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MindTrek-2008-Tutkimusparvi-Proceedings

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Sivulla tuotetaan Mindtrek2008:aan noin 20 000-merkkinen ACM -ohjeistuksen mukainen proceeding.

ACM:n tyylipohja: [[1]]

Sisällysluettelo

Proceeding - Tutkimusparvi - The Open Research Swarm in Finland

Heiskanen, Tero, Hintikka, Kari A., Kokkonen, Juhana, Kola, Petri & Näkki, Pirjo (on behalf of the Tutkimusparvi)

Ubiq: tähän jokaisen halukkaan osallistujan / presentoijan nimi - laitoin nuo ensi alkuun yleiskeskustelun perusteella

Abstract

In this paper, we describe Tutkimusparvi (Research Swarm). Swarming is an experiment of self-organizing and a novel way to collaborate in the field of academic research. Tutkimusparvi utilizes the possibilities of Internet, especially social media tools. The main goal is to collectively achieve rapid solutions to given challenges and to develop a distributed intellectual milieu for researchers. Transparency of the research and creative collaboration are central ideas behind Tutkimusparvi. Like Wikipedia, Tutkimusparvi is open for everyone to participate. The questions and research topics can come from Tutkimusparvi participants, from purposed principal or from general discussions on the mass media.

Categories and Subject Descriptors xxx

D.3.3 [Programming Languages]: Language Contructs and Features – abstract data types, polymorphism, control structures. This is just an example, please use the correct category and subject descriptors for your submission. The ACM Computing Classification Scheme: http://www.acm.org/class/1998/

Ubiq: Alustavasti vaikuttaisi voivan olla tuo A: http://www.acm.org/class/1998/A.html. Useimmat muut kategoriat ovat aika teknisesti softa- tai rautaorientoituneita.'

General Terms

Management, Experimentation, Human Factors.

Ubiq: : Olisiko näistä Experimentation ja Human Factors?
--Pirjo: Parhaiten minusta sopii tuo Management. Mutta jätetään vaan nuo kaksi muutakin siihen. Poistanpa nuo toiset.

Keywords

Open science, academic practices, collective intelligence, social media.

Introduction

In this paper we will present some novel way to make academic research and theoretic background for collaborative swarms on the Internet, describe the birth of Tutkimusparvi, and report the experiences of the work done at Tutkimusparvi thus far. We will discuss both advantages and challenges in swarm-based research collaboration over organizational boundaries, as well as individuals' motivations to participate in Tutkimusparvi. The paper itself is a result of swarm collaboration and has been written openly in a wiki by non-preselected contributors.

With swarming we are referring different points of views, e.g. research methods exploiting collective intelligence, which has got new relevance on the Internet era. The phenomenon itself, how people can find the best solutions and practises among themselves, better than any single expert, has been long-known, but the Internet has revealed its full potential. The collective intelligence is also referred to as smart mobs by Howard Rheingold [17], the wisdom of crowds by James Surowiecki [20], wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthory D. Williams [22], crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe [10] or We-think by Charles Leadbeater [14]. Pierre-Paul Grassé [8] introduced "stigmergy" to refer collective behaviour of termites. Some call self-organizing autonomous intelligence of ants and bees as "hive mind" [2] or "swarm" by Kevin Kelly [12].

In Tutkimusparvi, the beginning phase 2008 is reflecting to so called 1-9-90 -rule, see Jacob Nielsen [16] and Aaron Swartz [21]. Some individuals contribute the most of the activities, some participate some times and most like to just follow advancement. We hope to get enough mass and participatition. On the other hand, some corner stones of Tutkimusparvi is to share openly, comment others' work positively, try to enhance others' ideas and encourage others' to innovate.

Motivation to seek novel ways to scientific collaboration rose from noticed targets of development in procedures of current science. Publicing can be groundlessly slow, restricted access is prevailing practice in journals, research data and initial stage research knowledge are commonly closed. The fundamentals grounding the endeavours of Tutkimusparvi are mutual with the ideology of Open Science. Open Science is not very well-defined concept that consists of Open research practices like Open Source, Open Data, Open Access, Open notebook science and Open peer review. In Tutkimusparvi openness is seen as a broader concept including the research process, financing, and participation, as well.

Other basic concepts behind Tutkimusparvi are collective intelligence, holoptic activity and produsage. Collective intelligence or the wisdom of crowds refers to the notion that a crowd creates in average better solutions than a single expert [20]. Holoptic activity refers to transparent actions and to a development prosess where anyone can observe all the others' activities. Term 'holoptic' is introduced by Michel Bauwens [2]. Produsage describes the coincident using and producing of shared content in a networked, participatory environment. It means collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement [4]. When individuals and communities share their research from the beginning, it is possible to create common understanding that benefits everyone.

Introducing Tutkimusparvi

First steps of Tutkimusparvi

Tutkimusparvi was formed in December 2007 based on discussions among various researchers in the microblogging service Jaiku. Theoretic discussion about open research and concrete need for new research partners, as well as people with similar interests met each other through common contacts in the social media service. A common channel for further discussion was soon created and the aims for collaboration were found.

The aim of Tutkimusparvi is to achieve high quality research both academically and ethically. It primaly rely its activities to social media tools and channels on the Internet. One of the key advantages in the swarm-based collaboration is its agility and easiness of finding the best experts for each research question. That should result in efficient use of resources. Also the results can be published more quickly, when the documentation and reports are openly on the Internet. The quality of the papers is ensured by both internal and external peer review procedure, and the results may be publicly discussed by anyone. Besides research, Tutkimusparvi aims at supporting learning and works as a virtual graduate school for doctoral students from different fields. A longer term goal is to create organizational innovations for new types of collaborative research organizations and connect Tutkimusparvi to the Finnish and European research funding systems.

Microarticles - open referee procedure

In the scientific world, specially for PhD students it is very laborous to start a academic career with publishings on journals. The traditional peer-reviewing procedure is an established mechanism to achieve the best possible results. On the other hand, it is very slow way to exercise her/himself. Just for the starters, one need to wait months just for getting the first signals whether she/he is encouraged to proceed. With the internet, some practises and experiments have been made already, like First Monday Internet Journal.

In Tutkimusparvi, we are developing the concept of microarticles. The idea is to write an academic text which is longer than normal abstract, but maybe one tenth of normal journal article (3000 - 5000 characters plus references). A microarticle is written openly at wiki and others can comment microarticle during the writing process. The development model of microarticles is an example of holoptic activity.

The concept of microarticle has several benefits. The aim is not critisize the anonymous peer review process, but offer quicker and easier way to test concepts, ideas or research plans. If one is encouraged to bring her/his research context openly to the Internet, he/she will get instant comments from others. Microarticles can be found with Google and other search engines before they have even "officially" published. The sharing cycle of ideas is subtantially faster than in traditional academic journal procedure. Instead of making months alone (and maybe getting some comments from closest collagues) a researcher can take advantage of full potential of the Internet as early as the beginning of the research process. With microarticles a researcher can test her/his hypothesis, the basic concept of the article, find potential co-writers and researchers, maybe also funding resources and so.

Tutkimusparvi will make its first microarticle seminar in the middle of September and the experiences will be reported at MindTrek conference. We are also making a MicroCongress at December 2008 for testing novel presentation models, such as Pecha Kucha -model, where each presenter is allowed a slideshow of 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds. We are also testing Jaiku presentation model, where presentation is clipped to 160 characters, like in sms messaging, and it will be easlity followed via mobile phone.

Collective innovation

One of the first efforts of Tutkimusparvi has been writing a research plan to a MOTIVE research program of Academy of Finland. The whole Tutkimusparvi was born partly thanks to the funding process. When researchers in one organization were planning a project proposal to the MOTIVE program, they decided to try to find research partners via Jaiku. An open question was posted that asked, if anyone would be interested in collaborating in the project about ubiquitous computing and communication. For a traditional research organization it was not a normal way of finding partners, but in a couple of days the message got 55 comments and many people reported themselves as willing to participate. There arose a big interest in not only finding partners but doing the whole research in a different way. Some people had already used Jaiku as a channel for open steering group for their development program and similar interests for open science were quickly found.

Some new thoughts arose: Could research projects be innovated openly on the Web instead of internal planning behind closed doors? Could the research be partly addressed to a swarm - basically to anyone who is interested in it? Could the audience (the citizens) vote for what is being researched with the public funding? People who had similar thoughts about utilizing crowdsourcing, "swarming" and social media in research, continued the discussion in an own Jaiku channel that was quickly created.

The idea for the project was first discussed in the Tutkimusparvi Jaiku channel and after meetings with interested members further developed in the wiki. Finally, four research organizations decided to participate in the project and formalized the final topic (Social media for citizens and public sector collaboration). After that the planning followed more or less the normal procedures of project design. However, both the intention of the research plan and the final plan in the second round of applying were written openly in the Tutkimusparvi wiki. Also people outside the consortium contributed to the plan, including potential competitors applying for funding from the same research program. In the final application Tutkimusparvi was mentioned as a fifth research partner as a self-organizing network and some funding was also applied for its work.

Towards Open science

Openness of Science

One could easily argue that science has always been "open", because science's function clearly is to discover and increase human understanding. Science is for "to know" and research is way to gain knowledge. It's self-evident that humankind's knowledge can't increase if science is not "Open". However, when we elaborate to the practices of modern science, we see that there are many "closed" stages or parts. Openness of science is not settled issue[24], neither on micro-level nor macro-level. Cottey[6] divides openness of science to four levels:

  • Secret Science: even the existence of the project is concealed
  • Restricted Science: publication of the results is subject to strict limitations in respect of timing and level of detail. Most commercial and applied government (including military) science is in this category
  • Circumspect Science: the scientists publish when the project is complete, but till then are quite 'close'. Academic science, as practised to date, and when not Restricted, is in this category
  • Open Science: This term means a radical kind of openness, an Open Science Project being open from beginning to end.

Cottey[6] argues that most of modern academic science is Circumspect Science which typical charasteristic of closedness is publishing until project is complete. Cottey sees "open science" as radical openness which lacks defined protocol or criterias and is long way away to reach for mainstream academic science practices. "Open science" is clearly very recent concept[18]. ISI Web of Knowledge-database is one of the largest scientific databases with over 10000 high impact journals [11]. Still topic search "open science" in Web of knowledge's database results only 33 hits, where most part are case reports and experiments and very few from discipline of philosophy of science or science studies. One of the few articles which discusses of "open science" suggests directly that "there is no common terminology for discussing the topic of openness in science"[5]

Elements of Open Science

There are at least four identifiable scientific movements which strongly drive openness in their own field without solid fixing to "open science". These are Open source, Open Access, Open data and Science Commons and Open peer review.

Open source is a popular model for computer software production and peer-to-peer development, in which the source code is made available for free to anyone to utilize, change, and improve the software, as long as the modifications are revealed openly and accessible also. Linux operating system and Apache Internet server software are common examples. In open science, open source model can be applied so, that primary data is published and others can improve it or join to research effort.

Open Access means access to Internet-distributed proceedings, papers, journals and other academic documentation forms, which are available online and both free of charge and most copyright, licencing or other restrictions. Open Access resembles Science Commons (SC), which encourages to lower barriers and makes tools for more efficient web-enabled scientific research. Science Commons is located at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the Ray and Maria Stata Center [19].

Open peer review refers to novel ways to create Internet-based alternatives to existing anonymous peer reviewing in journals, described above in the section of microarticles.

Tutkimusparvi's operations have been strongly related to open access and open data until down. Open peer review practices are planned to be tested in Microarticle publishing process. Scientific project's administrative and financial aspects are naturally part of science practices that should be open to reach "open science" certificate. Cottey[6] lists many aspects of scientific project that should be open. There are illustrated rough protocol of openness in table x. In that table there are also illustrated Tutkimusparvi's achievements and plans to strive towards radical openness.

[taulukko]

Research swarm model in evolving social media

The social media lacks still of definition or has multitude of approaches [15]. Generally speaking, social media is often considered a mix of social activities, communication and content production or generation with free internet services, where basically everyone can contribute. For the openness of Tutkimusparvi, social media is in essential role. One could say that without social media the activities of Tutkimusparvi are impossible, or very difficult. Todays social media services enables participation, editing, sharing, commenting and other contribution easily to basically everyone. However, commercial free tools have some pitfalls. Services can be down for days, they are bought and fusioned or just vanish. Most risks of social media tools are predictable, but that means more backups, creative minds to replace some services and functions on the fly and communication of changes. One can use some open source communication tools, like MediaWiki, but still many commercial services is needed.

In August 2008 there are 93 members in the #tutkimusparvi channel in Jaiku, which is considered as a coordinative hub and the main communication channel, where innovations, ideas and discussions mainly take place. In the wiki pages at tutkimus.parvi.fi there are 37 named researchers or other participants. Wiki is used for the iterative processes of plans, documents and other activities. There is also collaboration with the Wikiversity of Finland that was created in connection to Tutkimusparvi. For communication and information sharing social bookmarking service del.icio.us, email, Skype and blogs are used, as well. Occasionally, when a named file format is needed, like presentation slides or spreadsheets, Google Docs is used.

Albors et al.[1] present three different network paradigms that all are reaching higher social and informational connectivity (see figure x). In same article Albors et al.[1] also present taxonomy that elaborates the differing academic, social and business network paradigms. Research swarm differs more from academic paradigm then social paradigm regarding the taxonomy. There are many variables in the taxonomy where Research swarm's openness separate research swarm model and traditional academic model from each other. Table x

[taulukko]

Tutkimusparvi as collaborative scientific organization

Scientists have made attempts to build computer-supported scientific collaboration environments over quarter of century and yet only a few have succeeded to achieve sustainable efficient collaboratories [3]. Tutkimusparvi as scientific organization differs remarkably from traditional scientific organizations. Tutkimusparvi doesn't have administrative management, formal or legal form as organization or policies or guidelines regulating operations. Anyone is free to join Tutkimusparvi without any prerequisites or formalities. Although research swarm model has few unestablished aspects in this point of development, the model is definable using taxonomy of scientific collaboratory[3]. Bos et al.[3] defines collaboratory as

"an organizational entity that spans distance, supports rich and recurring human interaction oriented to a common research area, and fosters contact between researchers who are both known and unknown to each other, and provides access to data sources, artifacts, and tools required to accomplish research tasks."

There are no need to hesitate to call Tutkimusparvi as collaboratory basing on this definition. Bos et al.[3] groups existing collaboratories to seven distinct types. Research swarm model is similar to "Open Community Contribution System" before anything other type. Open Community Contribution System is defined as

"an open project that aggregates efforts of many geographically separate individuals toward a common research problem. It differs from a Community Data System in that contributions come in the form of work rather than data. It differs from a Distributed Research Center in that its participant base is more open, often including any member of the general public who wants to contribute."

Open Community Contribution System described by Bos et al.[3] seems a model where collaboratory work is made to collect resources to solve one common research problem or to reach one well-defined achievement. Research swarm model doesn't found collaboration on any single core problem or issue. Sociality and communication without any clear goals is also important parts of research swarm model and this way collaboratory type "Virtual Community of Practice" described by bos et al.[3] is very close to research swarm model.

The activity model of Tutkimusparvi resembles the idea of negotiated knotworking introduced by Yrjö Engeström [7]. Inside the swarm different kinds of temporary combinations of people come together and collaborate for a while. After the goal of the "knot" is achieved the group will be untied and new targets and knots can be activated. From the perspective of first experiences of Tutkimusparvi the pace of knot creation is notably faster than in normal working environments. This is probably an effect of the used social media tools. Besides, possibly because the participants of Tutkimusparvi collaborate mainly on a voluntary basis, great number of suggested activities do not be completed. The swarm seems to work like an evolutionary system, where only the most vigorous things will live. Because of the holoptic character of swarm activity also the unsuccesful part can be traced, examined and even resurrected afterwards.

Discussion

The research plan experiment demonstrated that unhierarchical academic swarming is still difficult. The key benefits - openness, informality and sharing - do not totally fit the current academic structures. One needs organizational and juristic body for applying and funding, for example. On the other hand, swarming also needs light top-down coordination, as pointed out also by Kevin Kelly [12]. He states that autonomous and bottom-up self-organization is possible, but considered recently that light top-down coordination is needed. Charles Leadbeater has made the same observation [14]. Inside Tutkimusparvi many ideas evolve quickly and starting a new discussion or project has proved to be very agile, but for finalizing them some mechanisms for assigning responsibility and coordinating the process are needed. The power structures and decision processes inside swarms require further consideration. Another challenge is the stabilization of the swarm without losing the energy that comes from its constant motion. The swarm must attract also new participants in order to get fresh insights and not become an insiders' community.

Bos et al.[3] listed three barrier types that hinder expansion of scientific collaboratories. First, scientific knowledge is difficult to share. Secondly, researchers are mavericks by nature. Thirdly, scientific institutions are inflexible in enabling cross-institutional collaborating. Tutkimusparvi's collaborative undertakings are heading to face these barriers in novel way. Wiki and other future wiki-like open collaborative tools are promising to share scientific knowledge and ideas. Jaiku and other social networking, lifestreaming services offers possibilities to demolish researchers ivory towers. And finally open science practices could lead to way to remodel scientific institutions strict policies concerning scientific collaborating.

The main motivations to participate in Tutkimusparvi are learning, knowledge sharing, networking with both like-minded and different people, and the desire to create new ways for doing and organizing research. Tutkimusparvi attracts researchers and students as well as entrepreneurs and other people interested in online collaboration. Social media has thus far been the main shared interest, but the swarm model could be used for organizing research on other fields as well.

References

[1] Albors, J., Ramos, J. C., and Hervasa, J. L. . 2008. New learning network paradigms: Communities of objectives, crowdsourcing, wikis and open source. Int. J. Inform. Manage. 28(3), pp. 194-202.

[2] Bauwens, M. 2005 Peer to Peer and Human Evolution. Retrieved August 19, 2008. http://integralvisioning.org/article.php?story=p2ptheory1

[3] Bos, N., Zimmerman, A., Olson, J., Yew, J., Yerkie, J., Dahl E., and Olson G. 2007. From shared databases to communities of practice: A taxonomy of collaboratories. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12(2), pp. 16.

[4] Bruns, A. 2008 Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang.

[5] Chubin, D. E. 1985. Open science and closed science - tradeoffs in a democracy. Science Technology & Human Values (51), pp. 73-81.

[6] Cottey, A. 2000. Information technology - the key to taking open science forward. Scientists for Global Responsibility Newsletter (21), pp. 7-9.

[7] Engeström, Y. 2008 From Teams to Knots. Cambridge.

[8] Grassé P.-P. 1959 La reconstruction du nid et les coordinations interindividuelles chez Bellicositermes natalensis et Cubitermes sp. La théorie de la stigmergie. Essais d’interprétation du comportement des termites constructeurs, Insectes Soc. 6, 41–84.

[9] Herz, JC. 2005 Harnessing the Hive. Creative Industries. Malden, Mass: Blackwell. pp. 327-341.

[10] Howe, J. 2006 The Rise of Crowdsourcing. Wired 14.06. Retrieved August 25, 2008. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html

[11] ISI Web of Knowledge. Thomson Reuters. http://www.isiwebofknowledge.com/

[12] Kelly, K. 2008 The Bottom is Not Enough. 12.2.2008. Retrieved August 25, 2008. http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/02/the_bottom_is_n.php

[13] Kelly, K. 1994 Out of Control. The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World. 4th Estate.

[14] Leadbeater, C. 2008 We-Think - Mass innovation, not mass production. Profile. London.

[15] Lietsala, K., Sirkkunen, E. 2008 Social media. Introduction to the tools and processes of participatory economy. Tampere University Press. Hypermedia Laboratory Net Series; 17. pp. 17-28. Retrieved August 26, 2008 http://tampub.uta.fi/tup/978-951-44-7320-3.pdf

[16] Nielsen, J. 2006 Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute. Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox. Retrieved August 17, 2007 http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

[17] Rheingold, H. 2002 Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Perseus Books.

[18] Schroeder, R. 2007. e-research infrastructures and open science: Towards a new system of knowledge production? Prometheus 25(1), pp. 1-17.

[19] Science Commons. http://sciencecommons.org/

[20] Surowiecki, J. 2004 The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. Little, Brown.

[21] Swartz, A. 2006 Who Writes Wikipedia? Retrieved August 17, 2007 http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

[22] Tapscott, D.,and Williams, A. D. 2006 Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Portfolio Hardcover.

[23] Wilbanks, J., Boyle, J., and Reynolds, W. N. 2006 Introduction to Science Commons. Science Commons Funders Meeting, Duke Law School Aug 3rd , 2006. Retrieved August 27, 2008 http://sciencecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/ScienceCommons_Concept_Paper.pdf

[24] Willinsky, J. 2005. The unacknowledged convergence of open source, open access, and open science. First Monday 10(8)

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