Research:Committee/Reorganization

This is a summary of the main achievements of RCom during the last fiscal year (2011-2012) and a proposal to make sure it can fulfill its mission in an effective and sustainable way.

• RCom's main achievements
  • launched Research:Index: currently hosting documentation of 147 projects and project proposals (spanning both internal and external research) and 28 sprints from the 2011 summer of research;
  • launched the Wikimedia Research:Newsletter (WRN). Published 12 issues since July 2011; released the full annotated corpus of references covered in the newsletter; launched a new social media handle (@WikiResearch) for real-time dissemination of Wikimedia research news;
  • reviewed 9 major subject recruitment requests, processed several requests for access to private data, and supported many other research proposals
  • promoted several OA initiatives led by Daniel and endorsed Access2Research
  • established a collaboration with DataHub on setting up test open data repository
  • hosted or participated in several research outreach initiatives (Wikimania '11, COASP '11, WikiSym '11, Digital Commons '11, Science Online '12, Wikimania '12)
  • started gathering ideas and resources towards the creation of a expert engagement program, modeled around GLAM/WiR initiatives
• What problems emerged over the last year
  • discontinued regular RCom meetings
    • they have not been effective at coordinating work or reporting progress
    • SR has monopolized the committee's attention
  • project review has become increasingly costly to sustain and suffers from many problems
    • lack of community involvement
    • hard to find sufficient interest from RCom members to participate in the reviews
    • no clear review criteria
    • no clear timeline for the review process for the applicant
    • no clear expectation for the applicant on the outcome of the review
    • most importantly: no policy to back the review process, which means:
      • incentives to freeride and by-pass the review process
      • lack of legitimacy of RCom to accept/reject proposals
      • no guarantee that a project reviewed by RCom will eventually be accepted by the community
  • delayed or archived requests for potential new members to join RCom
    • capacity limit only justified if RCom needs to make decisions or hold meetings of a manageable size
    • missed opportunity of engaging with new people and talent
  • declining participation in WRN
    • we need to find a better model to make WRN sprints more sustainable as it currently relies on a very small team of volunteers with an enormous workload
  • loose integration of research, Wikimedia communities and WMF work
    • despite initiatives such as WRN and outreach efforts, we still haven't found a good way to pitch to external research teams problems/questions emerging from the community or the Foundation in need of answers and, vice versa, we haven't found a good model to make existing research results more easily accessible to the community/Foundation
• A proposal for RCom 2.0
  • launch an RFC for SR, led by Aaron
  • reorg RCom as a federation of teams, resuming the original idea of teams per area of interest
    • no limit to # of participants per team
    • RCom membership as union of team membership
  • discontinue regular meetings and replace them with 1 or 2 annual meetings (Wikimania/WikiSym)
  • Dario to discontinue his role as RCom coordinator, will remain the contact point for all data requests and research collaborations that directly involve the Foundation
  • rethink WRN
    • identify a more sustainable recruitment/participation model for WRN
    • discuss a new format to complement monthly updates with more topic-driven updates
  • blog with a new proposal on RCom reorg after Wikimania