Online Scientific Collaboration: The Sequel

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Jon Udell's Internet Groupware for Scientific Collaboration taught me how to think about the web. He's now revisiting that report, and would like our help. Details are below; please give him a shout if you can help.

Jon Udell writes:

In 2000 I was commissioned to write a report called Internet Groupware for Scientific Collaboration. That was before modern social media, before blogs even really got going. But arxiv.org was already well-established, and wikis and calendar services and Dave Winer's proto-blog, Manila, and many kinds of discussion forums were relevant to my theme. On the standards front, RSS, MathML, and SVG were emerging. One of my premonitions, that lightweight and loosely-coupled web services would matter, turned out to be accurate. Another, the notion of a universal canvas for creating and editing words, pictures, data, and computation, remains part of the unevenly distributed future, though projects like IPython Notebook and Federated Wiki rekindle my hope that we'll get there.

Now I'm writing an update to that report. There's unfinished business to reconsider, but also much new activity. Scientific collaboration happens in social media and on blogs, obviously. It happens in scientific social media. It happens in and around open access journals. It happens on GitHub where you can find open software and open data projects in many scientific disciplines. It happens on Reddit, on StackExchange-based Q&A sites, on citizen science websites, and in other places I don't even know about.

I want to interview researchers engaged in various aspects of online scientific collaboration. I'm well connected to some of the tribes I need to reach, but need to cast a wider net. I want to hear, from practitioners in natural sciences, social sciences, and digital humanities, about ways you and your colleagues, in disciplines near and far, do, and/or don't, collaborate online, both in specific contexts (OA journals, academic social networks) and wider contexts (blogs, mainstream social media). How does your activity in those settings advance your work (or not)? How does it help connect your work to society at large.(or not)?

If you're somebody who ought to be involved in this project, please do get in touch via the email address on my home page. And if you know someone who ought to be involved, please pass this along.