Scientific community building

by …†∆†¡∆µ∆ 
[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]
Building scientific communities:
[Via business|bytes|genes|molecules]
Here is an interesting point that should be discussed more, especially with scientific community building (my bolding).

I will start with something I have quoted all too often

Data finds data, then people find people

That quote by Jon Udell, channeling Jeff Jonas is one that, to me at least, defines what the modern web is all about. Too many people tend to put the people first, but in the end without common data to commune around, there can be no communities.

A community needs a purpose to exist, a reason to come together. Some communities arise because of similar political or gardening interests. Most research communities come together for one major reason - to deal with data.

Now data simply exists, like grains of sand. It requires human interaction to gain context and become information. In social settings, this information can be transformed into the knowledge that allows a decision to be made, decisions such as ‘I need to redo the experiment’ or ‘I can now publish.’

It used to be possible for a single researcher, or a small number, to examine a single handful of sand in order to generate information needed to answer scientific questions. Now we have to examine an entire beach or even an entire coastline. A much larger group of people must now be brought together to provide context for this data in any reasonable timeframe.

However, standard approaches are too slow and cumbersome. When one group can add 45 billion bases of DNA sequence to the databases a week, the solution cycle has to be shortened.

Science is an intellectual pursuit, whether it is formal academic science or just casual common interest. That’s where all the tools available today come into the picture. The data has always been there. Whether at the backend, or at the front end, we can think about how to get everything together, but being able to discovery and find some utility is very important. One of the reasons the informatics community seems to thrive online, apart from inherent curiosity and interest in such matters, is that we have a general set of interests to talk about, from programming languages, to tools to methods, to just whining about the fact that we spend too much time data munging. Successful life science communities need that common ground. In a blog post, Egon talks about JMOL and CDK. Why would I participate in the CDK community, or the JMOL one? Cause I have some interest in using or modifying JMOL, or finding out more about the CDK toolkit and perhaps using it. Successful communities are the ones that can take this mutual interest around the data and bring together the people.

Part of what is being discussed here is a common language and interest that allows rapid interactions amongst a group. In some ways, this is not different than a bunch of people coalescing around a cult TV show and forming a community. A difference is that the latter is a way to transform information that has purely entertainment value.

The researchers are actually trying to get their work done. What Web 2.0 approaches do is permit scientists to come together in virtual ad hoc communities to examine large amounts of data and help transform that into knowledge. Instead of one handful at a time, buckets and truckloads of sand can be examined at one time, with a degree of intensity impossible for a small group.

The size and depth of these ad hoc communities, as well as their longevity, will depend on the size of the beach, just how much data must be examined. But I guarantee that there will always be more data to examine, even after publication.

So my advice to anyone building a scientific community (the one that jumped out at me during the workshop was the EcoliHub) is to think about what the underlying data that could bring together people is first. Data here is used in a general sense. Not just scientific raw data, but information and interests as well. Then trying and figure out what the goals are that will make these people come together around the data and then figure out what the best mechanism for that might be. Don’t put the cart before the horse. In most such cases, you need a critical mass to make a community successful, to truly benefit from the wealth of networks. In science that’s often hard, so any misstep in step 1, will usually end up in a community that has little or no traction.

EcoliHub is a great example of a website in the wild that is supported almost entirely in an Open Source fashion. This is a nice way to create a very strong community focussed on a single, rich topic. On the wide open Internet, though, it may be harder for smaller communities to come into existence, simply because of how hard it might be for the individual members of the community to find one another.

But there are other processes allowing other communities to come together with smaller goals and more focussed needs. The decoupling of time and space seen with Web 2.0 approaches, frees these groups from having to wait until the participants can occupy the same space at the same time. These group can examine a large amount of data rapidly and move on. There is not the need to assure the community that it will be around for a long time.

This is the sort of community that may be more likely to come into existence inside an organization. There are other pressures that drive the creation of these types of groups than simply a desire to talk with people of similar interests about some data.

A grant deadline for example.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

Clash of mediums

by kla4067

My mom sent me this article from the Houston Chronicle and it took me off on a fun journey through a mash-up of old media and new media. First my rant.

This article actually ticked me off, not for the content but for the way it was presented. So many newspapers just shovel their print versions onto the internet without seeing it is a new medium with its own needs and logic. Online is a conversation while print is a monolog (although LTEs simulate a dialog, just not a very effective one.)

Why is there not a single link to any of these videos? Why is there not a single link in the article to anything? It is as if a TV program consisted of simply filming a radio broadcast, microphones , sound effects man and all.

If I am going to read something online, make the content fit the medium and put in links.

So I went and googled the author. Turns out the original LA Times article does actually have the links, even to the video referenced in the article, indicating it gets the medium. But then I looked closer and found out that the reason it has links is because it’s a blog.

Yep, the Houston Chronicle published an article from a blog from the LA Times. But it was presented as if it was just a regular newspaper article, not something written for a different medium (Think a TV show that just showed us the pages from the screenplay, not the movie itself.).

No wonder the article read so different than normal. I originally thought the guy was condescending because he was someone who did not get it. No, it is from a blog where he can be condescending because It’s a blog. And a fun one to read.

Turns out that this LA TImes writer, David Sarno, whose beat is ‘ Internet culture and online entertainment,’ produces articles with lots of personality and snark. That is what is often expected with an online blog. Because there can be lots of comments to add balance. He writes with a personal viewpoint but one that invites a reaction, which can easily be seen in the comments provided.

This blog is a great example of the online medium, and how it often differs from print. It is a conversation between people, not an authority telling us what is happening.

He can be a little snarky, have his soapbox to write with a personal point of view, with opinions that may provoke. But he also provides a soapbox for anyone else who wants to add to the conversation. He is not afraid of the response from his readers and actually uses them to help write other posts.

In fact, this article is only the latest is a series of Fred posts, all adding to the conversation. The first initially brings up Fred and talks about how the author does not understand his popularity. Couple of commenters add context.

The next is a few days later, where the author tried to base the popularity not on creativity but on marketing from a company. This idea was shot down by commenters. Thus the latest article, which now adds much more depth and backstory. It really enhances the conversation, even though there are several items of controversy that the commenters bring up..

It is obvious from these conversations that the author does not get the humor nor understand it. That is a personal issue for any type of humor. But several of his commenters do get the humor and their context is available to all. Thus a conversation which we will continue as we discover just how commercial or how creative Lucas is going to be now that he has begun to find success in Hollywood. This is how online conversations work and why the medium is different than print.

Obviously the Houston Chronicle does not get this. It is like it quoted just part of a conversation from a dinner party, totally out of context. No wonder it sounded kind of off.

I wonder if the Houston Chronicle realized this or if it even cares? Just another indication that it does not really understand the online medium?

So, I went to watch the videos. I found them pretty funny.

You know, I wrote a long rant about how wrong the author of the piece was, but I deleted that and will simply put quote a commenter to the blog:

I agree with commenter Misty who said Fred doesn’t have to appeal only to kids. In my case (60 years old), I think his show is the best thing on YouTube and I can’t get enough of him. I think if one has performed on stage or in film (as I have), or have directed (as I have), you can’t help but notice and appreciate what kind of a talent Lucas Cruikshank is…and his “numbers” or “stats” definitely demonstrate that, too. You can’t sneeze at viewer numbers in the several millions. If people (adults) stand by with shrugged shoulders and “just don’t get it,” that’s their problem. Just because you get older doesn’t mean you suddenly forget human issues such as insecurity about your body (you should see mine for God’s sake) or wish someone hot would return your affections or you want to have a better relationship with your father, and so on…all issues Fred has touched on, plus many more. Also, there is an immensely sweet human being inside there, with touching hopes and dreams coupled with ruthless disappointments, and yet always there is that infectious optimism and willingness to keep on trying (which I HOPE isn’t limited to youth). I’m sorry, I don’t want to ruin Fred by dissecting him, but only the insensitive would think he is nothing but a speeded up chipmunk voice and something only computer literate kids would understand. And what makes you think adults aren’t computer literate? I’ve been on-line since before the Internet was even fully created and had one of the very first desktop computers ever made. Computers have been part of my life ever since the punch-card and reel-to-reel batch processing days…and how hard is it to keep up, really? It’s hard only for a mind that stagnates, but I think that Fred has a remedy for what ails ya.

While it may not be everyone’s cup of tea (neither is George Carlin but he could be incredibly funny), I found it pretty amusing and creative (laughed out loud a couple of times). “My mom says that if you are mad at someone, just sue them” said with all the obvious sincerity of a 6 year old who is left with way too much time on their hands by a single Mom who is out partying too much. Fred is the only person you ever see in his world and after watching a few of the videos, the humor obviously covers some real pathos in the character.

Lucas is actually a pretty expressive actor, one of those people who can twist his face into the emotion he is trying to display. He really ’sells’ the character in ways that are very real and affecting.

When Gilda Radner did the same thing on SNL, it was viewed as a classic. Is this humor that can only be enjoyed by young people? Gilda did not think so and neither do I.

Or is it only unfunny when a 14 year old does it. Heck, several of Lucas’ sketches are better than anything SNL has done for years and he is only 14!!! A 14 year old that is watched by more people than watch most TV shows. A 14 year old from Nebraska who gets the attention of Hollywood. How does that happen and how does that change things?

Spielberg at this age was making home movies in his backyard. You can bet that if youtube was available, they would have been up there. Would this blogger have liked them? Perhaps not but that is not important here.

He allows a platform for those that agree or disagree with him to have a voice. That is how he is a different sort of journalist. This is how the medium is different than the newspaper. It is why I have added his blog to my newsfeeds. He is a journalist who not only is an interesting writer but he gets the new medium.

It fosters conversations, that provide context that lead to richer information transfer.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

Freeing journal articles

by fdecomite
Freeing My Father’s Scientific Publications Update:
[Via The Tree of Life]

Well, I have made some progress already in my quest I began on Father’s Day to free up the scientific publications of my father (see The Tree of Life: Freeing My Father’s Scientific Publications).

I wrote to the powers that be at the journal “Endocrinology” asking about when back issues might be made available. And I got a VERY quick reply from someone from Highwire Press which is the place that puts out Endocrinology on the web

Dear Jonathan Eisen,

The Endocrine Society is currently in the process of loading back issues for all of their journals. It will most likely be six months before back content is online.

The person who wrote back was almost apologetic about how long this might take but I am personally very pleased. Given that Endocrinology says the make all articles more than a year old available for free, this likely means that my father’s three papers in Endocrinology will soon be available for free online. This then changes my tally to:

Pubmed Central: 3
Free access: 17
Fee access: 11
Unavailable: 4

Getting better. Of course, I want them all to be as widely available as possible so I am still going to work to move everything up the list towards Pubmed Central. Also, my brother suggests (in the comments to my previous post) that since my father was a government employee we should be able to just post his papers online. I think this is a good option but I still will be working on the “official” channels to see what happens.

Since I made the original posting there have been some useful comments about what I might do on some other sites. See for example, this FriendFeed discussion (I have just discovered FriendFeed and it seems quite cool but I am not sure if everyone can see this discussion or not so please let me know if this link does not work).

I will keep posting on my progress as well as what I learn about Copyright, Free Access, etc.

This is an interesting story. When he first started, 11 of the papers were unavailable. Now if he can just work on the 11 that require fees to access. This is where it gets so weird since many articles that are over 10 years, or, in this case, 20 years, have access fees as high as one published last week. I know few scientists who would pay $31.50 for access to a 20 year old paper.

This will change and journals that recognize this will make changes. Are any of them going to go after someone putting up a PDF of a paper written 20 years ago?

I made what I know recognize is a mistake and published some of my early papers in an Elsevier journal. Now 18 years later, I would have to pay $31.50 to access the paper.

I think I’m going to scan them in and make my own PDF.

Technorati Tags: Open Access, Science, Social media, Web 2.0

More millennials

by chelseagirl
Millennial Backlash:
[Via Clippings]

Larry Dignan has a classic rant on how Millennials will run into a wall when they go to work and confront Six Sigma and enterprise IT.  Funny, and its a good sanity check, but nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, we live in a complex world my friends, and this demographic shift shouldn’t be underestimated.

First, this is the largest demographic shift in history.  Size matters.  When you have the NetGens, the biggest generation, entering the workforce when the Baby Boomers, the second biggest, are leaving (in some industries 1/3 of the workforce in 3 years) — it creates conditions for change.

Second, the pace of technological change is quickening.  Larry suggests that they will come to work and find out that it makes sense to centralize IT.  Trendlines and clouds suggest otherwise.  I also believe this effects management structures and practices.

Third, there is that social thing.  According to an Essex study on the Generation Gap, NetGens count 70 social connections on average, compared to those over 50 and working who count just 20 contacts.  This is a significant difference, not necessarily in how connected they are, but their views on what constitutes a connection.

Fourth, you can stereotype by generation.  Its a large group of people that have shared experiences and temporal context compounded by the influence of technology.  I don’t know, Larry, is this some masked ploy to undermine evolution to teach religion in schools? ;-P

Kidding, but what I think Larry is really saying is he has meme exhaustion.

It will be interesting to see who affects whom the most. While I don’t expect capitalism to disappear, it will adapt to the use of these technologies. Because many successful organizations will have to be nimble, learning to use innovative approaches to solve complex problems. Social networks have always permitted this.

The social networks of the Millennials will have impacts. But the way they change the world will probably not be just the way we think.

Technorati Tags: General

A grain of salt

by Alicia Nijdam
Open salaries:
[Via Gurteen Knowledge-Log]
By David Gurteen

Now here is simple yet powerful sharing concept - a website Glassdoor.com that allows you to share your salary details with others! Here is how they describe themselves:

“Glassdoor.com is a career and workplace community where anyone can find and anonymously share real-time reviews, ratings and salary details about specific jobs for specific employers — all for free.

What sets us apart is that all our information comes from the people who know these companies best — employees.”

Credit:: Glassdoor.com

I have always admired the one or two organizations that I have read about who have been prepared to be open about their salaries but this is another way of getting close to achieving the same end.

It reminds me that some years ago I came into the office early and on going to the print room found the whole of the organization’s salary details sitting in the print hopper. Of course I rescued them and delivered them safely to the MD who had printed them out late the night before and then forgotten about them. Of course, not before I had thoroughly digested them and realized the downright lies that were being told by senior managers about how salaries were managed but of course I couldn’t act upon it.

Alexander Kjerulf, in this article has some interesting thoughts on the subject and on openness in general:

“I believe on a very fundamental level that openness is better than secrecy, in life and in business. I’m not naïve enough to share all information all the time, but my chosen approach is “Let’s make everything open by default and only make those things secret that absolutely need to be”. Would I share my list of prospective clients with my competitors? Nah. Would I share it inside the company? Heck, yeah!”

Credit:: Alexander Kjerulf

This is where I say as an old fart:”How in the world can anyone actually do this?” I wonder if in the old days Roman soldiers had this problem (i.e. everyone knowing what they got paid by seeing how much salt they had). I just get a little flusterpated about this.

Now I have to go and tell those kids to get off my lawn.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Web 2.0

Web 2.0 behavior

by helmet13
[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]

Action and Reaction:
[Via A Journey In Social Media]

Conversations are basically what Web 2.0 is all about. It uses new tools but they only accentuate what humans already do naturally - interact and exchange information with a large social network. Many of the same social skills we use in person can be adapted to online use.

Here is a nice discussion of just that at Chuck’s blog as he discusses some of the problems they have seen following a Web 2.0 rollout at his company.

We Want People To Have Conversations

And they are.

Lots of conversations, really. Mostly about work stuff. But not always.

A while back, there was a notable surge in “off topic” discussions — favorite movies, raising rabbits, anime, commute times, etc.

In a pure Web 2.0 idealized world, it’s all good, right?

Well, we’re not exactly in this progressive 2.0 world quite yet. And we have to be mindful of the transition.

There Is A Valid Business Need For Off-Topic Discussions

More and more of our teams are geographically and culturally dispersed. We want people to align and bond around common interests — whatever they might be.

Just like we spend boatloads of money to fly people around for group meetings — and subsequent “team building” events — this sort of idle chatter has a role in “enterprise 2.0″, and we don’t want to be shutting things down.

But, we also want broad adoption in our 1.0 employee base. And if certain 2.0 behaviors hamper that, well — that’s an issue, isn’t it?

So, how to deal with the innovation of a new world to play in as it bumps up against real world situations? First, identify the problems. Here are three.

Problem #1 — Clutter

With our current 1.x Clearspace implementation, we have a “home page” that dutifully records each and every thought someone shares (except blog comments for some reason). That off-topic clutter at a corporate level is downright annoying to many people.

Sure, the user can take action: set up filters, personalize, etc. There’s some of that in Clearspace 1.x, more in 2.x, and then there’s RSS feeds, etc. But all of these are highly dependent on users taking control of their content stream.

And that’s a new 2.0-ish skill that not too many people at our company have. Sure, we could tell them “here’s what you have to do to control the problem”, but we’re trying to drive broader engagement and adoption of the platform, and we’ve had more than a few people new to the environment simply say “I can’t handle this social content stream in addition to my email deluge”.

It’s one thing when they’re exposed to the business-related deluge. It’s another thing entirely when it looks like 40-50% of the stream appears to be purely social in nature.

Doesn’t make it look like a business platform, which is how it was sold to the company.

Problem #2 — Naysayers

In physics, every force results in an opposite force. And in driving corporate change, the same generally holds true. I’m not being negative, just practical.

And, not surprisingly, there are those that look at our internal social media platform with a cold, cynical eye. They don’t understand, they may be threatened, they’re not comfortable, or maybe they’re generally concerned.

Collectively, they have “voice”.

And now they have a bit more evidence for their case.

Problem #3 — The Proficient

We now have upwards of 1,000 people who are truly comfortable and really enjoy the deep end of the pool. They love being exposed to everything. They’re very comfortable controlling the content stream.

And they inherently resist any thought of control, policy, etc. — it just doesn’t work for them. And they’re quite vocal that the rest of the world has to adapt to this 2.0 world, and they better get on with it, now!

And — they have a point. But I’m looking at outcome, and less to make a philisophical statement.

He thought they had a software fix - create a ‘water cooler’ area for the off topic material. But their software made this a problem.

So what he decided to do was use normal social approaches to modify online behavior.

What We’re Doing Short Term

A couple of things, really. First, I went to the more — ahem — prolific threads, and simply reminded people that everything they write is syndicated up to the corporate feed, and that their insightful comments were widely read by several thousand people.

And that while it’s OK to get off topic, please keep in mind that we’ve got a business platform, and you may want to think twice before an extended off-topic discussion for several reasons, e.g. is this what you do all day at work?

The second thing we’re doing is engaging the community. I wrote a blog post outlining the problem and the tradeoffs, and simply asked “what do you all think we should do?”.

People appreciated that we engaged them rather than arbitrarily doing something — good 2.0 behavior. And, somewhere in the dozens of comments, the discussion became pretty clear: we should take no action to limit discussions on the platform, but we should work towards having a “default” home page for newbies that’s a little less intimidating.

He did this with social tools we already possess. For example, he quietly and respectfully told someone, in a non-judgemental way, that their behavior was not really appropriate and to please stop. Then, like a village elder, he directly asked the community what to do. The company can not hire enough annies, tutors, mentors and police to deal with everyone. The community has to use its own members to fill these roles.

It appears that Chuck’s community is doing just that, which indicates to me that it is a rich, well-developed community and that Chuck is far along on the path to success. Because he knows to do this:

So, What Do You Think?

Now that we have a clear “digital divide” in our company with regards to our social productivity platform, what’s the ideal compromise position? Or should there be compromise at all?

And — any proposed solution can’t involve a bunch of custom software, nor can it involve hiring and dedicating people to the task. Nor can it involve having tens of thousands of employees learning to control their content stream as a prerequisite for success.

An interesting challenge, to be sure ….

He checks with the larger outside community, because he also acts as a connector between communities. He engages the groups for answers so that if there are other ideas, he can quickly implement them for his community. This is how creativity and innovation can be so rapidly created with Web 2.0 approaches.

Innovation diffusion rates in a community can be greatly affected by these approaches.

Because the potential number of other communities he can engage is huge. if there is any solution out there, he does not need it to diffuse to him by Web 1.0 or even World 1.0 approaches, which could take years. Web 2.0 greatly decreases the friction of information transfer from other approaches.

The faster a community can deal with change, the more it can deal with innovation, the better decisions it can make because it has access to more information and creativity, the sooner it will gain wisdom.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Web 2.0

The laws are not ours

by losiek
Testifying for the public domain:
[Via Amy Sample Ward’s Version of NPTech]

Tomorrow I will be headed down to Salem with many others to testify in front of the Legislative Council Committee. A friend working hard on this issue, Pete Forsyth, has a great explanation on the current situation:

The topic: whether or not the laws that we, the people of Oregon write are in the public domain, or whether the State can prevent their republication by insisting on licensing arrangements.

You can read the rest of his post here.

This all came about a few months ago when a website that publishes state laws free of charge (not even any advertising) in a standard format was issued a take down notice from the LCC, citing a law that gives them authority to decide ownership of various works of the state government, and local governments within the state, including the Revised Statutes. A California-based nonprofit (Public Resource) is leading the advocacy counter and will be at the hearing tomorrow.

You can read the paper trail or declaratory statements on Public Resource’s site
You can read my written testimony

If you are an Oregonian and want to weigh in, feel free to contact members of the Committee with your thoughts, or leave comments here for me to relay tomorrow.

Thanks!

Yes, in many cases the actually legal language many of our laws are in, the laws passed by our employees, has been given to a private organization who makes us pay to read our own laws!

This does not make any real sense today when this information can so easily be put online. It reminds me of the delegation of copyright forced onto most scientific authors. Why are we allowing our government to do the same sort of delegation, making it very expensive for the citizens whose lives the laws affect to access the laws.

Technorati Tags: Open Access

Confusing will not work

by ul_Marga
[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]

A million minds getting together can be confusing but might end up being really cool:
[Via The Tree of Life]

There is a possibly interesting paper in Genome Biology by Barend Mons et al: Calling on a million minds for community annotation in WikiProteins. I say possibly because the paper itself is quite confusing to me but the overall goal seems to be a cool concept. This group has created and is encouraging the use of “WikiProteins” a community annotation system for “community knowledge.” Sounds a bit fuzzy? Well, reading the paper does not completely help. For example here is the abstract

WikiProteins enables community annotation in a Wiki-based system. Extracts of major data sources have been fused into an editable environment that links out to the original sources. Data from community edits create automatic copies of the original data. Semantic technology captures concepts co-occurring in one sentence and thus potential factual statements. In addition, indirect associations between concepts have been calculated. We call on a ‘million minds’ to annotate a ‘million concepts’ and to collect facts from the literature with the reward of collaborative knowledge discovery. The system is available for beta testing at http://www.wikiprofessional.org webcite.

[More]

This is an interesting attempt but the community they are asking for is not in existence yet. The goal is extremely worthwhile, since the best way to create knowledge from the huge mountain of data being created is to incorporate large social networks. But the community must be created first.

However, at the moment in the science community there is a large activation energy (yes, human social interactions also require energy to be expended in creating the network before the information flow can become self-sustaining). First, there needs to be demonstrable proof that putting time into community annotation will be productive and rewarding. There is no proof of this yet.

Second, most scientists are creatures of habit; they have developed a workflow that is successful. In order to get them to change, it had better be easy. Again, time is important, especially in the early phases of community building.

I spent some time at the site trying to get an idea of what was involved. I still did not really figure it out. I do not believe many working scientists will either.

However, this is an important site and one that should be watched. Simply because the initial site is not there yet does not mean it will not quickly get a lot closer to perfection. It is a beta. It is easy to incorporate feedback and move rapidly to something more usable. Lowering the barrier to entry would help a lot.

These sorts of tools are too useful for them to remain unused. A million minds will someday be involved in this work. But it will not happen until a strong community is created.

Online communities will be how we solve the difficult problems facing us. The sooner they are functional, the sooner we can begin finding solutions.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Science, Web 2.0

Obsolete?

by extranoise

Slashdot | Are Academic Journals Obsolete?:
[Via Slashdot]

Writing “Surely there is a better way,” eggy78 asks:
“With the ability to get information anywhere in the world in seconds, and the virtually immediate obsolescence of any printed work, why are journals such an important part of academic research? Many of these journals take two or more years to print an article after it has been submitted, and the information is very difficult (or expensive) to obtain. Does this hinder technological advancement? There are certainly other venues for peer review, so why journals? What do they offer our society? Are they just a way to evaluate the productivity of professors?”

Lots of very interesting discussion here, including how plagiarism is easier to detect with online publishing. I guess we will all work this out sometime soon.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0

Irony abounds

by cowlet
Case study of the IR at Robert Gordon U:
[Via Open Access News]

Ian M. Johnson and Susan M. Copeland, OpenAIR: The Development of the Institutional Repository at the Robert Gordon University, Library Hi Tech News, 25, 4 (2008 ) pp. 1-4. Only this abstract is free online, at least so far:

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of OpenAIR, the institutional repository at the Robert Gordon University.

Design/methodology/approach - The paper outlines the principles that underpinned the development of the repository (visibility, sustainability, quality, and findability) and some of the technical and financial implications that were considered.

Findings - OpenAIR@RGU evolved from a desire to make available an electronic collection of PhD theses, but was developed to become a means of storing and providing access to a range of research output produced by staff and research students: book chapters, journal articles, reports, conference publications, theses, artworks, and datasets.

Originality/value -The paper describes the repository’s contribution to collection development.

And it only costs £13.00. So an article describing an open archive is not itself open. What a shame because open archives will be the way to go. Learning how an organization put one together, especially one that contains more than just journal articles, would be useful.

But it did lead me to this which describes two organizations that will serve as open archives for any paper for which the authors has retained copyright. What it also makes clear is that most researchers still maintain the rights for any preprint versions of the work.

That is, the only copyright that is usually transferred is the one that was peer-reviewed and approved, Any previous version can be archived, At least for most journals. If the work was Federally funded, most journals permit archiving the approved version after a limited embargo time, such as 6 months.

There is a database that details the publication policies of many journals. Ironically, there is no copyright information for Library Hi Tech news, the publication containing the OpenAIR article.

Let’s look at some others.

For instance, Nature Medicine permits archiving of the pre-print at any time and the final copy after 6 months. They require linking to the published version and their PDF can not be used. So just make your own.

On the other hand, Biochemistry restricts the posting of either the pre- or post-print print versions. A 12 month embargo is imposed only for Federally funded research. Others apparently can never open archive. The only thing that can be published at the author’s website is the title, the abstract and figures.

Let’s see one journal allows reasonable use of the author’s copyright to permit open archiving and the other only permits what is Federally mandated. I’m going to investigate this database further because my choice for journals to publish in will depend on such things as being able to use open archiving.

If my work is behind a wall, it will be useless in a Web 2.0 world. Few will know about it and others will bypass it. Just as the work on OpenAIR is not as useful as it should be.

More irony. Susan Copeland, one of the OpenAIR authors, has done a lot of work on online storage and access to PhD theses. She is the project manager for Electronic Theses at Robert Gordon University and received funding from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), as part of the Focus on Access to Institutional Resources Program(FAIR). She just received the 2008 EDT Leadership award for her work on electronic theses.

She has done a lot of really fine work making it easier to find the actual work of PhD students, something of real importance to the furtherance of science. Yet her article detailing some of her own work is not openly available to researchers.

And finally, ironically, the organization that funded some of her work, JISC, also funds SHERPA, the same database that I used to examine the publication issues of many journals.

In a well connected world, irony is everywhere.

Technorati Tags: Science, Web 2.0

A parade for a leader

by Bob Jagendorf
Blow up the Beltway:
[Via Scripting News]

In US politics they talk about Inside The Beltway the same way the tech industry talks about Silicon Valley.

Now, people may question whether Barack Obama really wants to connect with the power of the whole nation, or if once he gets elected he’ll be an Inside The Beltway guy. I don’t know if he will or he won’t. I’m old enough to know that it’s an important question, because I’ve seen bright young idealistic people get taken over by the systems they proposed to dismantle. But I also believe that it’s the nature of the times to decentralize, so if Obama has the guts, and there’s every reason to believe he does, it should actually work, imho.

Frank Rich, in his column in today’s NY Times, explains that, on Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton and John McCain gave the same speech. Clinton’s was better rehearsed, it’s the same one she’s been giving for months, the “fairy tale” speech that Bill Clinton gave in New Hampshire. The “angels will sing” speech she gave in Ohio and the “shame on you Barack Obama” speech in Pennsylvania. Someone taught McCain how to laugh, but it’s falling apart like a Botox injection, turning into something else, something nasty. Both of them were echoing the same sentiment as the president from the previous century when he ached out loud — “Give me a break.”

Dave Winer has been discussing his world view since before blogs existed. It is very possible that one of the major Web 2.0 tools, RSS, would not enjoy its stature without him. Always fun to listen too, even if he can be exasperating, I think he comes close to getting Obama, not someone who is perfect but someone who is closer to getting it. If he walks from the path, it will not stop the changes.

As John Naisbitt said “Leadership involves finding a parade and getting in front.” Obama has done that. More from Winer:

But back to my point. As much as I believe in the idea of Obama, if he doesn’t live up to it, I’ll still believe in the idea, because I always have. I don’t want to be an insider, I don’t want the insiders to rule, I don’t want there to be insiders at all. I want to distribute opportunity and acknowledge intelligence and goodness where ever it appears. I fought against the centralized Inside The Beltway way of doing things in Silicon Valley, and we won. Of course a new aristocracy pops up but their power is as thin as the people whose power got popped in every bubble that came before.

The Internet destabilizes every hierarchy it contacts. It erases every barrier to entry. The only way to win is to point off-site, in every way you can think of. Win by offering better value, not by locking users in. People will become instant refugees to escape your clutches. Think you’re immune? Think again.

Update: Papa Doc approves.
Update: Cross-posted at Huffington.

Update: Micah Sifry and Patrick Ruffini agree Obama’s use of the Internet deserves more attention.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Social media, Web 2.0

Helping people change

[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]

In Pursuit Of Process Change:
[Via A Journey In Social Media]

I was discussing with one of our execs the progress we’d been making on social media proficiency internally.

And he asked a great question that made me think:

“So, has anyone fundamentally changed their work processes because of the platform?”

And I realized this is the next frontier on what’s turning out to be a large-scale social engineering project.

Getting Business Value Out Of Our Social Software

As we make progress in this journey, I’ve got my eye out for different catagories of business value we’re seeing.  I suppose, at the same time, I should also be keeping my eye out for business value we’re NOT seeing yet.

And, as I’ve mentioned before, we’re seeing business value — in many forms — across the board:

People with specific interests are finding other people with similar interests
Rather than searching big content repositories, people are asking other people for help and answers
A pan-organizational “social fabric” has been created that wasn’t really there before
Folks who spend time on the platform are better educated — and more engaged — in EMC’ business

And more And, just to be clear, there’s no shortage of business benefits — I still stand behind the broad assertion that this has been one of the most ROI-positive IT projects I’ve seen in my career.

Interesting “value nugget” of the week: 

EMC runs a healthy program to bring a large number of interns and co-op students into the company.  They started introducing themselves to each other on the platform.

What started with “name, rank, serial number” blossomed into a wonderfully diverse set of conversations about careers, favorite hangouts, what it means to work at EMC, what is everybody doing, and so on.

I would argue that — whatever millions that EMC spends on this intern/coop program — we’ve now made it 10-20% more valuable, simply because we connected people to each other, and connected them all to the broader company. 

At zero incremental cost.

But we want more. Much more.
[More]

Right up front EMC can demonstrate easily how new technologies save money and create new opportunities. The problem comes from actually getting people to use the technologies.

Many companies are process-driven. If the process is working, why change? Of course, buggy whip manufacturers probably had a great process also. But if they did not change, they disappeared.

What is driving the world more and more is the rate at which innovations diffuse through an organization. This is a fascinating subject because there are also some hard data behind it, some of it generated over 70 years ago.

Using the rate of adoption of hybrid corn by farmers in the early 1930s, Ryan and Gross were to derive some very important insights. These two researchers interviewed 345 farmers in Iowa about their use of hybrid corn, when the farmers first heard about it and when they started using it.

Here is a figure from their classic paper ‘The Diffusion of Hybrid Seed Corn in Two Iowa Communities’. Even though the hybrid corn had many important advantages it took almost 13 years for this innovation to diffuse throughout the entire community. The actual adoption curve (from their 1943 paper) is compared with a normal distribution curve (in black).

If the data are plotted as the cumulative adoption of the innovation, it looked like this:

Both of these types of curves have been seen again and again when the diffusion of innovation is examined. They seem to be derived from basic forces present in human social networks.

Ryan and Gross made several key contributions besides the identification of the S-shaped curve. One was the process by which the innovation diffused. The other was the type of farmer who used the innovation.

They found that there were five stages in the adoption of an innovation by an individual: awareness, interest, evaluation, trial, and adoption. And there were at least 4 different types of farmers, of which the early adopters were the most important.

Early adopters heard about the corn from traveling salesmen and tried small plots to see how well it worked. Later adopters relied on the personal experience of other farmers, usually the early adopters. When there were enough positive reactions from the early adopters, when there were more stories of personal experience, the adoption rate took off.

It was the human social network that was critical for the rate at which the innovation was adopted. The more social connections an early adopter had, the more cosmopolitan they were, the more likely it would be that others would adopt use of the innovation.

Everett Rogers was instrumental in codifying many of the principles of innovation diffusion. Here is his famous rendition of the distribution:

Only 16% of a population is usually made up of the early adopters, the ones that are critical for spreading the innovation to the early majority. The key to the adoption of any innovation is the rate at which early adopters can transmit the knowledge of the benefits to the early majority. In the case of the farmers, it would often take 4 or more years for this to be converted form awareness to adoption.

In many areas of our world today, this is much too slow. Technology is disruptive, meaning that the people who adopt this technology actually deal with the world in entirely different ways than those who do not. It is similar to a paradigm shift, in that those on either side of the shift have a hard time communicating with each other. It is almost as if they inhabit separate worlds.

This can cause some problems because the early adopters are required to communicate with the early majority if an innovation is to diffuse throughout an organization. If they can not, it creates a chasm, which has been described by Geoffrey Moore in his book.

The organization has to take strong action to recognize that this chasm is present and to span it, either with training or, more effectively, with people who have been specially designated as chasm spanners. In many cases using Web 2.0 technologies, they are called online community managers.

Disruptive innovations seem to arrive almost yearly. Without a directed and defined process to increase the rate of diffusion in an organization, if just standard channels of communication are used, innovation will diffuse at too slow a rate for many organizations to remain competitive.

Because there is usually not just one innovation disrupting an organization at a time. Life is not that clean. There can be multiple innovations coursing through different departments, moving early adopters even further away from the rest of the group and expanding the chasm. This only makes communication harder.

So, a key aspect of being able to increase the rate of diffusion is to create a process where early adopters are identified and strong communication channels are created to permit them to pass information to the early majority.

It can no longer be possible to simply let the early adopters go through their 5 stages of adoption and then tell others about it at the water cooler. Designated online community managers, with the training needed to enhance communication channels, will be critical in getting this information dispersed throughout an organization.

Organizations need to take pro-active approaches to span the chasm. Otherwise they will lose out to the organizations that do take such approaches.

Identifying and nurturing the 16% of the organization that are early adopters will be critical for this process. Having community managers who are well embedded in the social structure of the organizations will also be needed to help increase the rates of innovation diffusion.

Powerpoint Karaoke as a Web 2.0 tool

by Clav
SlideShare Blog » Blog Archive » Run your own PowerPoint Karaoke with the open source SlideShare Karaoke randomizer!:
[Via Slideshare Blog]

So you have heard of Karaoke - when you sing along to the soundtrack of pop songs. The idea behind PowerPoint Karaoke is similar. Presenters present, but to other people’s slides. But it’s a little harder than karaoke, because the slides are randomly chosen! Go here for a great writeup of how to run your own ppt karaoke.
[More]

So I used Google to find out more about Powerpoint Karaoke and found this nice link at Slideshare. This site allows people to upload slide decks so they, and others, can access them anytime. Very nice idea.

What they did here was use their API to create a randomizer that picks slide decks based on a topic and randomizes them. Thus it is now very easy to find and create slide decks for Powerpoint Karaoke.

There is also a nice link to a discussion of how to put one of these on. I so want to put together something like this. It will be fun but is also a nice exercise on being flexible and even human during a slide presentation. Plus I feel confidant that I can do a better job with this than making people listen to me sing off key.

So, by using a published API, a new use for Slideshare was created that not only enhances everyone else’s use of the site, but helps enlarge the social network on Slideshare. Nicely done.

Technorati Tags: Entertainment, Social media, Web 2.0

Go for the karaoke

BarCamp Seattle right around the corner:
[Via Blue Flavor]

Seattleites, if you’re looking for a fun and exciting web community event to attend, look no further than Blue Flavor’s own neighborhood of Fremont, right here in Seattle. June 14th and 15th, the first ever BarCamp Seattle will be taking place at Adobe’s Fremont building (801 N 34th St., Seattle, WA 98103). Attendees are welcome to attend one or both days of the event. There’s also a party planned for Saturday night.
[More]

I may just go to this because they are going to have Powerpoint Karaoke. Volunteers get up before the audience and give a Powerpoint presentation, without ever having seen the slide deck before. It is scientific improvisation that in the hands of someone with skill, can be very funny.

Here is just one example:

I know geek humor. Is it just for scientists and such or can anyone enjoy it? See how you feel about this classic humorous presentation. It is for anyone who nodded off in a talk, woke back up and tried to figure out what the heck they were talking about:

At least you can read the paper beforehand.

Technorati Tags: Entertainment, Technology, Web 2.0

Some science journals are messed up

by Beige Alert
Why snakes don’t have legs:
[Via 2collab public bookmarks]

Tags: Hox gene, Homeobox gene, Limb
Authors: Cunliffe, Vincent
Source: Trends in Genetics; 15, 8, Page 306; 1 August 1999
Sharing: Public

I’m providing a detailed examination of an online journey I took this morning that demonstrates how the Internet has altered the landscape for publishing of articles in scientific journals. Online access certainly changes how we search for and how we read articles. It is also changing where we chose to publish.

So I see this interesting name for an article - Why snakes don’t have legs - in my newsfeed. I click on thru (why it is on 2collab I do not know?) and get this page. Great. ScienceDirect which usually charges for journal access. But this is an article from 1999. Surely it will be open by now?

Nope. They want $31.50 for a nine year old article. With no abstract or any other way to determine whether this article is worth the price. $31.50! First off, few articles in science today that are nine years old are worth $5, much less $31.50. Secondly, with no abstract how am I to even figure out if it is worth the price?

This greatly limits access to the article and encourages other routes for getting the information than reading it. Why would a scientist want to publish an article that no one will read? We want as many people as possible to see our wonderful work. This is not like literature or art where older is better.

Seems to me that this is a losing business model. I can see paying a premium for up-to-date work. I understand someone has to get paid and can easily pay a reasonable price. But $31.50?! For an article that is almost a decade old!? That makes no sense in an online world.

Very few articles in biology that are ten years old retain much value. Just a few years ago, I would have been stuck but now I have other tools.

I went to PubMed, the database of journal articles, and did a search for “snakes AND legs”. Got 48 articles. The critical one appears to be by Cohn and Tickle “Developmental basis of limblessness and axial patterning in snakes” in Nature from June 1999. Great. Now I have a subscription to Nature so this article is available to me but if you wanted to read it without a subscription it would cost $35! Wow! But at least now it has an abstract.

The evolution of snakes involved major changes in vertebrate body plan organization, but the developmental basis of those changes is unknown. The python axial skeleton consists of hundreds of similar vertebrae, forelimbs are absent and hindlimbs are severely reduced. Combined limb loss and trunk elongation is found in many vertebrate taxa1, suggesting that these changes may be linked by a common developmental mechanism. Here we show that Hox gene expression domains are expanded along the body axis in python embryos, and that this can account for both the absence of forelimbs and the expansion of thoracic identity in the axial skeleton. Hindlimb buds are initiated, but apical-ridge and polarizing-region signalling pathways that are normally required for limb development are not activated. Leg bud outgrowth and signalling by Sonic hedgehog in pythons can be rescued by application of fibroblast growth factor or by recombination with chick apical ridge. The failure to activate these signalling pathways during normal python development may also stem from changes in Hox gene expression that occurred early in snake evolution.

Sounds really interesting to me but still not sure it is worth $35. But right above that link from PubMed is another one - from Current Biology with pictures. “How the snake lost its legs”. It is a ScienceDirect link also but this one is available for free. And it has nice pictures while discussing the Cohn and Tickle article.

So partial success. Now I have a better idea of the article’s content. All the other links from PubMed dealing with snakes and THEIR legs, as opposed to snakes and the legs they bite, have costs to access, up to $39.

Except for this nifty one from the Journal of Experimental Biology - “Becoming airborne without legs: the kinematics of take-off in a flying snake, Chrysopelea paradisi” (The picture above is of a flying snake.) Open access and more recently published. Not exactly on topic but it comes with movies! These were just not possible to see without online access. And the movies are really cool and help explain what the author of the paper was describing. You can actually see the difference between a J-loop takeoff and other modes. Plus, flying snakes sound like something from a B-movie.

Back to the topic. I went to Google and searched “Cohn Tickle snake”. The top response is from a USA Today article about why snakes do not have legs. In the article there are links to Martin J. Cohn and Cheryll Tickle. Clicking the Cohn link takes me to his page at the University of Florida. Not a lot here but there is a link to his personal site.

Now we get the Cohn lab page. I could just email him and ask for a copy of the paper (a slightly updated approach to the old method of sending reprint requests by snail mail). But there is a link to Publications.

And here we find the PDF to the paper I was looking for. A quick runthrough reveals that it is a paper I will find interesting (I love Hox stuff). But I would not have paid over $30 for it.

I certainly believe that downloading a paper from an open archive presented by the author of a paper is an ethical way to obtain the paper (It is just the online version of the reprint request, remember). So, it took me less than 10 minutes to find a copy of the article online. (And it turns out that if I had looked at my Google results just a little more, I would have found a direct link to the publications page, saving myself some time.)

I think that, except for the most highly paid of us, 10 minutes time would be less than $10. This seems about right. A paper for $5 I would buy immediately while much over $10 and I will go searching. I may not succeed but I can usually find an email link and request a copy from the author.

Online archives by the authors are becoming more common and are a basic aspect of many Open Access initiatives. Paying a small premium for access to a current article is a reasonable price, especially if it is convenient. But any business plan that wants to charge a huge premium for decade old work needs serious rethinking.

So, for a few minutes of my time I got the article for free and also got to see some nice movies of snakes flying. Not a bad way to travel in an online world.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Open Access, Science, Social media