Session 4: New Economics

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Finishing up the notes from yesterday’s meeting:

Session 3: New Structures

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Session 2: New “Texts”

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Notes from this morning’s first session follow. Any misrepresentations herein are solely the fault of the note taker.

Dan Greenstein, Vice Provost, University of California
“New Directions, Different Possibilities”

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I’m in Oakland for the day today, at a thoroughly exciting meeting: “New Structures, New Texts: A Summit on the Library and the Press as Partners in the Enterprise of Scholarly Publishing.” I’ll hope to post my notes either during the day today or in the coming days, as I process what’s said.

For the last year or so, I’ve been an extended faculty member of Claremont Graduate University’s School of Information Systems and Technology, though that affiliation has been mostly theoretical to this point. Today, however, I’m participating in a one-day retreat aimed at brainstorming the founding of a new institute of social entrepreneurship and design.

The opening panel, which just concluded, brought together John Seely Brown, Don Norman, and CGU’s Tom Horan to discuss the purposes of such an institute and how it might create innovative modes of scholarship and learning. JSB and Norman’s presentations both focused on the parts of design that often get overlooked, what Norman referred to as the “invisible layer”: the design not of technologies, but of institutions. I’m very happy to note that JSB pointed to MediaCommons as an example of a project that is focused on such institutional change, in our desire to redefine structures of authority in reinventing peer review.

More from the day as it progresses…

The notes that follow are entirely my fault, and not at all the fault of the speakers. That said, I’m going to attempt to give a sense of what I take from various sessions at the conference. Various talks are available via webcast at HASTAC.

Jamie Boyle, “Creative Commons, Science Commons, and Open Source”

– digital technologies and relevance to learning in science: we don’t know what we’re doing

– recognition of our inability to predict the future should in fact be a positive

– we’re incredibly bad at estimating the advantages of openness; we overestimate the value of closedness and control

– we’d have made a series of bad choices if we’d been presented with proposals for the current internet or wikipedia, opting for more closed systems

– knowing that we’d have made those mistakes, perhaps we need to operate under the assumption that we don’t know, and that somebody else might have a better idea than we do

– open educational resources sites look like silos right now, separate from one another—CCLearn is devoted to making connections, allowing people to take content from different sources and recombine

– need to move from “this content is mine” to “this content is available for mining”

– makes no sense to spend millions of dollars creating balkanized islands of content

– science commons: creating a realm in which it’s easier to get the content you need

– series of blockages in the scientific process that could be solved by private agreement

– the research cycle: first you have to find the relevant literature (not just finding MORE data, but finding the RIGHT data)—access is not the problem—our methods for generating data have gone digital, but out methods for finding and comprehending data have remained analog

– semantic web—the web in which the computer “understands” the concept rather than searching for the term—admittedly not perfect right now, but will get better (someone will have a better idea)

– what if people apply semantic web concept to science?

– biggest problems: copyright and contracts—journals and publishers want to control what can be done with the material they publish, because they know that the future of publishing this material is not in getting readers, but in processing data

– the research cycle: then you need to get the “stuff”—the raw materials on which scientific experiments are run

– in part because of the credit economy in science—scientists don’t want to share the materials on which their work is based because it might take something away from their own work

– also being held up by legalities—tech transfer agreements are complex and arcane and slow

– uniform biological material transfer agreement can only go so far toward fixing the problem

– what if there were a creative commons-like form that handled all such transfers, in a machine-readable way

– what if you can get reputation for giving things away?

question: what about the unintended consequences of openness?

answer: there’s lots of research that we do want to maintain some kinds of control over, however, in order to cure a disease, scientists must have access to the disease. (cryptography: anyone’s smart enough to come up with a security system that he couldn’t break)

question: credentialing, authenticity, accrediting are important features of closed systems; how to translate to an open system

answer: two modes: one is authoritative map; other is to use a form of metadata, to see usage patterns

In Houston, on my way to North Carolina for HASTAC.  If you’re there, look me up.  And with any luck, there might be actual posting from the scene.

An MLA moment I haven’t written about, as yet:  I had three and a half minutes between meetings, at one point, and so I grabbed the laptop and headed for the corridor in the conference center, where there was a nice strong free wifi signal.  Just as I was sitting down and getting myself set up, along came a guy in a very nice suit and a very nice open-collared shirt in a lovely shade of green.  Perhaps I looked a bit familiar for some reason, perhaps it was the usual conference name-tag scan, perhaps it was the sight of me yanking laptop out of messenger bag, but the guy in the lovely green shirt gave me a decided squint as he passed by.  I thought nothing of it for about thirty seconds, and then realized—I think that was Michael Bérubé.

I’m still not positive—I’ve never met the man in person.  And of course, I left Philadelphia before the big blogging panel, so I couldn’t confirm then.  Nor could I introduce myself, which is something I really wanted to do.  He did me a quite astonishing professional favor some years back, one utterly unnecessary, particularly given that he had no idea who I was.  It fell at a key moment in my career, when things were looking more than a little dark, and I’ve never gotten the chance to thank him in person, or to let him know how much it meant.

And now things have gone all explody over at Le Blogue Bérubé.  Once upon a time, at least, we both belonged to a fairly small cohort of academics with the same weird tendency to publish our random thoughts online.  Now he’s gone, and I’m just me again.  I can’t help but feel like I missed my moment.

Folks I’d met before, whom I was happy to see again:

– Chuck;
– John;
– Scott;
– Dr. B;
– Laura.

A non-exhaustive list of folks I hadn’t met before, whose acquaintance I was very happy to make:

– Jonathan;
– Clancy;
– a white bear;
– Amanda;
– Collin.

Another non-exhaustive list of folks I never got to meet, and wish I had:

– Amardeep and the other guys down at that end of the table.

Quality of conversation: genial, fast-paced, multi-threaded.

Number of glasses of wine consumed over what really ought to have been my limit: 1.

Number of phrases used by grad-school colleagues that I discovered weren’t, in fact, in popular circulation, and thus required some lightly embarrassed explanation: 1.

Number of minutes before the first panel I need to attend, at the time when I actually wrote this post: 23.

Number of minutes remaining once I actually got this posted: 4.

Level of frustration with internet connection that keeps crapping out on me: high.

Number of hours of sleep last night that too much wine and too much to think about resulted in: 3.

Time and place of my next expected proper night’s sleep: Saturday, Paris.