval process. (4) Open Access initiatives led by Daniel Mietchen have spawned, among other things, a dedicated Wikiproject [4] and OA is now becoming an opportunity of active collaboration between Wikimedians and open knowledge/open science advocates, thanks to the work of Daniel, Andrea Zanni, Lane Rasberry, to name just a few. OA was big last summer at Wikimania ’13 and it will be even bigger this coming year in London. [5] Other outreach initiatives similar in spirit to the RCom’s – such as Labs2 and WikiResearch hackathons [6] – have taken off thanks to the self-organized effort of like-minded individuals. I am very proud of these achievements, which wouldn’t have been possible without many of you donating time and energy to push them forward (and I am sure I’m omitting other ideas born under the RCom brand that I am less familiar with). I am also glad that decentralization produced the desired effect of freeing individual projects from coordination costs and allowed them to grow at their own pace. I take these success stories as evidence that the existence of a fixed-membership group with a recognized authority on any possible matter related to Wikimedia research and associated policies has ceased to be a priority. I believe this is the right operating model, given the diversity of projects that fell under the original scope of the RCom, but I’d like to hear if others on this list have a different opinion. Meanwhile, best wishes of happy holidays to you and your families. Dario [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter [2] https://twitter.com/WikiResearch [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Subject_recruitment [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Open_Access [5] http://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Outreach/Open_access [6] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Labs2/Hackathons _______________________________________________ RCom-l mailing list RCom-l@lists.wikimedia.org<mailto:RCom-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/rcom-l -- «·´`·.(*·.¸(`·.¸ ¸.·´)¸.·*).·´`·» «·´¨*·¸¸« Mayo Fuster Morell ».¸.·*¨`·» @Lilaroja «·´`·.(¸.·´(¸.·* *·.¸)`·.¸).·´`·» Fellow. Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Harvard University. Researcher. Institute of Government and Public Policies. Autonomous University of Barcelona. Ph.D European University Institute Website: http://www.onlinecreation.info Phone: 0034-648877748 The information transmitted is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. Any review, retransmission, dissemination, distribution, forwarding, or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon, this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited without the express permission of the sender. If you received this communication in error, please contact the sender and delete the material from any computer.