[iDC] Notworking online collaboration in science and education

[Tania Goryucheva]

Thank you, Danica,  for sharing your experience and concerns.

This reminded me of a quite interesting article by Timothy Lenoir  
"Making Studies in New Media Critical" published in "Media Art  
Histories" edited by Oliver Grau. The article basically reports  
about  a project, involving few US research institutes, which was set  
up to develop a new media platform to foster collaborative forms of  
scientific research, documentation, knowledge share, public awareness  
etc in the domain of nanotechnology. It has a very interesting  
approach from the methodological point of view, though I brought it  
up as a reference to comment on the raised by Danica issues of  
collaborative action/non-action, networking/not-working.

As the author and also developer of the project himself points out,  
despite the common approval of the idea, the actual participation of  
the scientific community in the project at the early stage, when it  
was launched and tools were ready to use, did not take off. When  
people were asked why don't they use it, the typical answer was -  
"lack of time".

It's interesting how the developers responded to encountered  
unwillingness of scientists to participate in somebody else's  
program. For example, they tried to adjust the software to  
communication patterns of people, by adding a special e-mail feature  
(apparently most of people are more eager to communicate and exchange  
with information via e-mail rather than web-sites). But particularly,  
which I find also strikingly symptomatic, integration of tools for  
personal profiles updating and their representation within academic  
networks with advance tracking system, increased participation  
significantly. The motivation is pretty obvious here.

Though later in the text T. Lenoir writes that within few months  
preceding his article, the  climate had changed, and scientific  
community had become more concerned about the issues raised by the  
project, he also mentions in this regard that institutional  
authorities (NIH? and National Nanotechnology Initiative) "mandated"  
top-down to include "societal and ethical considerations" into  
research frameworks.

It would be interesting also to put the question of academic  
collaboration and networking into the perspective of the relation of  
academic world to public sphere. If you think, for example, how  
academia, academic publishers particularly, elaborately guard  
academic papers, publications, journals, preventing the open public  
access to them by means of ridiculous fees and all kinds of multiple  
gates-keeping online systems, usually pretty inconveniently designed  
from the user perspective. (not to mention copyright enslavery,  
restricting authors from dissemination of their own texts  
independently, or commercial patenting of the knowledge whose  
production is initially funded by public money)

It looks like the internet, which is an efficient new media  
embodiment, or extension, of public sphere with all meanings  
attached, is treated by academic institutional world still  
predominantly as the tool for internal purposes, self promotion and  
knowledge policing rather than for efficient inter-cultural  
information exchange and productive knowledge dissemination. There  
are of course progressive projects and initiatives happening, and  
climate is  indeed changing, but still on the whole it does not fully  
match neither needs of society nor technological potential.