Stefano Mazzocchi has an interesting essay
that connects to recent discussions of peer review. He argues that
giving a voice to many researchers, rather than to a small number of
established (and busy) researchers, is often a better way of evaluating
the usefulness of research.
I suspect that this holds in general, not just in academic publishing: The set of people who are in the best position to evaluate your work are those who (will) build upon it. In academia, I'd bet that the referees that your paper is assigned to rarely belong to that set.
I took the liberty of naming the page "Montreal social software conference"
because the term has a scope that encompasses blogging and I think an
event like this would be better if it also included the perspective of
wikizens, linkloggers, Flickrers and various others who are also
expressing themselves and connecting to one another via the Web. But maybe we can find a groovier name for the event.
So anyways, go ahead and brainstorm, and if you post about this on your personal site, make sure it appears on the channel!
Naming update: Boris and the gang, who are putting together the Northern Voice
conference in Vancouver, writes: "We originally designed the name of
the conference so that it could (potentially) be re-used for other
similar conferences in Canada. We'd like to offer you the use of the
moose logo or any other collateral material." I like the idea of making
this part of a series. What do others think?
