Dave Winer has posted a "modest proposal" of a weblogging conference. I like the ideas he's put forth, though I'm less enthusiastic about the working title ("Weblogs in Meatspace").
Shelley Powers notes that the cost of attending such things is often a deal-breaker, especially for the less-heard voices (women, minorities, lower-income). Interestingly, that's exactly the sort of thing that NSF is most interested in these days...how to get underrepresented populations more involved in sci-tech activities.
So, I see some room for cooperation here. Perhaps a conference like Dave's describing could have partial funding from NSF. We could build either the conference itself, or participation in the conference (and "scholarships" for it focused on underrepresented groups) into the grant proposal.
I e-mailed Dave about it, and he's interested...what do y'all think?
More from Supernova, this time from David Weinberger, talking about Howard Rheingold:
Every time power decentralizes, there's an opportunity for innovation. How might the new decentralization give rise to new forms of collective action?
So, if blogging results in a decentralization of scholarly publishing, what innovation can result?
From the blog for Kevin Werbach's SUPERNOVA 2002 conference, a post entitled "Why Decentralization."
Decentralization is a big word. It's not one of those catchy buzzphrases the market research firms churn out, so its meaning may not be immediately obvious. But it's vitally important. I'm convinced decentralization is a crucial concept for the next wave of technology and business developments.
I think this is key to the blogging concept in scholarly publication and pedagogy, as well. Worth following the threads here (and going back and looking at some of what the speakers discussed at Yale Law School's "Revenge of the Blog" conference last month.
Here are some not-well-thought-out opinions. They are really a reply to Liz's post, but they are long enough that I am breaking convention and throwing them to the top level:
I still like the blogging center of excellence idea, but I also think it may be slightly premature. Such a (fundable) center, it seems to me, would be a natural spin-off of any sizable collaborative research venture.
I think the combination of your points would make for an interesting proposal. I'll restate these with my own spin (and a focus on your third point, I suppose):
1. Is there a clear way to measure the effects of blogging within a research field?
There is an inherent difficulty in establishing such metrics, as we are looking at a swiftly moving target. Nonetheless, we should be able to establish, in more than an anecdotal way, that blogging leads to significant progress within scientific fields of study.
I think we can borrow pretty heavily here from a tradition in measuring R&D capacity, especially at the national level, and extend these measures to the blogosphere.
2. What (formal or systemic) factors lead to the highest degree of (e.g.): (a) community formation, (b) production of new ideas, (c) whatever metrics we establish in #1>
That is, are some blogs better than others. Once we know what is good, we can start to talk about some--perhaps abstract--means to achieve better collaboration.
The literature on "communities of practice" would provide some basis for establishing a model here, though there is a lot of chaff to get through there (IMHO).
3. How can the diffusion of such technologies of collaboration be encouraged?
Liz, you've suggested Turkey dinners, but I don't know that this is a scalable solution :). The question is: once we know that these things are good, and how to make them better, how do we sell them to a scientific community. I'm thinking about this in terms of my graduate students and fellow faculty. How do I sell them on the idea that taking a few minutes (who am I kidding?) of their day out to read and write in blogs is a productive pursuit?
One of the ways I do this is by establishing empirically (in #1 and #2) that there are productivity gains--I prefer "creativity gains"--to be had by getting on the blog wagon.
Another, as you suggest, is to look for the reason folks pick up blogging (uses and gratifications) in law, journalism, etc., and how this might be translated into scientific endevors.
My guess is that we may be able to borrow something from the push on electronic portfolios in the education world, as well.
In any case, I think it would be beneficial to keep the idea of what concrete results we can produce at the forefront. Faculty that made visits last year also suggested ITR was open to social scientific work--more open than some other obvious contenders in NSF. But I think it's a very good idea to frame our research in a strongly empirical--and dare I say quantitative--way.
Here is one final suggestion. Perhaps not now, but at some point we might want to invite one of the program officers to check out the blog, and perhaps offer comments. The former, rather than the latter, seems more plausible. As Seb has already mentioned, this approach to public grantwriting is not only unusual, but something of a proof-of-concept in terms of our proposal itself: i.e., collaboration via blogs leads to significant research.
Met yesterday with some people from our grants and contracts office to talk about the ITR program and the angles this could take to fit that solicitation.
They told me that up 'til now, ITR has primary funded more "hard" research, as opposed to "soft," although the solicitation this year has a lot more "soft" language in it.
We'll also need to focus in on the research question(s) to be addressed.
As we talked, I started to see some directions emerge.
First, there's the issue of determining what professional fields blogs are currently being used in (we know, for example, that law, computer technology, and journalism are early adopters), and whether the technology will diffuse into other professional/academic fields. Finding a way to track and describe that would be one interesting area of research for a multi-year project--since I think we're close to the "tipping point" on this technology, it would be a great time to be taking a longitudinal look at the changes as they occur. Related to that is the cross-cultural component--blogging seems to be big in a couple of specific geographic areas--US, Scandinavia, Japan. The same areas that Rheingold looked at in Smart Mobs.
Second, what impact is blogging having on more traditional publications--not just the traditional news outlets (which is getting discussed already), but also scholarly publishing. Will there be "peer reviewed" blogs that carry credibility similar to peer reviewed journals? Can a "slashdot" style karmic moderation system play a role in scholarly publication? (Alex, seems like this is up your alley...)
Third, how can blogging provide new channels for academic collaboration--with what we're doing here being a meta-example of that. It seems clear that blogs provide researchers with the ability to quickly find others with similar ideas... through the automated tools (like waypath) that can do semantic analysis, through trackbacks and links, and through "matchmakers" (like Seb!).
Finally, how can blogging change pedagogy, particularly in science and technology education? There are people looking at this in the "edublogging" circles, but so far I haven't seen any research focused on this in higher ed, and specific STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) areas. Of particular interest here may be the fact that blogging gives teachers and researchers more of a "human voice," which could well have an impact on attracting women into STEM fields, an area of particular interest for NSF at this time. Research done to date on why women have been coming into computing in smaller numbers seems to point to their impressions of the field as being unwelcoming, impersonal, etc.
We also tossed around the idea of proposing things like an academic blogging research/resource center ("blogging center of excellence"?) where tool development, research, etc could be centralized and made available.
So...comments? Are people still interested in this?
Found via GrumpyGirl's blog:
PhDweblogs is a non-profit initiative to bring together PhD students’ weblogs from all around the world. If you are preparing a PhD, or have a blog about your research interests, you can register it here.
Okay, I know I started this and then dropped the ball. Our winter quarter starts today, so I've been involved in trying to get syllabi ready. But I've also been turning this research topic around in my head, and have made some progress.
Where I'd like to focus is on the ability of blogs (and other microcontent publishing, but especially) blogs) to enable connections among scholars in a way that traditional media have not. That's the "scholarly communication" piece. On that topic, take a look at this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education, in which a Princeton CS professor talks about blogs:
But he and other researchers who are challenging government efforts to regulate technology are expressing themselves more broadly through blogs, as Web logs are known. Besides Mr. Felten's there are also Zimran Ahmed's winterspeak.com, Maximillian Dornseif's dysLEXia, and Frank R. Field's FurdLog, to name a few.Mr. Felten says Freedom to Tinker allows him to refine his thinking about technology and law without going through the traditional academic-publishing process. "I get a surprising number of really good, thoughtful comments from people I've never heard of," he says. "I've access to these ideas ... which I never would have had otherwise."
Sometimes he uses the blog to float ideas for regulating technology -- and then he debates those who respond.
(Thanks to Hylton Joliffe's Corante on Blogging for the link.)
Of particular interest would be the ability of blogs to foster cross-cultural and international collaborations (like this one!), and looking at how acceptance/use/impact of the technology varied across cultures. If we could do three cultural environments--Norway, Japan, US--it woud strengthen any conclusions.
The second area I'm interested in exploring is looking at the effect of microcontent publishing on scholarly publishing models. How can these systems, with their associated "reputation systems," change the traditional publish-or-perish models in academia?
So, there's some stuff to start the brainstorming.