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Dear all it came at the bottom of my introductory email and therefore maybe didn't get the attention I thought it deserved. Sort of quietly, without big fanfare, I together with others have started building up a site which is dedicated to becoming a platform for shared and collaborative research. It is a site for people doing academic research, for instance practice-led PhDs but also for independent researchers who have continuing research interests. It started when I was looking for a way of documenting my own research. I quickly discovered how lonely all these research blogs looked and thought it would be much more fun to collect those different streams of thoughts and put them together on one site. Why am I posting this here? I am convinced that there is such a thing that might be very losely termed 'open source methodologies'. I think, and posts during the early days of this emergeing discussion show that I am not alone in this, that there is such a thing as an open source culture, that first and foremost open source creativity is not a sub-discipline of engineering but comes out of a shared culture of people interested in creating things collaboratively. but what exactly this shared culture comprises is probably where the differences start. Now there is another culture, which is also 'shared' to some degree, which is academic culture. Without any accusative finger wagging I dare to state what for me is a matter of fact that there is a growing gap between open source culture which I almost synonymously also call net culture, and academic culture. the irony is that the net has been created by academic researchers who invested their academic ethos of knowledge sharing into it, but meanwhile academia has changed through neoliberal influences and strictures of intellectual property regimes and the general economisation of education high and low. as a result, many but not all academics risk falling out of touch with emergeing creative and still buzzing participative and collaborative net culture. However, academia has also the chance to reinvigorate itself through the adoption of approaches from open source culture. As a way to address those issues, to try and apply open source methodologies to reseach, both in- and outside academia, I have founded thenextlayer.org as a platform for converging interests between art, politics and free and open source software culture. supported by Goldsmiths and in collaboration with Adnan Hadzi, Lindsay Brown and others, we are preparing a research day called taxi-to.praxi on 21st of april at Goldsmiths. You can find a longer text which states our intentions here http://www.thenextlayer.org/node/382 I would like to invite you to join our research day if you have time, or, if you cant, still have a look at the site and decide if this is an effort which you want to join. If you like, register as a member and start to docuement your research jointly with us on thenextlayer.org best Armin