[open-science] OKF: What shall I say at the Open Science Summit in Berkeley

Wed Jul 7 19:34:28 UTC 2010

> I agree with what you say about the importance of attitude, but I think
> open community is about more than just attitude.  There's a well-defined
> question that can be asked of any scientific project: does the project
> offer substantive ways for non-professionals to contribute to the science,
> and encourage that involvement?

This made me realise something. For each of these "petals", publication,
code, data, etc. I now just _assume_ that two way communication is a given.
So making code available on a recognised repo presumes that you are open to
receiving external patches, publishing a paper means that you will receive
commentary...I mean why else would you bother? I realise this is probably
not a widely held set of assumptions :-)

So I see a difference between the technical capacity which I am essentially
assuming is built in as we migrate more activity in a substantive way on the
web vs the attitude towards actually listening to the return path.

I still feel the attitudinal change is the hard thing, and also the hard one
to measure. Galaxy Zoo could have forums but not have any of the scientists
actually listening to them. ArXiv could be more open to contributions from
non-professionals, its just a matter of attitude.

Of course, as you point out, most projects have no technical return path at
all and that is something that is measurable. What sort of standards and
expectations would be appropriate to build in there? What is appropriate for
different kinds of projects (with different issues around
privacy/security/time availability?). Is there a minimal standard?

Cheers
Cameron

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