All, I would like your help making us more collaborative. So I'm declaring this coming week "Collaboration Week." But first, a short bit of background.
I am working on a paper called "Should science communication be strongly collaborative?" and this got me thinking about the advantages of collaboration, both expository and social. The primary *expository* advantage of collaboration is that articles become more broader, or fuller and less provincial, in their coverage. The main *social* advantage is that, when others collaborate with us, we tend to get very excited--usually positively, but sometimes not. The social visibility inherent in thinking problems through with others, actively, is extremely motivating. In short, we quite literally honor each other when we collaborate. But if, by contrast, if we work on our own projects and ignore what others are doing, many of us lose steam. Now, I am proud of what we have accomplished (over 7,000 articles in a year and a half), and I am proud of this community. I also think that we Citizens are decidedly more collaborative than some other encyclopedia projects, like Scholarpedia and the Encyclopedia of Earth. But we are not as collaborative as we could be--and not as collaborative as would be good for us and this project. So we should try to collaborate more. I hereby declare the following week "Collaboration Week." What does this mean? Two things. First, we make a special point of going to work on "other people's articles," and to respond when others work on "ours." Of course, there is no such thing as another person's article on CZ: our articles have no owners, and anyone can work on them. But the point is that we search through existing articles, new and old, and find some that we have not worked on before, and we work on them. I know this must sound obvious and even a little silly to some people--shouldn't every week be "Collaboration Week"? Well, yes. I would like us to become *more* collaborative. But let's begin with a period of time in which we *specifically* encourage collaboration. I don't care if our article count stays flat during the week. Of course, you don't *have* to participate in Collaboration Week--I'm only asking you to. Here is my prediction: if we are more collaborative this week, we will find ourselves more energized by the project, more engaged and interested. As a result, participation in general will increase. There is a good reason for this: when we work together on something, we take a general interest in and responsibility for the article, and so we are fascinated with how it develops. We are also interested in how our own work will be received by others working on the article. So, please, get out of your silos and work more with others. I think this will help envigorate the project. Second, in Collaboration Week, let us try to make the message of collaboration more front-and-center in our communications. If necessary, enlist the help of a constable to make the change (some pages/text can be edited only by someone with "sysadmin" rights in the wiki; all constables are sysadmins). You'll see a little from me about this on the wiki in a bit. But please, go to [[CZ:Home]] and click through to the various community pages, and make sure that they loudly sing the virtues of collaboration...remember, *I* don't own those community pages, even if I started them, and you can collaborate on them! --Larry _______________________________________________ Citizendium-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/citizendium-l
