Tag: science-online

Posted on

Designing for the phase change: Local communities and shared infrastructure

Pink crystal.
Image via Wikipedia

Michael Nielsen‘s talk at Science Online was a real eye opener for many of us who have been advocating for change in research practice. He framed the whole challenge of change as an example of a well known problem, that of collective action. How do societies manage big changes when those changes often represent a disadvantage to many individuals, at least in the short term. We can all see the global advantages of change but individually acting on them doesn’t make sense.

Michael placed this in the context of other changes, that of countries changing which side of the road they drive on, or the development of trade unions, that have been studied in some depth by political economists and similar academic disciplines. The message of these studies is that change usually occurs in two phases. First local communities adopt practice (or at least adopt a view that they want things changed in the case of which side of the road they drive on) and then these communities discover each other and “agglomerate”, or in the language of physical chemistry there are points of nucleation which grow to some critical level and then the whole system undergoes a phase change, crystallising into a new form.

These two phases are driven by different sets of motivations and incentives. At a small scale processes are community driven, people know each other, and those interactions can drive and support local actions, expectations, and peer pressure. At a large scale the incentives need to be different and global. Often top down policy changes (as in the side of the road) play a significant role here, but equally market effects and competition can also fall into place in a way that drives adoption of new tools or changes in behaviour. Think about the way new research techniques get adopted: first they are used by small communities, single labs, with perhaps a slow rate of spread to other groups. For a long time it’s hard for the new approach to get traction, but suddenly at some point either enough people are using it that its just the way things are done, or conversely those who are using it are moving head so fast that everyone else has to pile in just to keep up. It took nearly a decade for PCR for instance to gain widespread acceptance as a technique in molecular biology but when it did it went from being something people were a little unsure of to being the only way to get things done very rapidly.

So what does this tell us about advocating for, or designing for, change. Michael’s main point was that narrow scope is a feature, not a bug, when you are in that first phase. Working with small scale use cases, within communities is the way to get started. Build for those communities and they will become your best advocates, but don’t try to push the rate of growth, let it happen at the right rate (whatever that might be – and I don’t really know how to tell to be honest). But we also need to build in the grounding for the second phase.

The way these changes generally occur is through an accidental process of accretion and agglomeration. The phase change crystallises out around those pockets of new practice. But, to stretch the physical chemistry analogy, doesn’t necessarily crystallise in the form one would design for. But we have an advantage, if we design in advance to enable that crystallisation then we can prepare communities and prepare tooling for when it happens and we can design in the features that will get use closer to the optimum we are looking for.

What does this mean in practice? It means that when we develop tools and approaches it is more important for our community to have standards than it is for there to be an effort on any particular tool or approach. The language we use, that will be adopted by communities we are working with, should be consistent, so that when those communities meet they can communicate. The technical infrastructure we use should be shared, and we need interoperable standards to ensure that those connections can be made. Again, interchange and interoperability are more important than any single effort, any single project.

If we really believe in the value of change then we need to get these things together before we push them too hard into the diverse set of research communities where we want them to take root. We really need to get interoperability, standards, and language sorted out before the hammer of policy comes down and forces us into some sort of local minimum. In fact, it sounds rather like we have a collective action problem of our own. So what are we going to do about that?

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted on

Incentives: Definitely a case of rolling your own

Lakhovsky: The Convesation; oil on panel (Бесе...
Image via Wikipedia

Science Online London ran late last week and into the weekend and I was very pleased to be asked to run a panel, broadly speaking focused on evaluation and incentives. Now I had thought that the panel went pretty well but I’d be fibbing if I said I wasn’t a bit disappointed. Not disappointed with the panel members or what they said. Yes it was a bit more general than I had hoped and there were things that I wished we’d covered but the substance was good from my perspective. My disappointment was with the response from the audience, really on two slightly different points.

The first was the lack of response to what I thought were some of the most exciting things I’ve heard in a long time from major stakeholders. I’ll come back to that later. But a bigger disappointment was that people didn’t seem to connect the dots to their own needs and experiences.

Science Online, both in London and North Carolina forms, has for me always been a meeting where the conversation proceeds at a more sophisticated level than the usual. So I pitched the plan of the session at where I thought the level should be. Yes we needed to talk about the challenges and surface the usual problems, non-traditional research outputs and online outputs in particular don’t get the kind of credit that papers do, institutions struggle to give credit for work that doesn’t fit in a pigeonhole, funders seem to reward only the conventional and traditional, and people outside the ivory tower struggle to get either recognition or funding. These are known challenges, the question is how to tackle them.

The step beyond this is the hard one. It is easy to say that incentives need to change. But incentives don’t drop from heaven. Incentives are created within communities and they become meaningful when they are linked to the interests of stakeholders with resources. So the discussion wasn’t really about impact, or funding, or to show that nothing can be done by amateurs. The discussion was about the needs of institutions and funders and how they can be served by what is being generated by the online community. It was also about the constraints they face in acting. But fundamentally you had major players on the stage saying “this is the kind of thing we need to get the ball rolling”.

Make no mistake, this is tough. Everyone is constrained and resources are tight but at the centre of the discussion were the key pointers to how to cut through the knot. The head of strategy at a major research university stated that universities want to play a more diverse role, want to create more diverse scholarly outputs, and want to engage with the wider community in new ways. That smart institutions will be looking to diversify. The head of evaluation at a major UK funder said that funders really want to know about non-traditional outputs and how they were having a wider impact. That these outputs are amongst the best things they can talk about to government. That they will be crucial to make the case to sustain science funding.

Those statements are amongst the most direct and exciting I have heard in some years of advocacy in this space. The opportunity is there, if you’re willing to put the effort in to communicate and to shape what you are doing to match to match their needs. As Michael Nielsen said in his morning keynote this is a collective action problem. That means finding what unites the needs of those doing with the needs of those with resources. It means compromise, and it means focusing on the achievable, but the point of the discussion was to identify what might be achievable.

So mostly I was disappointed that the excitement I felt wasn’t mirrored in the audience. The discussion about incentives has to move on. Saying that “institutions should do X” or “funders should do Y” gets us nowhere. Understanding what we can do together with funders and institutions and other communities to take the online agenda forward and understanding what the constraints are is where we need to go. The discussion showed that both institutions and funders know that they need what the community of online scientists can do. They don’t know how to go about it, and they don’t even know very much what we are doing, but they want to know. And when they do know they can advise and help and they can bring resources to bear. Maybe not all the resources you would like, and maybe not for all the things you would like, but resources nonetheless.

With a lot of things it is easy to get too immersed in the detail of these issues and to forget that people are looking in from the outside without the same context. I guess the fact that I pulled out what might have seemed to the audience to be just asides as the main message is indicative of that. But I really want to get that message out because I think it  is critical if the community of online scientists wants to be the mainstream. And I think it should be.

The bottom line is that smart funders and smart institutions value what is going on online. They want to support it, they want to be seen to support it, but they’re not always sure how to go about it and how to judge its quality. But they want to know more. That’s where you come in and that’s why the session was relevant. Lars Fischer had it absolutely right: “I think the biggest and most consequential incentive for scientists is (informal) recognition by peers.” You know, we know, who is doing the good stuff and what is valuable. Take that conversation to the funders and the institutions, explain to them what’s good and why, and tell the story of what the value is. Put it in your CV, demand that promotion panels take account of it, whichever side of the table you are on. Show that you make an impact in language that they understand. They want to know. They may not always be able to act – funding is an issue – but they want to and they need your help. In many ways they need our help more than we need theirs. And if that isn’t an incentive then I don’t know what is.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta