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. If you do not want to edit yourself but prefer to watch how the document evolves, that is fine, and the Time Slider function makes it very convenient. - Daniel Mietchen

thanks, Daniel, re "uploadability of all kinds of media" (in revision 15, this is in line 38), I like your point that, e.g., videos "would be easily integrated" and just added my2cents on that. Why construct any file type as 'the newcomer', test it: why not say that text objects still need to stake their claims in a non-printable world? - Claudia Koltzenburg

Surely text will not vanish. My point there was to inform readers that videos can be embedded into wiki environments and that video journals exist. Rephrased. By the way, I keep a list of references-to-be-included at http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki... and trim it down once a reference has been included. - Daniel Mietchen

good idea; and: it's fun, thx :-) - Claudia Koltzenburg

Some sort of FlaggedRevisions in combination with WikiTrust should probably also go on this wishlist for scholarly wikis of the future. What else? See also http://ff.im/8ycL6 . - Daniel Mietchen

My blog's server is scheduled for maintenance over the weekend. So if it is down, please use the direct link to edit the document: http://etherpad.com/SxYOAaQDUd . - Daniel Mietchen

the ethernetpage does not seem to connect from here, Daniel, will try again tomorrow, more ideas to add, cheers from Petersburg - Claudia Koltzenburg

In case you can't access it either way, I just copied the current text to http://en.wikiversity.org/w... , so that you at least have the text as a basis for improvements. You can then put your comments into the ether_pad_ page once you have a more permissive connection. Приятного времени в Питере! - Daniel Mietchen

спасиба, даньель, before I left Hamburg, I had copied the text into my own wiki, too ;-) alas, now I can't see easily which changes were undertaken after my latest edit; am already missing the time slider :-) also, wikimedia is limited here (compared to e.g. moinmoin which gives not just paragraph changes but shows any amendments sign-by-sign), well, an interesting part of our experiment - I have changed my IP location to a different hotel lounge, and now, on accessing the etherpad page, a pop-up says: Внимание, вирус ... SCRIPT.Virus - ah, so that is another possible hurdle to consider for fair trade issues in online collaboration/ publishing, maybe - will be back from yet another IP, from within the medical university, on Monday, will not undertake any changes on the wikiversity site, my new alterations will just be saved up - btw I agree to toning down the redundancy issue. пока - Claudia Koltzenburg

Interesting... I'm following a similar collaborative writing experiment here: http://mixedink.com/Eups20... - François Dongier

thx, what's your take on the differerence re tool functionalities? - Claudia Koltzenburg

Hi Claudia, both tools (Etherpad and MixedInk) look pretty similar and seem to make good use of colour coding to identify each author's contribution. At this stage, I have just looked at both projects, trying to see whether collaborative writing actually works with them. My main concern so far: from what I have seen, neither of these two tools seems to provide mindmapping support, to help the co-writers collaborate on the document structure before getting down to writing actual sentences. - François Dongier

mindmapping, yes, this is exactly what I did this morning (currently having no access to the etherpad site from here) - was missing it before but had not acted on it yet, so, after all, there is some positive side to this lack of access ;-) also an interesting result for our experiment, maybe (less is more...) - Claudia Koltzenburg

my mindmap on the issues of the blog post as well as on the experiment itself, in freemind, see here (upcoming "The time from submission to publication may take up to 24 hours."): http://www.mindmappedia.com/... - another invitation to an experiment :-) - Claudia Koltzenburg

Can't seem to get to the mindmap but agree very much with François' point about needing services that help with the drafting - often have issues getting documents started because everyone is waiting for a structure - and often feel uncomfortable with jumping into other peoples' pre-existing structures. Haven't yet had a good experience of that early stage of drafting in a collaborative authoring process. - Cameron Neylon

@Claudia: I'll look at your mindmap when it gets published. The "up to 24 hour delay" seems to indicate that the mindmappedia staff is doing it manually. Not sure that this will scale. I also wonder if there will be such a delay for the publication of each new version of the mindmap; that would make collaborative mindmapping pretty slow :-) @Cameron: collaborative mindmaps could be useful not only at the early stage of drafting, but also for structure revision occurring at later stages (writing and polishing). - François Dongier

Yes, embedding mindmaps (or otherwise couple them with etherpad) would certainly be helpful. Mind42 (example at http://mind42.com/pub... ) comes close, though it currently does require an invitation to get permission to edit a document (much like most Google docs). - Daniel Mietchen

@ Claudia, an easier (and faster) way to share mindmaps in freemind may be to install http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki... for your wiki. - Daniel Mietchen

good points made, thanks & cheers, @Daniel good hint, yet mine is a moinmoin wiki, so maybe you can suggest a different location for this freemind file everyone can then jump into? (and I will not offer you a static view, too unexciting, much more fun if it is open for additions and changes straight away :-) - Claudia Koltzenburg

A nice visualisation of collaborative writing: http://www.youtube.com/watch... - François Dongier

cool, now: do we feel encouraged? Cameron, re your experience: in hindsight, was this mainly due to missing suitable tools or mainly due to the habits of people participating (or not participating) - or mainly both? if habits were in the way, what kinds of habits do you guess these were? - Claudia Koltzenburg

@François agree - abstracting back out again at a later stage can be very useful for revision @Claudia I think it was a combination of over optimism about what could be done and habits that don't work for large scale collaboration, possibly also being overly polite. Good tools would be a great help in overcoming these. I think there is an issue over a sense of ownership (having it, not having it) that prevents people from stepping in and just doing something - but a lot of this is down to the fact that documents are rather poor collaborative draft generation environments. Once you have structure then people can take ownership of separate parts but getting that structure down seemed to be a key step in getting people to actually become actively involved. - Cameron Neylon

agree: documents are rather poor collaborative draft generation environments - that is exactly why in the end I was quite happy not to be able to access Daniel's etherpad file from here (Питер) and actually start on the mindmap... and once that is up somewhere useful, the next test is on, too :-) my take is that linearity is actually a pretty closed business, syntax and all... - Claudia Koltzenburg

I agree that starting with a collaboratively constructed mindmap is probably a good idea for this kind of joint activity but I did not plan this experiment too long ahead, and I already had a document to build on, so I found it reasonable to start without a mind map. Plus, when I invited participation to part I ( http://ff.im/3Zk6I ), nobody jumped on the boat (perhaps because there was no Time Slider?), and so I wasn't even sure whether I would get anything more than a couple of yawns this time. - Daniel Mietchen

For my taste, MindMappedia take way too long to make your mindmap accessible, Claudia . As another alternative, Freemind seem to have their own wiki where individual mindmaps can be embedded: http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki... . - Daniel Mietchen

I just suggested integration with mindmaps to Etherpad: http://uservoice.etherpad.com/pages... . Perhaps you can add your voices there? - Daniel Mietchen

thanks, Daniel, awesome, I really like that tool, see: http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki... - Claudia Koltzenburg

@Daniel: just added my voice to support your proposal at uservoice.etherpad. @Claudia: great, I got your map now, diving into it slowly :) - François Dongier

my vote added, too; Daniel, am eager to get to your previous outline again :-) - Claudia Koltzenburg

As for "why only two aspects of paper vs. digital", see also a more detailed list of differences at http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki... . - Daniel Mietchen

thx, mindmap now also up at http://www.mindmappedia.com/..., actually, I like the numerical sorting added underneath - Claudia Koltzenburg

Daniel, now we could also certainly do with an elegant sentence chopper :-) - Claudia Koltzenburg

Yes, the numbering facilitates digestion of the structure. As for sentence choppers, any idea about their presently preferred habitat? - Daniel Mietchen

Just did some further brushing and issued an invitation to comment on the "suggested feature" list, via http://ff.im/8ycL6 . Also, one sentence chopper commented that he does not see a need for intervention. - Daniel Mietchen

I did two (very minor) edits in part 1 ("how did you did that?" => "how did you do that?") and in part 2 (variatinos => variations). - François Dongier

Other than that, I was probably a bit misled by the title of part 2 (knowledge structuring): I was expecting from this title to see more emphasis on the benefits of a shared knowledge structure, and not so much a discussion about the benefits of wikis. Part 2 seems to me to be about "collaborative writing" more than about "structuring knowledge". I do like very much the idea of a "collaboratively created set of interlinked knowledge elements", and I think it deserves further development. It's not clear to me that a wiki is really the best tool for collaborative structuring. I think collaborative mindmapping tools and "thought networking" tools (such as Imindi and Debategraph) are better for the purpose of connecting, structuring and reusing concepts and ideas. - François Dongier

Claudia's mindmap at this stage seems a bit disconnected from Daniel's article. I see interesting ideas there (e.g., analysis of barriers to open accessibility), but I don't see exactly how they fit with the structure of Daniel's article. Ideally, the mindmap should help in making such a fit. - François Dongier

I just wrote in Freemind a quick map with parts 1 and 2 and merged Claudia's map into it (without attempting connections), as well as a link to the "Related posts not cited in article yet". Would be nice to extract the *ideas* from these related posts and fit them somewhere into the map. I uploaded the result to Mindmeister (http://www.mindmeister.com/3016825...). Sorry for using yet another mindmapping tool but I was afraid that sending the map to mindmappedia could mean another couple of days before it got published :-) I saved this as a Wikimap, so feel free to play with it! - François Dongier

I agree that the focus should be on collaborative editing in general, not just on wikis that I happened to single out. Perhaps an integration between wikis, mindmaps and databases would be good - the mindmap gives the overall structure, and each of its nodes links to a wiki article or database entry. I also think that the final blog post would have both the etherpad and the mindmap embedded (possibly even this FF discussion). - Daniel Mietchen

splendid, Francois, & cool you should suggest and use yet another tool (mindmeister) -am waiting for my account activation. Daniel, good idea to embed this FF discussion, I think Cameron's remarks re "possibly also being overly polite" are certainly worth looking into for such an experiment. Has anyone (apart from Francois) tried Imindi or Debategraph? - Claudia Koltzenburg

Just poked around the mind map François has put up (thanks, by the way, for mapping part I too). It is certainly feasible to get its nodes linked to appropriate sections in the blog text version (if we add HTML anchors) or to other places or media anywhere online, and I am tempted to go for it, albeit this will require the part II map to be shrinked once we have finished incorporating its finer details into the text. I also added Cameron's comment and an outline of part III. - Daniel Mietchen

great, thanks for part III - am looking forward to developing this together. I would like to suggest Part 4: 'Open Science' revisited: Which kind of 'openness' and for whom? and link this (see arrow) to the branch 'Open Science' of Part I - well, all went pretty well before 9 o'clock here (St. Petersburg), but since then, access has been interruptive and too slow for such a collaborative project, so, with apologies, I am leaving it at that for the moment. I suggest the 'open accessibility' branch to go into Part 4... can anyone step in, please? I am not actually expecting the connection to be better before midnight. And yes, thanks for adding Cameron's remarks, I do think education and culture do play a big role in all of this. - Claudia Koltzenburg

Great idea. Were you one of the beta-testers of Google Wave? I was in thoughts to do RT, but I have no scientific oriented group. :-) It is not so good to invite everybody on line :-) I shared it with my small group in FB. Do you have a group on LinkedIn? - Slavomira Vladimirova

Bravo Claudia and Daniel, very happy to see the map growing nicely. I've just been looking at the "history view" (there is a toggle button for this at bottom right) that makes it easy to see how the map evolved. By the way, when you are in this "history view", there is a "Revert to this version" option (destructive) that could be a bit dangerous and should be used carefully :-). - François Dongier

I tried to export the Mindmeister map in Freemind format, but this needs a Premium subscription that I don't have yet. The export to PDF is free though and I find the PDF version useful to view the map. - François Dongier

When you look at the map properties, you can find the embed code that could be used to embed the map into the blog post (or the Etherpad document). Still in the map properties, there is a Notifications option ("You can enable email notifications for map changes. Our server will then alert you via email whenever one of the mind maps is modified (ignoring small changes such as text style or branch position."). I had this option enabled but for some reason I haven't received any mail yet from the server telling me about the changes both of you made to the map. - François Dongier

Just did a test embed, so that now the etherpad document, the mindmap and this discussion thread can all be edited from within the same web page (the "invitation" blog post that started this thread). For the target blog post, we should probably display the time slider view instead of the edit view of the etherpad. Would be cool to have another embed of some real data - started a new thread on this one at http://ff.im/8Dyjq . - Daniel Mietchen

Interestingly, I see Mindmeister's ads in Firefox but not in Camino, Safari or Opera. - Daniel Mietchen

Embed in the etherpad seems fine. - François Dongier

When I load http://www.mindmeister.com/maps..., I see no ads in Firefox (probably filtered by the adblock extension), but I do see some ads (book recommendations) with Chrome - don't have adblock there :-( Anyways, even with Chrome I see no ads when looking at the map itself. That would be a pain :) - François Dongier

fixed some of the leftovers from this morning's broken session - I wonder why 'peer review' won't move, seems to have got stuck ;-) yes, and the history view is great. - Claudia Koltzenburg

I usually get an "unresponsive script" error when viewing the history, but it worked once, and this was great. Also re-enabled adblock, and the ads are gone in FF too. And I got the "peer review" branch moved away. - Daniel Mietchen

An update on the timing: The content of the Etherpad document will be transfered back to Wikiversity on Monday (Sep 28) around 11am CEST and from there to the Euroscience blog, where it should be up within a day or so (I cannot edit there myself). - Daniel Mietchen

ok, thanks for announcing this; re co-authoring attribution as part of our experiment: how will the file and its metadata show the microauthoring effects? in wikiversity and then in the Euroscience blog? - Claudia Koltzenburg

the 'Claudia's thoughts'/ 'Claudia Koltzenburg' branch is now in place, too, I guess, i.e., parts of it have either been moved to Part III (the attribution part, thanks, Daniel), or integrated into Part II or moved to become Part IV ('Open Science' revisited: Which kind of 'openness' and for whom?). Thanks, Francois, for having put my original mindmap into this one as was. I think this was useful in order to find out how these aspects might grow and link to any of the aspects in Daniel's previous concept. We might now start marking any ideas that we think need development outside the four-part-grid, maybe. Here I am thinking, e.g., of Francois' suggestions re collaborative work (in his longer comment above, No. 36, I think) - Claudia Koltzenburg

Just did some final brushing. What is still lacking is a few suitable subheadings, ideally linked from the corresponding mindmap nodes. Will give them a try later and also take another look at the still very long list of relevant blog posts not incorporated yet ( http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki... ). Anything else? - Daniel Mietchen

suggested tags: science 2.0, open science, collaborative science, knowledge structuring, wikis - Daniel Mietchen

yupp, thanks, good brushing and good formal additions. Further tag: open access - Claudia Koltzenburg

Final formatting done. http://etherpad.com/ep... is ready to be pasted into the blog. Links from the mind map to the subheadings will be added once we know the URL of the post. - Daniel Mietchen

:-) & thanks - Claudia Koltzenburg

What about turning Part IV into a collaboratively written contribution to Open Access Week (Oct 19-23)? Details via http://www.openaccessweek.org/ . - Daniel Mietchen

like :-) - Claudia Koltzenburg

some items added in Part III - join in at http://www.mindmeister.com/3016825... - Claudia Koltzenburg

Part V: Commodification of academic research: http://friendfeed.com/claudia... (if invented today...) - Claudia Koltzenburg

Francois, for http://www.mindmeister.com/3016825..., can you still see the click counter (which was on 755 when I last saw it) - and I wonder if the history function has disappeared? - Claudia Koltzenburg

Claudia, this seems to be related to whether you are logged in or not: if I just click on the link without logging in (to Mindmeister), then I don't have access to the map history, but I see the click counter (now 771). If I log in, then I can access the history, but it looks like I no longer see the click counter. - François Dongier

thanks, but the history comes with premium membership only, right? sorry, wrong, you talked about it when you did not have a premium membership, either, so I wonder if this depends on the browser? wrong again, sorry, I see the toggle button (and can use it) when I am not logged in - Claudia Koltzenburg

I also saw the counter for now when logged out. - Daniel Mietchen

I just opened up a new thread for part iii in order to facilitate its discussion: http://ff.im/9SvED . I suggest to keep planning the rest here and to start new threads as things proceed. - Daniel Mietchen

Claudia, I still do not have a premium membership and don't think it has impact on viewing the map history. As far as browser goes, I'm using both Firefox and Chrome and haven't noticed a difference between them. Not sure about visibility about the history toggle button: you see it when not logged in, I don't (today at least)... - François Dongier

@Daniel, agreed, @Francois, thanks again - Claudia Koltzenburg