Academia is trapped in a collective action problem: we all know there are better ways we could be doing things, but feel pressured to 'play the game' in order to survive a competitive career in science. Historically, collective action problems like this have been solved with collective action, i.e. the mass uptake of new behaviours that aim to further the group's interests. More recently, online conditional pledge platforms (e.g., Kickstarter) have demonstrated that collective action can be organised on a global scale with zero risk to users, serving to cut out middle-men and directly benefit the users themselves. At present, however, this strategy has yet to take hold in academia.
Project Free Our Knowledge (FOK) aims to rectify this by organising collective action in the research community. Using our platform, researchers can pledge to support open science practices, subject to there being a critical mass of support for the proposed behaviour. If the threshold is achieved, everyone who has pledged is contacted and directed to carry out the action together, thus motivating cultural change with minimal risk to individuals.
If you have an idea for a campaign that hasn't yet been proposed, start thinking about what action you would like people to adopt and how many people you think should do it together. Then we can discuss this when we meet in the hackathon.
Skills:
No skills required, just a healthy desire for change (but would help if people can sign up to Github beforehand)
[x] Goals for the OHBM Brainhack: describe what you want to achieve during this brainhack. See here.
[x] Flesh out at least 2 "good first issues": those are tasks that do not require any prior knowledge about your project, could be defined as issues in a GitHub repository, or in a shared document, cf here.
[x] Skills: list skills that would be particularly suitable for your project. We ask you to include at least one non-coding skill, cf. here.
[x] Chat channel: A link to a chat channel that will be used during the OHBM Brainhack. This can be an existing channel or a new one. We recommend using the Brainhack space on mattermost, cf. here.
[x] Provide an image of your project for the OHBM brainhack website
You can also include information about (all optional):
[x] Someone co-leading the project in the timeslot you have not selected to provide additional visibility.
[ ] Twitter-size summary of your project pitch, cf. here
[ ] Set up a kanban board on your repository to better divide the work and keep track of things, cf here
[ ] Project snippet for the OHBM Brainhack website, cf. here
We would like to think about how you will credit and onboard new members to your project. We recommend reading references from this section. If you'd like to share your thoughts with future project participants, you can include information about (recommended):
[ ] Specify how will you acknowledge contributions (e.g. listing members on a contributing page).
[ ] Provide links to onboarding documents if you have some.
QMENTA has agreed to sponsor the event and provide computational resources through their platform.
[ ] Get in touch with QMENTA through their Brain Innovation Hub Slack space, if you think your project would benefit from their support.
Project info
Title:
Developing collective action campaigns for the human neuroimaging community
Project lead:
Cooper Smout / @coopersmout
Timezone:
UTC+10
Description:
Academia is trapped in a collective action problem: we all know there are better ways we could be doing things, but feel pressured to 'play the game' in order to survive a competitive career in science. Historically, collective action problems like this have been solved with collective action, i.e. the mass uptake of new behaviours that aim to further the group's interests. More recently, online conditional pledge platforms (e.g., Kickstarter) have demonstrated that collective action can be organised on a global scale with zero risk to users, serving to cut out middle-men and directly benefit the users themselves. At present, however, this strategy has yet to take hold in academia.
Project Free Our Knowledge (FOK) aims to rectify this by organising collective action in the research community. Using our platform, researchers can pledge to support open science practices, subject to there being a critical mass of support for the proposed behaviour. If the threshold is achieved, everyone who has pledged is contacted and directed to carry out the action together, thus motivating cultural change with minimal risk to individuals.
Link to project: Website Github Twitter Facebook
Mattermost handle: @cooper_smout
Goals for the OHBM Brainhack
Good first issues:
Skills: No skills required, just a healthy desire for change (but would help if people can sign up to Github beforehand)
Chat channel:
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Image for the OHBM brainhack website
Project submission
Submission checklist
Once the issue is submitted, please check items in this list as you add under 'Additional project info'
Please include the following above (all required):
You can also include information about (all optional):
We would like to think about how you will credit and onboard new members to your project. We recommend reading references from this section. If you'd like to share your thoughts with future project participants, you can include information about (recommended):
QMENTA has agreed to sponsor the event and provide computational resources through their platform.