#What's an Honest Policy Informatician To Do?
The topic of this article is the relationship between evidence and beliefs in public policy discussions.
But this is also an experiment in collaborative group writing. We are inviting anyone to help us write and improve this article by joining us on GitHub. Rather than deciding beforehand who the list of authors will be and then working together to write the article - by emailing, for example, subsequent versions of Word documents with track changes enabled to each other - we are opening this writing process to anyone interested. Our objectives are first, to try and write a good article, but also to test a number of hypotheses, namely that:
- a group of academic authors can come together using the GitHub platform to collaboratively author an academic article that is successfully submitted to a reputable peer-reviewed journal of the group's choosing,
- discussions amongst the group members can be accommodated entirely on the GitHub platform (i.e., the repo's wiki, issues and pull requests),
- the article can be written in under 2 months from the date that it is publicly deployed to the date it is ready for submission to a journal,
- GitHub's network metrics (need additional information) in combination with the evaluation of the participating group members can be used to determine order of authorship,
- being listed as an author, in order of contribution, will provide sufficient incentive for potential authors to contribute,
- group decisions, including changing any of the "rules of the game", can be made by the members of the group using principles of consensus decision-making.
An evaluation of these hypotheses in light of this experiment will be the subject of a subsequent article using the same process used to write this article.
We fully anticipate that persuading colleagues to participate in this experiment will not be easy; but we believe that there is enormous potential in this approach. Above all, however, this is truly an experiment - we don't know what will happen. Will the group fragment and fail to meet its objective? Will conflicts be unresolvable? Will authorship become too contentious to determine? Can traditional academic incentives attached to authorship be accommodated within GitHub? Will anyone contribute? Will too many show up?
Needless to say - well, maybe we should make this explicit - this experiment can be freely forked by anyone to write a different article, or for a different collaborative process, using the framework we set out here or modified to how you see fit. Perhaps you can think of better rules, or a more interesting topic (though we doubt it), or you think you can write a better version of this article than us and get it published first. As Abby Hoffman wrote: "Fork this Repo!" If you do fork it for another, similar, collaborative writing purpose, we would simply encourage you to join us in the second stage of this experiment: i.e., analyzing and writing up the results.
###Contributing
You can raise issues, issue a pull request or contribute to the wiki. We are not concerned with who you are or how significant you think your contribution is. Start by pionting out a typo. Then dive in to more significant changes.
First Time on GitHub? Don't Know Where to Start? First thing is to Sign Up for GitHub.
After you have a GitHub account you can go straight to the article and start writing. Don't worry - you won't break anything (probably). When you're done, you'll see a little square in the top right hand corner - click on it and you should probably be able to figure your way along from there.
But if you want to learn a bit about GitHub first, try our beginner tutorial.
A key guideline for contributing: GitHub is not an ideal platform for text collaboration. One big limitation is that multiple changes to one file submitted in a pull request cannot be selectively "accepted" as with, for example, a Word document. To accommodate this, changes submitted as pull requests should be limited to one line or, at most, one paragraph. For more substantial changes (e.g., discussions about major structural changes), you can raise an issue or talk about it on the wiki.
###Rules for Participating
- participation is open to any interested person with the technical means to connect to and edit the repository.
- contributions must be made through GitHub. Contributors must have their own GitHub account.
- anyone who makes a contribution (regardless of magnitude or perceived importance) automatically becomes a member of the group (these are listed as contributors in GitHub). A member may choose to resign their membership at any time. Membership can be revoked using the consensus decision making process of the group.
- a limited subset of contributors will have enhanced administrator rights beyond those of contributors (these are called collaborators in GitHub). This is to ensure that a number of group members can perform functions such as merging pull requests on behalf of the group (collaborators cannot act without the consent of the group). Collaborators initially will be members of the Arizona State University Center for Policy Informatics, but subsequent collaborators will be added based on the wishes of the group.
- members of the group "own" an equal share of the repository regardless of when they join or the magnitude or significance of their contribution. Note, however, that the entire repository is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, so ownership conveys very little benefit to any individual member.
- the group has the ability to decide what constitutes authorship (e.g., contributions above a certain threshold). This decision must be made by consensus.
- order of authorship (or some other means of identifying relative contributions) will be determined by the group members (using a process to be determined).
- group decisions, including changing any of the "rules of the game", will be made by the members of the group using principles of consensus decision-making.
###Licensing Except as otherwise noted, this honest-pi repo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This does not mean unlicensed. Please ensure you understand what this license entails before forking or otherwise attempting to work with the contents of this repo in another space.