I thought this might be of interest particularly in light of the recent conversations here about academics vs wikipedians. - Joe
Abstract Since access to research funding is difficult, particularly for young researchers, we consider a change in approach: "We are the funding opportunity!" I'll develop this idea further in the comments that follow. This is an "open letter" to circulate to research mailing lists which I hope will bring in new interest in the Free Technology Guild. Keywords: research funding, postgraduate training A critique of the way research is funded Considering the historical technologies for doing science, it makes sense that public funding for research is administered via a competitive, hierarchical model. Science is too big for everyone to get together in one room and discuss. However, contemporary communication technologies and open practices seem to promise something different: a sustained public conversation about research. The new way of doing things would "redeem" the intellectual capital currently lost in rejected research proposals, and would provide postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers with additional learning opportunities through a system of peer support. JISC recently ran an experiment moving in this direction (the "JISC Elevator"), but the actual incentive structure ended up being similar to other grant funding schemes, with 6 of 26 proposals funded (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/blog/crowd/). It strikes me that if we saw the same numbers in a classroom setting (6 pass, 20 fail), we would find that pretty appalling. Of course, people have the opportunity to re-apply with changes in response to another call, but the overheads in that approach are quite high. What if instead of a winners-take-all competitive model, we took a more collaborative and learning-oriented approach to funding research, with "applicants" working together, in consultation with funders -- until their ideas were ready? In the end, it's not so much about increasing the acceptance rate, but increasing the throughput of good ideas! Open peer review couldn't "save" the most flawed proposals; nevertheless, it could help expose and understand the flaws -- allowing contributors to learn from their mistakes and move on. With such an approach, funding for "research and postgraduate training" would be fruitfully combined. This modest proposal hinges on one simple point: transparency. Much as the taxpayer "should" have access to research results they pay for (cf. the recent of appointment of Jimmy Wales as a UK government advisor) and scientists "should" have access to the journals that they publish in (cf. Winston Hide's recent resignation as editor of Genomics), so to do we as citizen-scientists have a moral imperative to be transparent about how research funding is allocated, and how research is done. Not just transparent: positively pastoral. The Free Technology Guild: a candidate solution Suppose someone needs to put together a team of four persons: a programmer, a statistician, an anthropologist, and a small-scale capitalist. This team would have the project to create a new social media tool over the course of 3 months; the plan is to make money through a subscription model. As an open online community for work on technology projects, the Free Technology Guild (http://campus.ftacademy.org/wiki/index.php/Free_Technology_Guild) could help: * by helping the project designer specify the input/output requirements for the project; * by helping the right people for the job find and join the project; * by providing peer support and mentoring to participants throughout the duration of the project. Because everything is developed in the open (code, models, ethnography), everyone wins, including downstream users, who can replicate the same approach with any suitable changes "on demand". (And, in case things go badly, those results can be shared too -- the broader community can help everyone involved learn from these experiences in a constructive fashion.) What is needed now We are currently building the FTG on a volunteer basis, but within the year we hope to set up a service marketplace where we and others can contribute and charge for services related to free/open technology, science, and software. Although we have criticised the current mode of research funding as inefficient, we would be enthusiastic about contributing to grant proposals that would support our work to build a different kind of system. But without waiting for funding to arrive, we are actively recruiting volunteers to form the foundation of the Free Technology Guild. We seek technologists, researchers, organizational strategists, business-persons -- and students/interns/apprentices in these fields and others. Together, we can bootstrap a new way to do research. _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l