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Re: [jox] Pot-pourri



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Hi Mathieu and all

There is a person for the scientific committee that has written on
intellectual property and that side of things, his name is Majid Yar
M.Yar hull.ac.uk, you can ask him to get on board. On themes it be great to
have one conflict in p2p (of course you know I will say that) and one on p2p
in global politics. I agree with Felix, I never thought that the rating was
a good idea myself.

Cheers
Athina

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 10:33 PM, Mathieu O'Neil
<mathieu.oneil anu.edu.au>wrote:

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Hi all

OK, here a is a long list of stuff to deal with, in no particular order.
Feel free to extract whichever point you want to respond to and start a new
thread.

* Timeline
I will be travelling from December 11 until December 31. I will be able to
check emails occasionally but probably not much more. Thanks for your
understanding. Since we are just starting discussions with the Scientific
Committee (SC) there is some doubt in my mind about whether wc can finalise
a CFP with SC member input before the end of November. I think it would be
counter-productive to release an official CFP in December as people tend to
focus on their end of year activities. See how we go, might be possible.

* Extra reviewers
I contacted a couple of legal scholars who have published on “open source”
and peer production: no answer. Same goes for people on the management /
business side of things. I suppose they thought the project was too
critical, or too grassroots, or whatever. Still and all, I think some legal
talent would be useful in the SC. If any of the SC know someone who might be
able to help, please contact me and let me know.

* Private List
Stefan Merten suggested he could set up some kind of password-protected
list where we could discuss “sensitive” issues such as potential SC members.
So far I have driven the SC member recruitment idiosyncratically but if
people do want to discuss this publicly (rather than just emailing me their
ideas) then I guess it would be useful. Maybe just email me. But in any case
we will def. need such a facility for when we discuss reviews.

* Constitution
We want the governance and decision-making to be democratic. The reason we
set up a Governance Board (GB) was to guarantee the integrity of the project
(to prevent it from being misdirected away from core functions such as
“advancing peer production”). However there is some vagueness about
practical details: how does one become a GB  member? How does one leave? Are
there terms of office? What about inactive members? Etc. These will have to
be sorted out over the next few months. Input welcome.

* Role of SC
I think since we are connecting through this list the SC (or some parts of
it) might become interested in discussing ideas and coming up with ideas to
develop the journal. This would be a great bonus for everyone in my view.
Two other things come to mind:
-SC members are invited to submit to the journal. Yes, we need content.
-SC members are invited to think about contributors. A natural target would
be masters / doctoral students. Potential benefits to highlight to such folk
would be the quality and depth of the feedback they will get as well as the
innovative quality of the review process (more on that later). And, the
general rightness and goodness of the project, of course - provided they are
the idealistic type ;-).

* Themed issues
I would like to prepare some themed CFPs (with deadlines). Two that come to
mind are:
1- Wikipedia
Rationale: A famous example of peer production, there is a heap of research
going on about it but - to my knowledge - not that many special issues.
There was some discussion on the wiki-research list recently about whether
it would be a good idea to set up a WP journal so people are interested. And
finally we are lucky to have on board a great wiki-scholar, Amy Bruckman.
Personally I am interested in practical issues: governance, criticisms,
problems with elite, how to research / role of research, etc. Suggestions?

2- Open hardware
Rationale: Suggested by Michel Bauwens a while back. How to have successful
peer & open production of analog / concrete stuff? Possibilities,
limitations, proposals? Suggestions?

If SC members would like to propose a themed issue and be guest editors
please do so.

* Questions raised by people in the last few days, in chronological order
(greetings and farewells removed):

=Brian Whitworth=

This is good news, and I am happy to assist in any way I can. Our main idea
is to go from a static KES to a dynamic one, e.g. authors can update
versions of what they write based on reader feedback, so things evolve
rather than being fixed in stone, plus with attribution. When the changes
stabilize, one can still do fixed print. So most current publishing manager
software design's wont cut it, like manuscript central, as a secret reviewer
feedback system is behind the publication "shop window". You can still have
that right at the beginning, by author choice, but the main idea is a system
tht is transparent and open. If you can make a move in that direction that
works, or implement the design the second part of our paper outlined in any
way, I encourage you.


(Mathieu:)

Thanks for your message, and for your offer to help. I will put you down as
part of our scientific committee. Regarding the updating of content, we
discussed this, and came to the conclusion that while we are all for readers
leaving comments to papers, and authors responding to readers in comments,
the notion of a permanently mutable text (as is the case for example on WP)
did not really suit us in the context of a journal. I can see the attraction
in what you suggest below but it does raise a number of issues:
- at what point is an article "stable", if the possibility always exists
that some new argument, for or against, comes along and must be dealt
with/integrated?
- another possible problem with continuously changing the main part of a
paper is that it would create uncertainty as to which version was being
referred to in subsequent publications.
So we decided that we would rather have people write a new paper based on
all the comments and responses, if necessary. At the same time this is
something that we can talk about more. I will subscribe you to our list and
raise this alongside other issues that come up.


= Felix Stalder=


As for the mission statement, there is the following sentence:

We understand peer production as a mode of commons-based and oriented>
production in which participation is voluntary and predicated on the
self-selection of tasks.

It took me very long to understand this sentence.  at the
very least, you would need to include an '-' before oriented. Otherwise,
it gets totally confusing.

(Mathieu:) OK


As for the review process, I think having people to be able to
comment is
great. I'm not so sure, if we should adopt a rating of published
papers
from +2 to +5. This would mean that the reviewers tell the
audience which
papers they think are every good, and which are merely good
enough. I think
this is a bit unfair to the published authors and creates biases
in the
audience. After all, wouldn't you start reading papers that are
ranked
high, rather than those ranked poorly?


(Mathieu:) Well, it also allows to rate and publish more papers... but I
see your point, will bring it to the attention of the group.


=Stefan Merten=

As an idea for further improvement: At the moment thanks to Mathieu
the members of the Scientific Committee are listed on the `current web
page`_ just with name and affiliation. Later I'd find it useful if for
each member there is an own page or one page listing all members with
a bit more detail. In particular I - but probably others as well - am
interested in the background of people. At the very least I think this
serves the new members as well as the founders of this project.

(Mathieu:)

At this stage I would suggest simply putting a link to the academic /
professional homepage of the various people, rather than collating and
setting up a lot of pages on the journal site; what do others think?



That’s all I can think of for now,

Cheers

Mathieu






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-- 
Dr Athina Karatzogianni
Lecturer in Media, Culture and Society
The Dean's Representative (Chinese Partnerships)
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
The University of Hull
United Kingdom
HU6 7RX
T: ++44 (0) 1482 46 5790
F: ++44 (0) 1482 466107
http://www2.hull.ac.uk/FASS/humanities/media,_culture_and_society/staff/karatzogianni,_dr_athina.aspx

Check out Athina's work
http://browse.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/results.asp?ath=A+Karatzogianni

Check Virtual Communication Collaboration and Conflict (Virt3C) Conference
Call
http://virt3c.wordpress.com/


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