On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 5:12 AM, Ward Cunningham <[email protected]> wrote:
> There are lots of other pressures on work. Take for example the principle > investigator who after decades of working within the existing system finds > one day that his grants aren't to be renewed. Nor are the grants of his > professional colleagues. Their labs contract but they are all still there > with serious science in front of them. > > I've suggested to a friend in this situation that it might be a good time > to rethink how academic science works. Pain begets change. Why not get > ahead of it? > > I'm close enough to science to smell change in the wind. I'm not close > enough to lead change. But I will cheer anyone daring enough to step out of > old habits and design a future that includes what we've learned about the > internet in the last decade or two. > > Randomly and connected to this, I was at a workshop yesterday being run by the Dementia Training Study Centres in Australia. They are working with their state run and other regional/topic based centres to move more of their materials to open source projects, encourage collaboration on WMF projects, etc. The discussion was about how they often spent $50,000 to develop tools and resources for academics but these quickly disappear if funding disappears or people move on or the technology backing them no longer works. By moving to WMF related projects, they can encourage and foster greater collaboration, keep lines of communication more open, better allow the general public to see what they are doing, provide caregivers and others access to better information, etc. The first step was done yesterday by having a workshop. Some of the details about what they are doing can be found at http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Caregiving_and_dementia , and it is viewed inside this community as a first step to encourage similar projects in their area. They are consciously building off the work done by an academic in his classroom where they encouraged student participation on Wikibooks and Wikiversity, along with the History of the Paralympics in Australia project. -- twitter: purplepopple blog: ozziesport.com
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