This file hosts information related to my participation in the JROST 2020 conference taking place online on 14-16 December 2020. My proposal below for a lightning talk was submitted on November 2 and accepted on November 20. It is now scheduled for Tuesday, December 15th at 12:00pm EST (17:00 UTC).
The slides and a copy of the video are available on Zenodo via https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4321982 . The video is also up on YouTube.
The call is for three types of contributions:
- lightning talks
- breakout sessions
- panel sessions
The relative time afforded to the different session types has already been sketched out in the preliminary agenda.
In the following, I will provide the key questions from the submission form, as well as my responses. The form is designed such that it allows a maximum of one per session type.
There will be two sessions of lightning talks (5 minutes each). These talks are great ways to share out your work, problems you’re wrestling with, and other ideas for collaboration.
(15 words)
- The Wikimedia ecosystem as a key component of an open science landscape
(250 words)
As Wikipedia is approaching its 20th anniversary, this talk will provide a brief overview of the myriad of ways in which the ecosystem around it - including platforms like Wikidata, initiatives like WikiCite or tools like Scholia - is benefiting from open research, contributing to it, amplifying it or paving the way for it. On that basis, I will outline some opportunities to intensify these interactions to mutual benefit and to that of the research ecosystem and society at large, and I would like to encourage active contributors to the open research ecosystem to reflect on their interactions with the Wikimedia ecosystem and on how these could be improved.
Part of JROST is being able to have smaller conversations with your peers to learn with and from one another. We are looking for a few participants to lead smaller breakout discussions (~45 min each), and share tactics and experiences with the group. Key topics to think about include Funding and Sustainability, Technical Development and Interoperability, and Operational Support. (Example: Diversifying your funding streams, building integrations with partners, pivoting your project - and what you’ve learned, choosing an organizational home, etc.)
(15 words)
- Calling home: hello open world!
(250 words)
One way of building a strong community is by linking creators and maintainers of infrastructures, services and other resources with their users, and various mechanisms have evolved for that in a range of communities. What I want to explore in this session is standard mechanisms by which open tools, services and individual users could be encouraged (but not forced) to ping other members of the open research ecosystem, and potential recipients of such pings encouraged to listen in on at least a reasonable subset of those pings, provided that there is decent spam protection. For instance, many infrastructures or services are providing resources like tutorials that encourage users to familiarize themselves with the offerings. For new users, the first steps are often the most difficult, yet if the community around them were more aware of their efforts, help would be more readily available. Likewise, creators and maintainers as well as experienced users could perhaps learn from the use cases presented by new users, and consider adapting their offerings accordingly. So what I would like this session to explore is something like a mixture of a "Hello World" in programming with a log book as used on mountain summits and geocaches or indeed for version control in software repos or wiki pages, yet it should work across systems that meet some basic JROST standards. On that basis, further community-wide communication standards could be pondered, e.g. a button to thank someone for any of their contributions to the open ecosystem.
We would love ideas for diverse panels (2-3 speakers + a moderator) to include in our program on Collaboration in Action (~45 min - 1 hour). Have ideas for panels you’d like to see? Want to lead one yourself? Please let us know.
(15 words)
(250 words)
In response to disasters, humanity often responds by sharing more than usual. This sharing takes place in a myriad of ways, some of which have not evolved much in millennia, while others evolve at every occasion or are unique to a particular event. The point of this panel would be to explore mechanisms by which open infrastructures could be leveraged more quickly, more routinely and more comprehensively to reduce disaster risk, to prepare for disasters, to respond to disasters and to share lessons learned from them. The main motivation behind that is that some of the key features of open research — e.g. speed, verifiability and scalability — are especially important in disaster contexts, yet the overlap between the open research and the disaster mitigation communities is currently rather limited, so that potential often cannot be fully leveraged.
(50 words)
I don't have this fully worked out but think that combining some people from the JROST community with representatives from organizations like the following would be a promising recipe:
- Humanitarian Data Exchange
- Humanitarian OpenStreetMap
- Global Indigenous Data Alliance
- PreventionWeb
- Open Data for Resilience Initiative
- Yes (I or someone I identify will lead)
- No (I'm hoping someone else might run with this!)
- Maybe (I could be convinced with the right support)
- Calling home
- proposed as a breakout session
- Disaster risk reduction
- proposed as a panel
- The Wikimedia ecosystem as a key component of an open science landscape
- proposed as a lightning talk
- Thank you button
- mentioned in breakout session proposal
- RIO Journal: Publishing all along the research cycle
- The importance of documentation
- Open learning
- Doathon