[open-economics] Setup an OSQA for Open Economics?

[Dirk Heine]

I much like the idea, but I believe there are huge network externalities
with this app and I would like us to first discuss how we will be able to
attain minimum efficient scale. I fear that with the size of our group we
will not currently be able to provide big enough a push to get to the point
where people actually find what they are looking for. And then we might
have issues starting up. How could we address that? Any technological
catalyst possible to lower the activation energy needed to make this work?

That said: I very much do like the idea. I am just worried it might be a
pretty big undertaking, which -different to our previous projects- would be
really difficult to start small.

Dirk



On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 7:53 PM, Velichka Dimitrova <
velichka.dimitrova at okfn.org> wrote:

> Yes, absolutely!
>
> We should boot this up, get a couple of example entries and see what
> adjustments need to be done.
>
> As about the collaborative discussions on literature, I know that Sam has
> done some pretty good work on TEXTUS (
> http://blog.okfn.org/category/okf-projects/textus/), which "encourages
> scholarly collaboration", so there is definitely something we can learn and
> re-use from OpenPhilosophy.
>
> Velichka
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 11:40 PM, Guo Xu <digitalepourpre at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Dear List,
>>
>>  The Effectopedia post got me thinking about the Metametrik/KillOrCure
>> for econ idea we developed at the OKCon in Berlin.
>>
>> I was wondering if we could get a quick implementation set up using a
>> tweaked OSQA?
>>
>> For example, people could post a question such as "What is the impact
>> of openess on growth?". Each reply would simply be an answer with a
>> link to a paper that provides some evidence in favour or against the
>> case. The rating function could be simply tweaked to show the number
>> of papers that argue for either case (thumbs up = good for growth,
>> thumbs down = bad), and we could eventually easily identify research
>> questions that are still unresolved. Tags can be used to categorize
>> the questions (e.g. Macroeconomics, Trade, Microfinance etc.).
>>
>> It would be very cool to set it up and start collecting a couple of
>> entries and see which adjustments would be required to adopt the OSQA
>> to our needs. Personally, I would start adding content just as a way
>> to summarize/review literature. The cost of setting this up would be
>> minimal, and the return potentially large: Ideally, I could imagine
>> this turning out to be the starting point for every empirical
>> literature review in economics (we could, of course, also link to the
>> datasets for people to replicate!). People could also use it as a
>> platform to discuss literature (since each answer - reflecting one
>> piece of evidence - can have sub-responses). This would certainly be
>> something every economist would love to have!
>>
>> It is also comparably easier to implement than the original Metametrik
>> idea. So what do you guys think? Could we just have a quick push and
>> deploy an OSQA for Open Economics (@Rufus, in particular) to get this
>> started? Would that be something to set up for the OKFN Labs?
>>
>> Guo
>>
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>>
>
>
>
> --
> Velichka Dimitrova
> Open Economics Working Group Coordinator
> Open Knowledge Foundation
> Twitter: @okfnecon, @vndimitrova
> Website: www.openeconomics.net
>
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>
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