[OWW-SC] Private Wiki Feedback from Steve Koch

Fri Apr 13 00:58:26 EDT 2007

Hi all, Here are some of my thoughts on the private wiki trial -- I am very
happy to clarify these thoughts and / or respond to more questions.

First, thank you to everyone for all of the great work you have done
starting up OWW and to OWW for providing my lab with the private wiki space
and the tech support to go with it!  The private wiki has been a huge help
to starting up my lab and I am very appreciative to have it.  I do realize I
am getting a lot for free.

I agree with Reshma that the time scale for the uncontrolled experiment with
private wikis is pretty long.  Especially in my case as I had an empty lab
three months ago and I am pretty slow anyway.  So far, I think I have had a
small but positive effect on OWW.  I am hosting one course now
(http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/PHYC500) -- unfortunately student
participation was sabotaged by a co-instructor, but even then I think at
least a couple students explored OWW because of this.  I expect much more
student participation in the future.  I also recently put up my basic lab
pages on the public site (http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/Koch_Lab) and
added one protocol
(http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/Koch_Lab:Protocols/Dig-bio_PCR and
http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/Koch_Lab:Protocols/Dig-bio_PCR/pRL574_4411_P
CR).  I have in mind to put up a whole bunch of protocols that I have
accumulated over the years and which I haven't had the know-how or impetus
to put online until now.  Part of the reason I took the time to put the one
protocol on OWW was out of a feeling of sort of guilt about the private wiki
-- otherwise I am sure I would have delayed more.

The obvious question about your experiment with private wikis is: what would
my lab be contributing to OWW if not for the private wiki?  My feeling is
that without the private wiki I would not have had sufficient motivation to
use OWW for my course or my lab pages.  Part of this was because having the
private wiki made it extremely worthwhile to learn the basic wiki syntax
etc.  I would guess that at this point I would still be exploring hosting my
own wiki, possibly MediaWiki, Social Text, or JotSpot.  Using MediaWiki (and
the exact OWW build) makes it much easier for us to contribute to OWW
(though a "publish button" mechanism would be nice).  So, my subjective
opinion is that the private wiki was essential to my small contributions to
OWW--and more importantly, I am committed to OWW and Open Science and I
really do think that once my students start doing experiments and my lab
gets going, that we'll have a whole bunch of useful contributions to OWW.
(On the couple year time frame that Reshma mentioned.)  So from my
perspective and in my case, I think your investment in the private wiki was
and will be very much worth it.  I think this would only be true for labs
who have a strong desire to be open, which may not always be true.

Another question is: why do I think I need the private wiki?  I do agree
with most of the thinking about this:  nobody really cares about whose turn
it is to bring beer to the picnic or whatever, and most private pages will
be ignored.  If it were just me and I didn't have to worry about students or
collaborators, I would not have worried about the private wiki.  For
students, I am cautious about subjecting them to an experiment with Open
Science, even though I think it's the right way to go.  I think they have
enough risks already working with a new assistant professor.  For
collaborators, I know that some of the people I work with are still in the
frame of mind that measured secrecy is essential to success and not getting
scooped.  While I think the best defense against getting scooped is complete
openness (see my thoughts here:
http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/Science_2.0/Brainstorming), I'm not yet in
the position to force my more experienced collaborators and mentors into
upgrading to Science 2.0.  But I am in the position to invite them to my
private wiki, create some private pages, bug them to put them on the public
OWW, and gradually convert them (and their students).

I agree with Reshma that you should avoid having an official policy for now.
I think anyone who has a private wiki should be committed to open science --
and right now, you are sort of selecting that way and have some arbitrary
control.  In my case, I was attracted to OWW's mission and signed up not
knowing about the private option.  I wrote in my sign-up form that I was
concerned about being 100% open and then was offered the private wiki.

It should be clear to anyone that private wikis cost OWW money in terms of
people's time and server space.  So, charging is reasonable and also
probably affordable once I have a grant.  If you believe in private wikis as
being a net positive for OWW, though, not charging is the simplest.  If I
paid some kind of fee, I would feel much less guilty about my slow
contributions to the public site :)

OK, Thank you once again to everyone, I think you have created a wonderful
community!

--Steve

Steven J. Koch, Assistant Professor, Physics and Astronomy
Center for High Technology Materials, University of New Mexico
1313 Goddard SE, MSC04-2710, Albuquerque, NM  87106
Office: (505) 272-7822   Fax: (505) 272-7801
sjkoch at unm.edu        www.openwetware.org/wiki/Koch_Lab 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Reshma Shetty <rshetty at mit.edu>
Date: Apr 12, 2007 5:43 PM
Subject: Re: [OWW-SC] Private wikis?
To: Barry Canton <bcanton at mit.edu>
Cc: sc at openwetware.org

OpenWetWare's mission is to promoter the *open* sharing of information
in biological science and engineering.  So the only way to justify
expending any resources on private wiki's is if it encourages folks to
digitize information as they go and this information gets eventually
made public.

Unfortunately, there are a few problems with the private wiki test

1) we won't know if people will actually make pages public after some
time for easily 1-3 years.   (The timescale for people to do
experiments and eventually publish them.)
2) we haven't made it trivial for people to "publish" a page to
OpenWetWare from a private wiki.  Perhaps this could be addressed by
the technology developer that we are trying to hire.
3) the experiment is uncontrolled.  Potentially digitizing information
early on privately doesn't make the information any more likely to go
public later.  But how do we know?
4) Making private wiki's available could in fact make things worse
because given the option of making things private or public, folks
might be more likely to make things private given an easy way of doing
so.  Again, there is no way to "control" for this.

I'd actually rather not have a general policy for giving out private
wiki's because

1) we shouldn't make any guarantees about the private wiki's.  It is a
trial right now which means it could go away at some point.
2) we don't want private wiki's to take off.  Shouldn't we keep the
number of private wiki's as low as possible?

Of course, the caveats to the above are that it may be strategically
useful to have more people become "dependent" on OpenWetWare (in terms
of getting support in the future) and that we could explore charging
for private wiki's to fund the public site.

Just some thoughts ... I'm open to discussion.

-Reshma

On 4/12/07, Barry Canton < bcanton at mit.edu > wrote:
>
> How do we think the private wiki test is going?  I'd be especially
interested to hear from those with private wikis.
>
> I got a request on behalf of some MIT faculty behind the SMART program
(Singapore-MIT alliance) who want to build their website on OWW.  As
expected they are put off by the lack of access control and are now
wondering if it's possible to keep their entire site private.
>
> My feeling is that we shouldn't give out private wikis unless we think
people are likely to use the public site significantly too.
>
> What do others think?  Do we have enough info. to decide a general policy
for granting private wikis?
>
> Barry
>
> _______________________________________________
> OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List
> sc at openwetware.org
> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc
>
>

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