Peter Ballantyne
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This member participated in the following Forums
Forum Forum: "Building the CIARD Framework for Data and Information Sharing" April, 2011
Question 4: What actions should now be facilitated by the CIARD Task Forces?
Following my earlier comment ... about stuff and stars, this comment suggest that CIARD focus on the choices people make and how to informa and support these:
Each day, we all make choices in how and where we share/publish/communicate what we do. The challenge is therefore to find ways to ensure that these choices are informed and biased towards maximum openness and accessibility.
Thus, as examples: We can choose open or closed/proprietary formats; We can choose simple web uploads or a CMS; we can choose an OAI-compliant repository or a traditional library system, or something home-made; we can choose a tool with or without RSS; we can adopt dublin core or make our own field structure; we can adopt standard vocabularies or make our own; we can build an open system, or a closed one, we can hold a closed meeting with no reporting or we can add virtual, multimedia social reporting; etc.
I recognize that our choices are usually limited by our situations, resources, knowledge, skills, connectivity etc. Often, even if we knew what choices are open to us, we think they are too big, too costly, too difficult, too time-consuming, beyond our skills, etc to be considered ... We choose something else, or to take no action.
Directions for CIARD?
I think:
1. We need to provide more information and support so people realise that there are different options and choices, that a different (more open) pathway is possible. This sounds a bit missionary I'm afraid; we need people to recognize that they have choices, in even the most difficult situations. [awareness]
2. In recognizing that we have choices, we also want an 'open' (or 'more open') outcome to be the 'no-brain' decision ...! But, lets recognize that jumping from 'closed' to 'open' is sometimes a massive leap, so we need to make sure that little steps are also possible, and are seen as good choices. [advocacy]
3. We need to support people to be able to make the 'right' choices - ie to make choices that result in more open and accessible systems, services, and stuff. I think this means bringing the possible tools and approaches and choices within (easy) reach.
This is important. I heard about some interesting ideas and tools on this discussion forum. How do I make the decision for ILRI to use these, instead of doing nothing, continuing as usual, or doing something else? Recalling that I and my team are already running full-speed doing what we have to do! The closer and easier any choices are, the more I am likely to make them.
This seems to be about making the decision as easy as possible - by making a new tool very easy to use and adopt, or widely applicable across platforms, for example; and/or by giving me the confidence, skills and resources to make the change. [mix of innovation to make 'easily-adoptable' choices as well as capacity reinforcement actions for adopters]
4. We should find a way to recognize and reward people who make the 'good' choices. Any decisions leading to 'more open' are better than staying closed. Here I go back to some original ideas in the CIARD founders that this be some kind of 'movement ' as well as an initiative ... something like the open access movement that energizes people to take action, promote action, and point to others who took action. [incentives]
In short, let CIARD:
1.Tell me about some feasible choices
2.Convince me that open choices are better
3.Make it as easy as possible for me to make (and implement) good choices [easy adoption; capacity reinforcement]
4.Reward me for making any choice that leads towards 'more open'
5.and perhaps also identify and devise and document new and emerging 'open' choices that I can consider taking.
Many thanks everyone for an interesting set of discussions. I was hardly able to keep up... and I look forward to the reports.
On Stuff, we should not distinguish too much between the 'stuff' and information about the stuff. Both are important and we need to work on both in parallel. In reality, some 'stuff' is easier to make open and accessible than others. I think we must ensure at least that everything an organization produces is described with proper metadata - so we know it exists. We also need the full ‘stuff’! We already have plenty of stuff online, unfortunately not properly described and accessible!
On the stars, I think we should be careful not to see this as a mountain to climb, a sequence of steps to follow, with 5 stars better than 1 star! Should we give 4 stars to an object with a URL, even if it is impermanent, hidden and not described properly?
Instead of seeing the stars as steps to climb, I think there is a multi-track 'continuum' or something of actions and choices we can take, with differing results. I think we should focus on the quality of these actions, or choices, ensuring they lead to the most open result in a given situation.
If we can find a way to rate and present our work as simply as the stars, this would be a good result.
Instead let's focus on choices and support for these ... (see next comment)
Question 1: What are we sharing and what needs to be shared?
Strongly agree Johannes ... Too many people blame scientists as not being open to share. In my experience they are very often leased to share, but only if it is not too much of a burden!
So how do we reduce the sharing burden?
I am Peter Ballantyne from ILRI (http://www.ilri.org), based in Addis Ababa.
Nice to see the range of ideas here, and several old and new names!
Seems we are really discussing 2 questions here: 'What are we sharing' and 'what needs to be shared?' - which surely need different answers...While Johannes is already taking us into a scenario (that I like) suggesting how information and data is accessed ...
What are 'we' sharing?
At ILRI, we look to share both explicit and tacit knowledge.
TACITLY:
We are looking for ways to support and encourage our researchers to document more from their various activities (earlier in the research cycle); especailly the processes and activities that seem to happen all time time, but which are not normally shared beyond a small group. We use a lot of social media for this and concentrate around events and related milestones.
As examples, here you see materials from an internal project planning and review meeting (http://vslp.org/2011/01/31/crop-residue-tradeoffs-in-crop-livestock-systems-project-lessons-and-gaps); here from an end of project meeting (http://fodder-adoption-project.wikispaces.com/Final+Workshop); here from an ongoing multi-orgabnization project (http://nilebdc.wordpress.com/comms-tools). We try to document and make visible outputs and stories and ideas (and decisions and choices)of projects long before they go the 'final dissemination' phases.
Recognizing that events and meetings take up a huge amount of the time we have, we also try to make the design and facilitation of these more interactive, participatory and dynamic - so encouraging more sharing (see here for a recent example with partners: http://agknowledgeafrica.wikispaces.com)
We also try to encourage colleagues to use Yammer as a platform to share what they are working on, questions, challenges, etc (see very related post by Ian Thorpe about yammer at http://bit.ly/eVK4WC)
Much of this is to try and make tacit knowledge explicit ...
EXPLICITLY:
We share about the work we do; we share the outputs of the work we do
We try to capture/publish and collect and index as many outputs of ILRI work, in any format: report, video, poster, powerpoint, photo, article, book, datafile, etc. We do not just want the end of project books and articles.
We give as many as possible open creative commons licenses
We index as many as possible in our dspace repository - linking to third party sites if needed (http://mahider.ilri.org)
We publish some formats (ppt, video, photo, news, etc) on specialised social media sites (slideshare, blip.tv, flickr, wordpress, etc).
We tag all the outputs so we can aggretate and re-publish them across different sites
We use dublin core and agrovoc in ther repository
We try and list all our various web services with CIARD RING, Agrifeeds, etc
We promote various outputs across various specialised and social media sites, like Twitter
We publish all our books and reports through Google Books
We STRUGGLE to do the same for our datafiles and datasets
We try to make explict knowledge 'share-able', to increase the chances for it to travel and be re-used.
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Does all of this NEED to be shared? Not sure ... we want at least to capture and identify all that we produce, so it 'can' be shared. It needs to be at least available and accessible for others (otherwise there is little scope for sharing)...
We try and store and index and publish and lixcense everything so there are as few barriers as possible for anyone who wants to get access to what we have produced.
cheers
Peter