A set of similar online research resources and instances of people talking about these resources can be seen as a manifestation of a research community online. This online community has more often than not evolved over time and can be somewhat nebulous in nature. It becomes difficult for a research to keep track of what is going on their field. Innovations such as aggregation services and RSS feeds have helped a great deal with this problem of keeping a handle on an ever evolving community.
Attempts are often made to create online community hubs; websites that aggregate resources and information on those resources alongside communicative tools. There are of course many social networking sites that simply bring similarly minded people together and let them exchange information on the resources they use. These approaches work to a greater or lesser extent, with PICT we are trying out a slightly different approach.
We believe that the potential of PICT lies in its capability to draw together existing web resources by offering a common set of useful tools that enhance the levels of interaction between individuals within a community.
Other approaches to community collaboration.
- The embedded approach – A resource owner makes sure that their site includes tools that allow users to enrich his, hers and others experience. (Various comments plugins, tagging and other folksonomy creating gadgets, SNEEP)
- My resource is the community! – This approach ignores the rest of the community, what they might be saying and the other resources out there.
- The toolbar approach – A user can download a nifty set of tools that they can use on any resource they happen to encounter. (Zotero, Diig, , Delicious). Being user-centric is on the whole a good thing, but…
- User hasn’t download it – They might not know about this wonderful tool and if they don’t get it they haven’t got it..
- Mass of disparate data – A large third party site aggregating data can certainly be an advantage if the more data the better, but sometimes the better the data the better.
- Not scoped for the community – What is all this stuff? Some of these sites have facilities to create groups and communities within the mayhem, even then they tend to be rather broad.
- Whose data is this? – Data is owned and managed outside the community (not a problem? at least you’d only have yourself to blame)
- The desktop approach – (Pliny, MS Office, OpenOffice, etc). This is traditional computing stuff. Email clients, word processors etc.
- Private thoughts – Desktop tools can be great for creating and viewing digital resources, but it would seem that web browsers are still the best way to share them amongst a community.
- The third-party approach – A site that provides the means to search resources and maintain networks of similarly minded people (Google, facebook, etc)
- Huge scope – again a wide scope can be really useful, but if you spend most of your day working in one area you may appreciate a more concise approach.
- User-centric – We’re not saying this is a bad thing, but directing people toward a facebook group, for example, may attract less people than a debate that is happening where the resource is.
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Had a brief meeting with Craig Bellamy from the Centre for e-Research at Kings College London. Explained PICT with the help of a biro. His assessment was that the framework for presenting tools at the point of use (on existing websites), whilst retaining a broader community level scope was a good one. Attempts to create community hubs often end in rather quiet websites due to a difficulty in providing a critical mass of users and hence enough initial interest. This and the prevalence of existing well established community services (facebook etc).
He felt that the PICT tools in themselves are not particularly exciting (maybe not exciting but I’m hoping useful) and that some killer community network tool would be a real boon. If the framework we’re building has any legs then hopefully that killer tool can be added to the suite in time.
Also had interesting ideas on scoping communities. Suggested the advantages of basing communities around quite specific subjects (eg Charles Darwin). Also the use of PICT to maintain a community directory (whether or not resources listed in the directory had PICT deployed).
In terms of participation he seemed to think that there was a possibility of trialling PICT on arts-humatities.net. Although not really a range of resources that represent the online workplace of a research community, this would be most welcomed.
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We had earlier identified Dr Simon Coles of Southampton University Chemistry department as a possible participant due to his involvement with setting up the eCrystals federation. The purpose of the federation project was to normalise practices of deposit and description amongst digital resource owners within the crystallography communtity. So Simon has spent a lot of time and effort bringing resource owners together.
We’re please to report that he was very interested in PICT:
“We had a partner engagement problem in eCrystals, in part due to a lack of tools to provide extra functionality on top of the standard repository. Chickens and Eggs! I would certainly like to take this further, as I think PICT would provide exactly what I am after in terms of community annotation etc.”
Have agreed to contact Simon again once the project is more mature tolook into the possibility of trailing some tools on some (hopefully more than one anyway) of the eCrystals federation repositories.
