User:Daniel Mietchen/Sandbox/Open Knowledge Conference 2010

Background

This document shall help the drafting of a "full paper" (meaning 15 min of talk on the basis of "5-10 pages describing novel strategies, tools, services or best-practices related to open knowledge") for the Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2010. Submission deadline for the abstract: Jan 31, 2010. Our abstract has been accepted. Feel free to edit as you see fit. For discussion, please use this forum thread.

Deadline for submission of full paper: March 31, 2010.

The presentation will be given by Tom Morris, but everyone is invited to chime in on the drafting. It is intended to reuse much of this material for improving our Citizendium entry.

Technical details

All authors of OKCon papers:

• Can submit a camera ready version of the paper in LNCS style [1] for publication in the online proceedings e.g. till March 31st, to the proceedings editor: Claudia Muller-Birn <clmb@cs.cmu.edu>

[1] http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-7-72376-0%20LNCS%20Style

Please also note there is no page restriction in place on your papers for this process.

The final typesetting in LaTeX will be done by Daniel Mietchen.

Title

Public and experts working together: an experiment in structuring (disseminating?) knowledge

Alternative: Structuring knowledge in, for, and with the public

Abstract

The abstract should consist of no more than 200 words.

There is much debate on how public participation and expertise can be brought together in collaborative knowledge environments. One of the experiments addressing the issue directly is the Citizendium. In seeking to harvest the strengths (and avoiding the major pitfalls) of both user-generated wiki projects and traditional expert-approved reference works, it is an organically-growing wiki to which anybody can contribute using their real names, while those with specific expertise are given a special role in assessing the quality of content. Upon fulfillment of a set of criteria like factual and linguistic accuracy, lack of bias, and readability by non-specialists, these entries are forked into two versions: a stable (and thus citable) approved "cluster" (an article with subpages providing supplementary information) and a draft version, the latter to allow for further development and updates. We provide an overview of how the Citizendium is structured and what it offers to the open knowledge communities, particularly to those engaged in education and research. Special attention will be paid to the structures and processes put in place to provide for transparent governance, to encourage collaboration, to resolve disputes in a civil manner and by taking into account expert opinions, and to facilitate navigation of the site and contextualization of its contents.

Key issues

This section is auxiliary to the drafting process and will be deleted when the draft is nearing completion. Let's concentrate on the following areas from the call for proposals:

  •   Platforms, methods and tools for creating, sharing and curating open knowledge
  •   Open educational tools and resources
  •   Supporting scientific workflows with open knowledge models

hence:

• Citizendium as

  • a platform for creating, sharing, curating and navigating open knowledge
  • an Open educational tool and resource
  • an open knowledge model supporting professional workflows
  • a democratic and meritocratic community

Introduction

Just imagine you had a time slider and could watch the history of knowledge on tool making, cooking, clothing, learning, general relativity, plate tectonics, self-replication, or cell division unfold from the earliest ideas of their earliest proponents (and opponents) onwards up to now.

"The Citizendium is a collaborative effort to collect, structure, and update knowledge and to render it conveniently accessible to the public for free. It is created by volunteers — henceforth Citizens — who contribute under their real names and agree to a social covenant centered around trust." - such starts the charter that the project participants are currently drafting. In this contribution, we intend to provide an overview on how the project is structured and what it offers to the open knowledge communities, particularly to those engaged in education and research.

The Citizendium model: Real names, stable versions and contextualization

Basic overview about the main differentiators to other Open Knowledge projects, and why they were introduced.

Open knowledge

• a collaborative platform for creating, sharing, curating and navigating open knowledge

Open education

• an Open educational tool and resource

Open science

1. an open knowledge model supporting professional workflows
2. For scholarly uses, a detailed outline can be found in this blog post.

Open governance

• a democratic and meritocratic community

Further notes

Speaker bio:

Tom Morris is a postgraduate philosophy student and programmer and has been actively involved as an author in the Citizendium project since October 2007.

Just some suggestions for consideration from Aleta, not intended to be cast in stone. Question: what do you mean by an 'organically-growing wiki' (fifth line in abstract)? Doesn't resonate with me, can you say it in a different way?

• There is a talk given by Chris Day on Citizendium in mid-2008:

http://www.scivee.tv/node/6673