for a talk to Life Itself, 2024-05-03 the talk dwells on the twin themes of collectivity and questions

1. A vision for regenerative
research knowledge commons
“Collectivity and Questions”
by Simon Grant
Life Itself Research, 2024-05-03
(These slides at https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Wso7m-yTC9n-k2m-APQnjU47RkzwDuzXRwhvPpb8s_4/edit?usp=sharing )

2. What would really help L I regenerative research?
Speaking for myself (and to me this seems true across many research fields)…
● Ease of finding key references and past work in my areas of interest
● Knowing who else is interested in the topics that interest / concern me
● Seeing other people’s perspectives about existing publications
○ particularly video and audio which I don’t have time to watch or listen to all of
● Being able to see and consider the questions others think are important
● Help with crafting research questions and agenda that engage others
Please send anything else to me!

3. A wiki for this research knowledge commons
● Can we arrange all this associated knowledge in a wiki?
○ Not only can we use the information, but also participate, in a community of practice
○ It offers ease of use for all potential collaborators
○ By design, easy to link and see backlinks
● So what do we want on a wiki? A very basic ontology for research…
○ “Publications” of all kinds: any good quality knowledge resource that is openly accessible
○ People: authors and participant researchers together, as some of us are both
○ Terms for the topics we are collectively interested in
○ Emerging and evolving research questions
● Would that (substantially) cover your needs?
○ Would you benefit from these?
○ Would you be able and willing to contribute?
○ What is missing?
○ Answers to me please!

4. Publications
Beyond the normal bibliographic stuff, wouldn’t it be helpful if someone else could
go through a paper, a video, or whatever, and point out the parts they found most
useful? Better still, if several people did, so you weren’t relying on one opinion?
And then, give their comments, links, and the questions that come up?
And add not just any keywords, but the terms most relevant to the wider field in
which you and your research colleagues work?

5. People: authors, participants, et al
As you’d expect: names, affiliations, interests.
Publications could be linked, but will anyway appear as backlinks.
Collective commentary is easy enough: what others appreciate or suggest.
But questions… perhaps most useful to start with the page owner writing about the
questions that are most of interest.

6. Terms; topics; tags; categories
Categorisation is complex. Taxonomy / folksonomy?
Who manages the term pages?
● May be a real need for dialogue (I call it ontological commoning)
● Someone needs to host this dialogue, as well
● Short neutral explanations, clarifications and disambiguation will be welcome
on term pages: not far from Wikipedia culture, but more open.
Links go to rather than from a term page.

7. Research questions
The quality of research is often proportionate to the quality of research question.
Good research questions are of genuine interest to researchers and others, but
they are not easy for individuals to formulate alone. Hence the detailed processes
to develop questions
● Participants raise questions in commentary on different pages
● Any other participant may endorse it and move it to “emergent questions”
● A research group may promote it to a top-level research question
● An individual researcher may add it to their own page
● Top-level questions may be addressed by subsequent publications

8. So what’s this about collectivity and questions?
● Collectivity selects and refines research questions to be the most relevant and
engaging they can be.
● Good quality questions bring people together in collective research, through
sharing a research interest in the question
● Research collectives can themselves be deliberately developmental
● Collectivity moves us away from individualism and competition to cooperation
○ opinion; perspective; dialogue
○ collaboration: forming groups and teams
○ peer support and study groups
● “Asynchronous collective refinement of research questions” you could say
● All points towards a Second Renaissance

9. Thank you for your interest!
Please let me know now or later if you would
● like to help set this up, in whatever smaller or bigger way
● if you would like to participate when it is set up
This will be better, the wider its scope, so I will be looking for other groups
Can we, collectively, constitute a broad regenerative research network, to set up
and govern / steward / host this initiative? Let’s bring in as many aligned research
groups as we can find and persuade!
I’ll set up a wiki as soon as I find a good name — please suggest…
My fuller piece on this is at https://wiki.simongrant.org/doku.php/d:2024-04-28