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Welcome to the Tutkimusparvi - The Open Research Swarm in Finland
Contact info: tutkimus . parvi at gmail . com - Qaiku.com: #tutkimusparvi-channel
In a nutshell
The Open Research Swarm ORS (Tutkimusparvi in Finnish) is a novel way and experiment of self-organizing, collaborative academic research utilizing social media tools on the Internet. The main goal is to collectively achieve temporal organizations and rapid solutions to given questions and challenges. Transparency of the research and creative collaboration are central ideas behind everything ORS does.
Like Wikipedia, ORS is open for everyone to participate. If you want to get involved you can just introduce yourself on our Qaiku channel or email us.
Towards Open Science
The motivation to seek novel ways to scientific collaboration rose from known imperfections in current procedures in 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 ORS are mutual with the ideology of Open Science. Open Science is not a fully defined concept. It is related to Open Source, Open Data and Open Access. In ORS openness is seen as a broader concept including the research process, financing, and participation, as well.
Other useful concepts to discuss the ORS are collective intelligence and produsage. "Collective intelligence" or "the wisdom of crowds" refers to the notion that a crowd creates in average better solutions than an any single expert. "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. When individuals and communities share their research from the beginning, it is possible to create common understanding that benefits everyone.
The aim of ORS is to achieve high quality research both academically and ethically. 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, ORS 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 ORS to the Finnish and European research funding systems.
Self-organized swarming
ORS was formed in December 2007 based on discussions among various researchers in the microblogging service Jaiku. Theoretic discussion of 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.
In June 2008 there are 80 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 35 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 ORS. For communication and information sharing social bookmarking service del.icio.us, email, Skype and blogs are used, as well.
This dualistic communication platform has been proven very efficient. Microchannels is used for instant messaging and as a backchannel via laptops and mobile devices, including archiving for later reading, and wiki is used for documents.
A case study: Somus -research plan to Academy of Finland
One of the first efforts of ORS has been writing a research plan Somus to a research program of Academy of Finland. The idea for the project was first discussed inside ORS 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 ORS 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 ORS was mentioned as a fifth research partner as a self-organizing network and some funding was also applied for its work.
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. He states that autonomous and bottom-up self-organization is possible, but considered recently that light top-down coordination is needed.
Early findings of research swarming
Inside ORS 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.
The main motivations to participate in ORS are learning, knowledge sharing, networking with both like-minded and different people, and the desire to create new ways for doing and organizing research. ORS 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.
