From the Archives: Scientific Research, Openness and External Validation

Image of a seine fishing net with a blurred image of a man at the end of it, weaving together broken bits and pieces.
Weaving it all together!

My face split into a grin when I read Carl Zimmer’s article, Swine Flu Science: First Wiki, Then Publish in Discover Magazine. This collective mobilization, weaving together emergent scientific findings, is what so many people in international agricultural research and other areas have been evangelizing. This is not to diminish the role of external validation – it is important. Amazingly important. But it is only one end of the spectrum of validating research and application.

First, about the Swine Flu wiki. Then I’ll circle back to external validation. From Carl’s article:

Last month I scrambled to write a story about the evolution of swine flu for the New York Times. I talked to some of the top experts on the evolution of viruses who were, at that very moment, analyzing the genetic material in samples of the virus isolated around the world. One scientist, whom I reached at home, said, “Sure, I’ve got a little time. I’m just making some coffee while my computer crunches some swine flu. What’s up?”

All of the scientists were completely open with me. They didn’t wave me off because they had to wait until their results were published in a big journal. In fact, they were open with the whole world, posting all their results in real-time on a wiki. So everyone who wanted to peruse their analysis could see how it developed as more data emerged and as they used different methods to analyze it.

Carl goes on to write about the wiki work-in-progress, the final publication in the journal Nature, and the Creative Commons license on the article – so we can all read it when it is published.

When should this be the common research pattern, instead of the exception? Carl suggests “With this sort of urgent situation at hand, the patient process of old-fashioned science publishing may have to be upgraded.” But what about important things that move slower, like international agricultural research which has at its core a mission to feed the world. Why should slower, “less sexy” science eschew the new practices of open access research? It is most often public governmental or private foundation money funding this work. In the case of public money, that is you and I, citizens of many countries. And what foundation in its right mind would want to stifle advancements that might help achieve missions?

So why isn’t this standard practice? I’m no genius, but one barrier is how research science is taught and rewarded – in any sector. The old “publish or perish.” Couple that with the competition for funding, generating a deep seated need to say “we invented it here in our institution, give us more money,” and you have the recipe for hoarding.

We are not talking about some pharma’s latest top secret moneymaking designer drug here. We are talking about research supposedly in the public interest.

So what is a facilitator to do about all of this?

First,  we can support scientists with practical and straightforward wiki collaboration tips and practices. Open up our wikis to the world. What if every talented online facilitator could be available to support any group of scientists who wanted to collaborate in their pre-publication research work.  Some organizations are clearly doing their part to support this effort, but what if we could make our little bit of magic available to help? Are we ready appropriately speak and support in the language of science, research and international development? If not, what do we need to do?

Second, we can support external validation of new ways of doing research intended for the public interest.

Time and again people ask  how to gain support for strategic learning, knowledge sharing  or social media initiatives from their leadership. They tell me they get big fat “no’s” with a laundry list of excuses. This is often true in the application of social media in scientific research.  How do we convince management, they ask? Or perhaps more relevant, how do we make a cogent case for the researchers and the institutions and how do we validate those cases?

One tactic is to muster external validation.

By external validation I mean tangible support or recognition for work done within an organization by an external voice as well as general recognition about the value of the practice in question from outside the organization. Carl’s article is an example of the latter. We should be pointing to it like crazy in research organizations. When the Nature article comes out, round two!

Getting the former can be something that emerges, or something you stimulate. Let’s look at both ends of the spectrum.

Stop “Assuming Good Intent”

Image of 8 panel chalkboard framed in red with writing in white. One panel reads "HURT NEVER."
Hurt Never

One of the first lessons I learned about hosting and facilitating online conversations was “Assume Good Intent.” As I read someone’s words online, this approach was practiced before I reacted, to assume the writer “meant well.” A breath before reacting. I have to say, it did keep me from writing overly reactive posts…sometimes.

This practice came out of hosting in the Electric Minds community, and later on The Well and other online communities. In his tip sheet on The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online, Howard Rheingold talks about “assuming good will.” It made so much sense to me that it became one of the cornerstones of my online facilitation workshops. My assumption was that if people practiced good intent, gave each other the “benefit of the doubt,” all would be well. Or at least less bad. 🙂

What I missed so blindingly was who gets the power to assume good intent. And that someone’s good intent could be coming from a well of white supremacy. This all blossomed into my consciousness with a post on LinkedIn by the astute Tara Robertson.

Tara pointed me to Megan Carpenter, who wrote something much more useful.

“I’ll give you grace if you give me effort”

Megan Carpenter

That feels like it makes the responsibility clear for each party, and not excuse a lack of care or grace under the flag of “good intent.”

It is funny, now I’m seeing the words “good intent” everywhere I look, and I am consciously trying to reshape my language towards grace and effort.

Update from the “fallow” period: hope

As some of you know, last Summer I declared a fallow period for myself. I was so tired.

Well, I’ve arrived at the cleaning stage. Clearing out books I’ll never open again. Going through files and digging into the huge (garbage) pile that is my office. Attacking deferred home maintenance projects.

Close up image of of a small wild temperate purple orchid from the University of Washington's Medicinal Garden.
A spring flower from the University of Washington’s Medicinal Plant Garden

What one can discover never ceases to amaze. Even some words that help me through a turn.

First I notice that I’m now rested enough that I can start and even ENJOY these tasks. It may be an indicator how far I’ve come from last summer’s burn out. And I can see the top of my desk! I feel comfortable giving away books and recycling piles of files. I’m scanning a few, offering some to folks who appreciate artifacts from the early days of online community, and holding on to some that are near and dear.

Some of the things I’ve unearthed remind me that phase changes are amazing moments to both reflect AND start out on new explorations and (learning) adventures. I found my independent study on solar algae ponds and the chemistry of phytoplankton in the aquaculture environment. Wow, I was smart back then! I found my high school year book. I realize no one knew me until I got the lead in the senior play. Invisibility, eh? I found printouts of the governance thrash when Electric Minds (snapshot here) lost its funding and in a hail Mary, became Eminds. (Howard wrote about that a bit here.) Names and personalities came flooding back. Moments of joy and moments of regret. The shattering of my naiveté about the possibilities of online community.

It was in one of these print outs that I found a response from the wise and wonderful Jay Rosen of NYU. I was deeply dispirited and Jay stopped into the conversation thread that I LOVED most, “How to raise the caliber of the conversation on the Net.” Jay wrote about the social critic Christopher Lasch and his distinction between optimism and hope. Here are a few snippets that Jay quoted.

Optimism is the belief that things will somehow get better because that is the direction things go.

Jay Rosen, paraphrasing Lasch

“Hope does not demand a belief in progress. It demands a belief in justice: a conviction that the wicked will suffer, that wrongs will be made right, that the underlying order of things is not flouted with impunity. Hope implies a deep-seated trust in life that appears absurd to those who lack it. It rests on confidence not so much in the future as in the past.

“It derives from early memories–no doubt distorted, overlaid with later memories, and thus not wholly reliable as a guide to any factual reconstruction of events–in which the experience of order and contentment was so intense that subsequent disillusionments cannot dislodge it.

“Such experience leaves as its residue the unshakable conviction, not that the past was better than the present, but that trust is never completely misplaced, even though it is never completely justified either and therefore destined inevitably to disappointments.

“If we distinguish hopefulness from the more conventional attitude known today as optimism–if we think of it as a character trait, a temperamental disposition…–we can see why it serves us better, in steering troubled waters ahead, than [optimism].

“Not that it prevents us from expecting the worst. The worst is what the hopeful are always prepared for. Their trust in life would not be worth much if they had not survived disappointments in the past, while the knowledge that the future holds further disappointments demonstrates the continuing need for hope… Improvidence, a blind faith that things will somehow work out for the best, furnishes a poor substitute for the disposition to see things through even when they don’t.

“… The disposition properly described as hope, trust, wonder–three names for the same state of heart and mind–asserts the goodness of life in the face of limits. It cannot be defeated by adversity. In the troubled times to come, we will need it even more than we needed it in the past.”

Christopher Lasch, “The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics”

Then Jay left his advice to me.

One is to remain optimistic and say: everything will work out. A second is to give in to despair, or give up on politics entirely.

The third is to steel yourself with hope. Prepared for the worst, fortified by loving memory of what was best in the past, open to a future in which trust is never wholly misplaced. That’s hope, in its muscular variety.

Jay Rosen, E-Minds, 1997

Lately the news of the world – Ukraine, White Supremacy, striking down of Roe v. Wade, shootings, hate — it has been taking its toll on me. Then I picked up this old print out and Jay reminded me, I can choose hope. Thanks, Jay!

Comparing F2F and Online Idea Generation – broaden our focus!

Picture of a small person looking out of a blue car's window as seen through the side mirror, with fainter image of hands on camera taking picture through front passenger window.
How many perspectives? Foci?

Earlier this month on the KM4Dev email list, one of my colleagues pointed to a study comparing F2F and online idea generation in the journal Nature and concluding F2F produced better results.

Virtual communications curbs creative idea generation, by Melanie S. Brucks and Jonathan Levav was a fascinating read. The authors did more to test their hypothesis compared to other studies I’ve read which claim one environment or other is better for some function. I take them with the proverbial grain of salt. This one got me thinking more deeply. Here is a bit from their summary:

Departing from previous theories that focus on how oral and written technologies limit the synchronicity and extent of information exchanged4,5,6, we find that our effects are driven by differences in the physical nature of videoconferencing and in-person interactions. Specifically, using eye-gaze and recall measures, as well as latent semantic analysis, we demonstrate that videoconferencing hampers idea generation because it focuses communicators on a screen, which prompts a narrower cognitive focus. Our results suggest that virtual interaction comes with a cognitive cost for creative idea generation.

Brooks and Levav

Narrower cognitive focus! In the example studies, they talked about the power of objects around is in a physical room to help us get creative. We limit those options when we diligently focus on the screen online. Wait, we focus on the screen because that is what we have habituated as proper virtual behavior. “Focus on the screen! Avoid distractions! And then we lose a bit of ourselves. Have you ever had that experience at the end of a Zoom where you have to reground yourself in your physical space?

Broader cognitive focus! Our habits impact our participation and our results. What if it is our lack of imagination and attention to what full presence and participation means that hampers us? What if we invited ourselves to use our F2F external environment WHILE attending to the screen? What if stepping away from the screen was part of the idea generation practice which not only widened our visual cognitive focus, but reawakened our kinesthetic selves?

It is convenient to assume that environment trumps all. And thus we begin to bias our thinking about the issue of F2F vs online options and choices that are so top-of-mind these days.

Maybe we are asking the wrong questions. What if the question was “what kinds of focus most contribute to idea generation?” And THEN ask how that focus can play out across different environments. This might be a great area for experimentation!

Image of tree branches in foreground, looking across a bay to a row of factories in the pink/orange of dusk.
View from a hotel room in Cameroon

Back when there was “social” in the software…

Picture of the head of a dog (Australian shepherd?) looking at you.
Alan Levine’s blog avatar

Alan Levine noted that he is just past his blogaversary and linked to a post of his from 2006 that I just love. It is a story of how he created an artifact from a presentation I gave at NorthernVoice (a BLOGGING conference, can you IMAGINE that?? We were crazy kids back in the day!). What was magical about this story is how Alan’s recording of my talk rippled across our respective networks and how people added to it and amplified it. (Bev, I loved your notes. Still do! Nick, all these years you mashed it up and now retirement is on the horizon! Who would have guessed!) I think this is when I really became a fan of CogDog, aka, Alan.

A picture of a woman in 2006 with shoulder length curly born hair glasses, holding two bags of Dove Dark chocolates. Photo by Alan Levine.
Photo by Alan Levine of a much younger, shaggier me, sharing chocolate

Alan’s post also has me looking back at years and years of Flickr event albums. Mama mia, there are stories. I often think I have few stories to tell. My problem is simply that I just don’t practice telling them! A little nostalgia… And boy, I was a lot younger back then! And with a lot longer hair. Still sharing the same Dove Dark chocolates though!

Edit a few minutes later: I’m listening to the audio. Still relevant.