Hello,
Would you like to help write a CHI 2012 paper about massively distributed authorship of academic papers? If so, please email me with the subject line "CHI Collaborative Paper" and I'll add you to the Google Doc, then you can add yourself to the author list and help write the paper. We'd be happy to have dozens or even hundreds of authors. The initial draft of the abstract and a timeline for the process are included below. We will be establishing any additional rules as we go along.
For more information about how this process will unfold, please look over the current draft of the paper. I'm happy to add you to the Google Doc even if you just want to read the draft. If you can think of a better way to do any part of it, please edit the document! Or, if you want a smaller role, you can look for a spot where there are just some notes, and start fleshing it out. If you come from a different disciplinary background, feel free to write about how your discipline would approach a given topic differently.
In addition, please invite other people whom you think could make valuable contributions - just go the "sharing" button at the top right of the Google Doc, add their email addresses, make sure "can edit" is selected so they can invite others too, and paste this message into the "personal message" box.
Thanks very much for your participation!
-Bill Tomlinson
Associate Professor of Informatics
University of California, Irvine
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wmt
wmt@uci.edu
DRAFT OF ABSTRACT (as of 19 July 2011)
This paper presents a model for massively distributed collaborative authorship of academic scholarship. The paper was written by a collective of authors gathered via snowball sampling - a few initial authors sent an invitation to members of their professional and social networks, who were then free to invite others. Together, the collective used the process of writing the paper as a way to discover, negotiate, and document relevant issues that emerged in the process, as well as potential issues that might emerge with papers about different topics, for different disciplines, and by different groups of authors. Starting from a minimal set of constraints, the collective established key tools and rules that would be necessary, sufficient, and/or useful to the process. Key issues that were seen to be discipline-specific were flagged as such, and specific means of addressing those issues for the CHI/CSCW communities were proposed. The broader goal of the project is to lay the foundation for a new kind of scholarship in which fluid and large scale teams can bring their collective expertise and enthusiasm to bear on a range of academic disciplines.
TIMELINE
Now through 1 September 2011: Paper writing.
1 September 2011 (~3 weeks before deadline): All substantive additions and modifications to the text must be completed.
7 September 2011 (~2 weeks before deadline): The corresponding author (currently Bill Tomlinson) will send a final copy of the text to all authors. This version will include all authors who match the criteria determined in the paper, in the correct order (to the best of the abilities of the corresponding author). No changes may be made to the text, with the following exceptions: plagiarism, grammatical errors, and similar issues. This version will allow all authors to have a chance to read the paper and decide whether to remain on the author list, move themselves to the acknowledgments, or remove themselves altogether. Contesting of proper ordering of authors is also appropriate at this stage. If the paper is sufficiently incomplete/disastrous that the corresponding author does not wish to have his name attached to it, he will ask if there is anyone else who wants to lead the effort instead.
14 September 2011 (~1 week before deadline): All authors who wish to remain on the author list will notify the corresponding author via email of their decision whether or not to remain on the paper. This stage is “opt-in”: if an author does not send an email, it will be assumed that that author has not read the final version, and does not wish to have his/her name attached to it.
21 September 2011: A release candidate of the paper will be completed. The corresponding author will upload it to the CHI submission site, and circulate it to all authors. Only serious errors (plagiarism, etc.) will be corrected at this stage.
23 September 2011: The paper will be submitted to CHI 2012.