Questions and Issues

Questions which are motivating the work of the working group (originally extracted from here)

These questions should eventually find their home in other, targeted nodes, such as Technologies, etc.

What are useful ways to chunk things?

• Useful data could be used in other ways.
• Code can also be shared separately.
• Problems can come in black box type tools.
• Better to have what tool was used and what went in and came out.
• Worth knowing where the landmarks are and how you got from one landmark to another.
• Ideas that don’t work out - at least to help people not waste their time - or perhaps to inspire someone to figure something out that was stuck before.
• Don’t want to have to keep track of or pay attention to all the things that didn’t work out.
• How you establish something is true is often more important than the thing itself.

What are the pain points of current tech? Break down the question:
Credibility and trust: how can a student enter into the field easier? Presence or absence in a group could be life-changing. Way to search and organize material - intelligent filtering?
How do we balance avoiding information overload with the concerns of echo chambers?
How much is the information being directed to a user controlled by that user?
How can we avoid severely limiting defaults in settings?
How can we use social resources? How can we use news resources? What blends of sources would be useful?
How can past behavior best be used to help with future efforts?
What tools would make embedding information less tricky? What kind of information would be useful to embed and into what?
What are possibilities for granularity other than a paper?
Possible answers:

Discussion during WG4 weekly meeting (2017-10-02)

What could be done to make it possible to see how the discoveries are developing and how the discussions are moving forward?
What do we want to have happening?
What tools are out there?
What various technologies are there? How might they apply to scholarly workflow/communication?
Who is the target?
How can we define a baseline to record progress?
How do we measure behavioural change?
From an email sharing some of Chris’ thoughts about WG4 for the FORCE11-Helmsley grant final report:
What is it that differentiates general productivity tools from scholarly tools?
Is there something intrinsic about the character of some knowledge that sets it apart as scholarly, or are there certain forms that make something a scholarly product?
Is scholarship more about the process of commoning than about the outputs? If so, what is needed to create a culture where people are willing to contribute in increasingly meaningful and micro ways, thus creating the opportunities for many more people to participate at any point in the process?
How can we leverage existing and emerging technologies and infrastructures such as the Web or cryptographic ledgers in bringing about this vision of the future? How can we do this in a way that frames scholarship as something interoperable with other forms of human expression by augmenting existing knowledge instead of isolating new knowledge from the rest of humanity?
From an email about CommonsPatterns Slack and WG4:
Is it beneficial to blend a more synchronous type of communication (chat) with asynchronous (email)?
What is the purpose for the WG4 email list? What is the purpose of Slack in this group? Which criteria would you use to decide which channel to use?

From the call on 2017-10-09:

Would it be easier to have people here consistently, or more people in general, if we had biweekly calls instead of weekly?
[DECISION] 2017-10-16: Continue meeting weekly, because
easier to remember
transcriptions should help when people miss a week

• Are there common things technologically between the different commons? Low level and subjective.
  • Can machines help somehow?
  • Social interactions involved here.

Issues and Questions from Sonja Blum, Dec 12, 2017 email

1. the underlying societal conditions driving the inequity of access to the currently dominant knowledge access system / for-profit journal system (such as public-private partnership /academia increasingly corporate/ publish or perish / global North-South issues),
2. the potential differences in the nature of knowledge production in current and imagined systems, and the implications of such differences,
3. what threats to net neutrality do to the possibility of the existence and functioning of the envisioned scholarly commons, and 4.) implications of encouraging releasing preliminary data within the scholarly commons on nature of authorship and intellectual property.

As a complement to, or extension of, the recent Bosnam et all manuscript on the principles and practices of the scholarly commons, a discussion of some of these issues may be useful to the process.

• What are the links between the system of knowledge production/ dissemination and the economic system? For example, manuscripts currently too often resemble ‘products’ which do not reflect new knowledge production, but rather are tools to ascend in the publish-or-perish climate. To what degree would the scholarly commons alleviate this issue?
  
• To what degree can the large scale goals of the scholarly commons be achieved in the broader setting of a capitalist economy?
• What would be the pros and cons of unrestricted access to 'knowledge', including mass dissemination of preliminary data / ‘early release’ data in the envisioned scholarly commons?
• Would the nature of knowledge production be fundamentally changed by mass exchange of preliminary and 'in process' work via a scholarly commons in comparison to the fee for access traditional journal system?
• Does the current system encourage the reproducibility crisis because of the current system’s conflict of interest between need for sensational new findings at the expense of ensuring the finding is actually reproducible and would the scholarly commons solve some of the problems arising from this conflict of interest?
• What new problems would a scholarly commons introduce in regard to knowledge production?
• What would habitual release of preliminary data do to the notion of the author?
• Aiming to create a platform with transparency of process implies that we may be ready for, or desire, an environment in which groups solve problems together/ the ultimate goal becomes advancing knowledge rather than advancing any individual’s fame or career status?

From Call on Jan 8, 2017

• Dichotomy: do we try to identify/propose better tools to capture and organize the existing components of the scientific process (data, notes, analysis, etc), or do we try to redefine the scholarly process altogether (possible, the old ways are too closely tied to the existing tools: pen, paper, letters, journals)?
• What is the incentive structure that can work for scholarly work (suppose that one can dispose with the current “publish or perish”, etc)? Can we glean insight from FOSS movement, e.g. Linux or Ethereum Foundations?
• Is there/can there be “market” for incomplete work, broader interest in research work-in-progress, as opposed to the cleaned up versions (print ready)?

For the group governance and operations

What granularity is helpful for us in this group?
Questions about transcribing our meetings:
Will it be sustainable? How could it be made sustainable?
Will it be useful?
Does having transcriptions lower the barrier for others to join in the conversation?
Will creating a transcript effect anyone’s behavior on the calls?
Do we need to somehow anonymize what has been said?
Are there things that belong “on the record” or “off the record”? If so, what is the difference?
What accessibility do we need to think about? For whom do we need it accessible? How do we do that?
Who might utilize what we produce? For what might they use it?
Who else do we need to invite to this group?
As we get to focus on the specific technologies, we can invite people that would be interested. Maybe not long-term but we could invite to a call.
Further discussion on purpose and approaches
How can we better connect to other groups right now involved?
Do we - in this group - take what we are learning and apply it and build something or not?