Kari-Hans, Ken and colleagues,
Maybe you can help me/us with two concerns:
Who owns and runs academia.edu, and where does their funding come from? Do you know anything about their governance from your contact with them.?
If the bibliographic database for design lay outside academia.edu and only referenced papers posted there, couldn't it be more secure and portable?
I'd love to know,
Thanks for your post. It really puts the cautions where they belong. I think that as you and Ken have suggested, academia.edu may be more of a learning/ growing experience. But maybe we can run alongside developing what works best for us as a portal/first look/ home base for our very large, not yet coherent community.
Thanks again,
Chuck
On Feb 13, 2013, at 5:49 AM, Kommonen Kari-Hans wrote:
> Dear Chuck,
>
> About Academia.com: I agree with you that Academia.com has many nice and worthwhile features, but I think that there is a generic problem with systems such as this, or e.g. Facebook: they easily acquire a status of some kind of "standard", as they gather a very large following with their nice features, and many people invest a lot of their own effort into uploading their materials and generating other useful connections etc. This gives the service a power position in the society that they tend to use to their advantage without making corresponding commitments to the community to manage the emerging resource according to the best interests of everyone.
>
> Say that you would, after maybe 12 months of using the system some to the conclusion that some other system would actually be better for you and our community. Typically none of these systems give you any support for migrating your own part of the database together with all its important usage data into another system - in most cases you can not get the information out, so to achieve this, you need to recreate your presence in the new system manually.
>
> Also, it might happen that they decide to change the functionality in some way that you are not happy with. You may write to them with your feedback, but they have made no commitment to you to listen to any such concerns or to take any of them into account in their service. There are numerous problems like this. I have also interacted with the Academia.com support myself, actually with a key person in the company developing it, and they did not seem to care about my concerns (about the privacy settings relating to which activities of the user become reported to everyone in the activity feed) at all. Hence I have decided not to use or endorse it myself, but I am forced to be a member, otherwise I can not read any of the nice materials that my colleagues are uploading there. This (forcing people who simply want to download an article into being members), is in my opinion also wrong and resemble the tactics of Facebook and other players that I have seen to consistently act against users' interests.
>
> I think that Academia and the other services offer short term immediate value, are good models for piloting this kinds of resources, but I believe that the worlwide academic community will run into trouble with them sooner than later, and it is a good idea to prepare for a migration into some more open and sustainable system that is probably not designed and run as a private business but more likely as some kind of open collaborative effort by academic institutions. I am sure something like that will happen sooner than we now expect, as some institutions will become aware of the problem. And like I said earlier, our own growing awareness of the problem - which many I am sure can not yet see as such, but may in the future - might help us to participate in the design of such an open system, when the time is right. Maybe many people need to try out the systems now, to see what they like and do not like, in order for us to get to that point. So: it is a good idea to try it out and learn about its virtues and woes, but I do not think we should build future plans for our field - e.g. institutionalized resources - on that particular product, and we should be mindful that we do not exclude people who do not want to participate on that platform - like myself :)
>
> cheers, Kari-Hans
>
> ---
>
> On Feb 12, 2013, at 6:02 PM, Charles Burnette wrote:
>
>> Ken, Terry, Teena, Mads, Kari-Hans, Teena, Ranulph, and colleagues,
>>
>> I have been exploring and pondering what a bibliographic system to support design education, scholarship and research might include and how it might be organized to provide a window into other resources. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than I can respond to guide us.
>>
>> It has been suggested that a bibliographic database with source identifiers, an abstract or statement of scope and purpose for each bibliography, keywords, a common citation format, and url links to digital documents at academia.edu or other digital depositories would offer a feasible portal for accessing bibliographic content relative to design provided by its authors subject to guidelines from a committee representing the field.
>>
>> Source identifiers and abstracts or guides to content are needed to give focus and context for judgment of potential value to the searcher. Other judgment may follow by scanning the listing content for originality, relevance, quality, etc.
>>
>> Keywords are needed both for this reason and to focus search. Academia.edu exploits keywords to score those frequently used to reach particular content. The search terms are not limited to the given keywords but may include other terms.
>> They help the author see what searchers are looking for when they reach a citation. For example, I have learned that the words "design thinking", "problem solving", "roles", and "modes" which are in the titles of papers I have written have been used in different ways to access my papers on academia.edu from google. Academia.edu ranks successful search terms enabling you to see what people want to find. "Management roles in group problem solving" for example got its author from google to my paper "A Role-Oriented Approach to Group Problem Solving". If a keyword ranks high enough it gets you on google's first page for searches for example typing "modes of philosophy " gets you a link to my paper "Philosophical Modes in Design Thinking Revised 1:25:2012 Academia.edu analytics shows me that "modes of philosophy" is one of the top search terms for this paper. Anyway open keyword searching is desirable.
>>
>> The connection to academia.edu as a depository is really worthwhile. Not only do they host your full documents, photo, CV and URL links they also notify your followers and designated fields of new posts and display the number of times each document has been viewed. Their analytics notify you of search terms and the country they come from, give you the number of searches from different sources each week (440 from academia.edu, 61 facebook, 37 google, 7 Google Canada and 551 document views and 665 profile views this week (this suggests I should update my profile).
>>
>> If you don't know the school and name of an author or that I'm independent (retired) you may not find what you are looking for. ex just googling Ken Friedman will not get you to his home page at academia.edu - just at Swinburne. Also Ken is so famous as a Fluxus artist that his wikipedia profile doesn't give access to his papers. Academia is an important new resource for design but I still think we need a bibliographic portal just for us.
>>
>> I had somehow misconstrued that Ken was going to post access to a list of digital depositories as resources. His list of nine books was a real contribution, I think that a list of links to especially valuable depositories would make a wonderful addition to the database. (Loughborough, Swinburne, The Interaction Institute, The library of Congress, The British Library,etc) This one might even be annotated. (I'm not asking that of you Ken! )
>>
>> Anyway, food for thought,
>> Chuck
>>
>>
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