World Association of Young Scientists

In the spirit of Another Conference I did not attend, I embed below my summary of tweets on OKCon 2010, as well as the piratepad that pleasantly fulfilled the function of collaborative note taking, for which I had proposed a wiki-based attempt yesterday. While the former is unbeatably interactive (one of the best ways to attend a conference online if no audio/video is available), I think that the latter is more suitable for long-term archiving and structuring the information about the conference and its sessions and talks. Looking forward to another Etherpad-based attempt at OpenSciNY.

Later today, OKCon 2010 will take place — the fifth (or fourth, depending on whether WSFII 2005 counts or not) installment of the Open Knowledge Conference, organized on an annual basis by the Open Knowledge Foundation.

I have contributed to a paper (with @Tom Morris, who will present it) that is scheduled for the Community-Driven Research session and describes Citizendium as a platform for the collaborative structuring of knowledge by experts and the public. I cannot attend in person but will do so online via Twitter and Friendfeed, and this blend of wiki and microblogging on the same topic stimulated me to give collaborative blogging another try, this time via the wiki entry on the conference, embedded below. Caveat: only registered users can edit, but everyone can register, and approval rarely takes more than a few hours. If this is too late for you to keep your OKCon 2010 notes there, then the wiki can still serve to structure them later and to contextualize them. Or it can simply link to your blog posts, images and other materials on the matter.

I am also aware that, as long as wikis do not allow parallel editing in the same sections of a document, Etherpad clones would be an alternative, and they may indeed get their try in a few weeks too.

Anyway, here we go for the wiki variant:

While 140-character summaries of scientific papers seem to be the topic of today in some parts of my feedsphere (#sci140), I wish to get back to another way of making publications shorter and more efficient, as has been discussed before in various circumstances, e.g. under the label of micropublication.

Let me start by requoting John Wilbanks:

Science is already a wiki if you look at it a certain way. It’s just a highly inefficient one -- the incremental edits are made in papers instead of wikispace, and significant effort is expended to recapitulate existing knowledge in a paper in order to support the one to three new assertions made in any one paper.

In this spirit, I have taken one of my articles whose licenses permit reuse and modifications and turned its abstract and introduction into a demo on how publishing in a wiki-style environment may look like.

I am currently writing up part II of the blog post "What would science look like if it were invented today?" Part I was focused on knowledge creation in the post-paper era and drafted in a wiki. Part II is focused on knowledge structuring, and as an experiment, I have ported the current draft from the wiki into an Etherpad document which anyone can edit, and embedded it here. Feel free to join in (just one condition: please do not break existing wiki or HTML syntax), or leave me a comment.