[open-science] Planet Open Science

Wed Oct 1 23:17:35 UTC 2014

Let me toss out a strawperson here:

Suppose we do what we always have done in the past, which is to resort to
chat rooms, which, sometimes like email lists, go on and on, and even
wander off topic. Chat rooms really do provide a valuable service, not
unlike the free chatter that goes on in one's prefrontal lobes before stuff
sticks and makes it to working memory for deeper consideration.  Chat rooms
can exist in this venue, just, I would argue, not as the primary means of
communication.

Suppose, instead, we seek out some kind of simulation of the "dog food" we
seek and use that?

It's not like all of us can schedule specific times for meeting on any chat
channel; it's more like we need the time to be thoughtful and do some
research to give evidence for whatever it is we would propose.

The strawperson I would offer is http://debategraph.org/ where there are
already lots of other communities seeking, guess what!, the same thing you
seek here, albeit under different contexts.

What you seek, some kind of collaboration platform with "planet" (think:
massive knowledge federation) capabilities just happens to be today's holy
grail. Lots of people seek the same thing. Those using debategraph have
already recognized that installing yet another wiki or blog platform is
just one step along a much longer path.

We are dealing with organisms here: each player in this or any tribe
already has agendas, goals, critical paths, and who can say just how many
opinions, justified or not.  The purpose of a "chat" would be to elicit
those. Keeping that elicitation, at once, civil, and well organized, by
which I do not mean placing filters on what is uttered, is no simple task.

A platform such as debategraph allows for such collection and organization,
though it does require more care than just typing opinions in a chat room;
one must do the same work at debategraph they would otherwise perform at
whatever "planet" you eventually install.

Now, not everyone thinks in bubbles and arcs; you can turn that off and
simply work to the outline view, where you see the structured gestalt of
everyone's inputs, including nodes which support other nodes, and nodes
which disagree, with justifications, of course.

Debategraph offers a nice tutorial, and has a lively presence on youtube.

You are more than free to select some other venue than that which I
suggest; that's just a suggestion.

On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 2:51 PM, Svetlana Belkin <belkinsa at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> On 10/01/2014 03:15 PM, Jack Park wrote:
> > Svetlana,
> >
> > I see that you have a vote. Can you articulate your reasons for that
> > vote? Is there a working hypothesis at play here?
> >
> > Are tags and categories the only criteria for choosing?
> >
> > What about signal-to-noise ratio? How does the platform support honest,
> > civil debate about topics?  For that matter, how does it make specific
> > topics findable? relatable?
> >
> > Does it simply aggregate, or does it provide for organizing resources?
>
> Um, good questions.  Maybe we all could explore the possibilities via a
> sprint via IRC or some form of real time chatting?
> --
> Svetlana Belkin
> A.K.A: belkinsa
> User Wiki page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/belkinsa
>
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