Social networking for scientists
This session is moderated by Cameron Neylon and Deepak Singh:
It seems that everyone is developing ‘facebooks’ for scientists these days. But they are not catching on. Why? What will make one of them a success one day?
Discuss:
No-one can argue that science communication could be more effective and that scientific research could make better use of the human resources available. Facebook-style services appear to offer a way to rapidly identify potential collaborators, solve specific problems, and build networks of like-minded researchers to tackle specific problems. However the evidence that the many services available are delivering on this promise is slim. There are many possible reasons for this – the communities are too small (and splitting between services doesn’t help this), the interfaces are not sufficiently intuitive or easy to use, or simply that the services being provided are not what most researchers want.
While there are elements of all these problems evident in these services, the moderators fall firmly into the latter camp. We believe that the the concept of a “Facebook for Scientists” is simply not what researchers want. If you disagree, especially if you are a designer or builder for one of these services, come along and argue your corner, preferably with examples and numbers. It’s not that we don’t want these to succeed, it’s that we don’t believe they can. We would be very pleased to be convinced we are wrong!
The session is likely to move towards the question of what sort of “social networking” services are desirable to support research. This will include discussion of document and reference sharing, data repositories and sharing services, and the whole ecosystem of online services that could support a fully networked research effort.
