Convener: Melanie Bartos, Austria (@melaniebartos@chaos.social)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

• Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor@mastodon.social)
• Darius Dunlap (@dariusdunlap@indieweb.social)
• Aaron Gray (@AaronNGray@fosstodon.org)
• Tommi (@tommi@pan.rent)
• Mark Corbett Wilson (@mcorbettwilson on Mastodon, X, LinkedIn)
• Ivan (@bernini@social.coop and @bonfire@indieweb.social)
• nigini (@nigini@social.coop)
• Saskia (@saskia@newsmast.social)
• gilles dutilh (@depemig@scicomm.xyz)
• Johanna (@johannab@wandering.shop and @johannab@cosocial.ca)
• Paul Fuxjäger (@cypherhippie@chaos.social)
• Babette Knauer (@Bibliothecaris@social.edu.nl)
• Ulrike Hahn (@UlrikeHahn@fediscience.org)
• Joan Pla (@joanpla@mastodon.social)

Notes

Migration to the Fediverse

• Babette and team is working on a project “academic staff engagement on Mastodon” and has experience writing around it.

Ulrike: “Types of users” introduced by Johannes yesterday. He had a whole typology structure proposed. (See session notes: User Personas of the Fediverse and Social Media)

• Building a community, having an audience, having the possibility to go viral…
• Should institutions consider guarding their science communication more?

Ivan: the governance of open science network.

• Part of the goal on Bonefire is to co-design the space with scientists.

nigini: when you try to discuss this concept with insitutions, it is very hard…

• Maybe the difficulty is around power-sharing, concerns about branding, etc.

Ulrike: university, researchers, and sicence communications goals are not necessarily aligned.

Isn’t it a win-win-win when you (as the university) provide such public intrastructure?

Darius: maybe that is not the role of the institution to provide such infrastructure? Maybe some of this infrastructure should be brought by professional organizaitons that focus on a topic or area of study?

Mark: what it boils down to is agency… as an education institutional responsibility, are you supporting your students (when you are not meeting them in the world they live in, i.e., social media?)

Gilles: killer app - open access publishing.

• Babette: that is (obviously) the goal of our proposal as librarians: the academic community needs to take back control of the publication process (diamond open access).
• Gilles: one bit of power we have as researchers, only review work that is to be published with open access.

Joan: Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment: https://coara.eu/

Extralink: Mastodon Pilot

Social media platform nurturing collaboration across Stanford faculty https://uit.stanford.edu/service/mastodon-faculty-pilot

Some selected quotes from chat:

Babette: University of Groningen Library; our transition to Mastodon and including open science principles in our mastodon approach strategy: https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0290-opus4-190172

Dan Gillmor: Public affairs (PR) people at universities (at least the one where I worked) want reach, not conversation.

ulrikehahn: My sense is that the three functions need to be separated out or at least separable into different spaces: one for science to general public comms, one for thoughtful peer to peer discussion and one for a brand focused kind of communication (here’s our conference, here’s my prize).

Johanna: I am a grad student rather than teacher/researcher, but I’ve been in and out of continuing education since the 90’s. I’ve observed a huge shift in how academics interact with audiences, and a proliferation of communications modalities. In too many cases, there’s a cart-leading-horse problem where the available communications forum becomes the framework into which the communication must fit.

Johanna: Academic comms HAVE to be multi-modal if you have any focus on any category of learner, though.

Johanna: Mastodon is not an adequate platform in itself, for sure.

BjornW In the NL there is already a pilot from SURF which allows institutions to test this federated stuff out :)

Johanna: Federation is AWESOME and I think activityPub is a protocol that could accommodate all of it, but the services and apps need to be tailored - and nobody has come up with a higher level specification for academia-specific services. Except maybe for what we saw just last hour in the flash demo - I’m really keen to watch what Bonfire-based servers can do.

ulrikehahn: I think there is a very different focus on public goods in the anglo-sphere as there is in continental Europe.

Jan Douma: Europe appreciates the value of education. US is in the grip of a fascist movement that wants to disempower education.

ulrikehahn: different emphasis/beliefs about what it is the role of the state to provide, and with that different evaluations of how broken or not current systems of online social media are, for example. This links back to things discussed yesterday.

Jan Douma: The whole take back control of what you are producing–how far along is that around the world? Are there still Unis stuck with commercial pubs?

Dan Gillmor: In the U.S. – far too many.

Jan Douma: Are there many independently published journals that are considered higher echelon?

ulrikehahn: It’s deeply entrenched, Dan.

ulrikehahn: There are journals from learned societies that are top journals in their field. Unfortunately many of those also moved to commercial publishers in the last 20 years

Jan Douma: Seems like Fedi could offer publishing platforms at least.

Gilles Dutilh: Indeed. Getting rid of the ridiculous “3 random reviewers looked at this, now it’s fixed and true forever”.

ulrikehahn: I think the goal has to be to build interoperability with the various systems people have been building in the context of the scientific reform movement. We don’t need to invent stuff from scratch.

Babette Knauer: But change is here: so- called flipped journals that moved from a commercial publisher to taking matters into their own hands.

Johanna: There certainly are blogging platforms and some in the offing to compete with substack/medium. but funding and marketing are always rocky. Academic support departments could be leveraged to help in sourcing, implementing, and participating in development of such things, but they need a mandate - and resources - from above to stand those up.

Jan Douma: We need to meet needs. If we get one hot function that brings everyone here, it will be a lot easier to introduce them to other functions.

Dan Gillmor: Thanks for a great session. See everyone later…

Johanna: Even something like a mandate at the Senate level of an institution that “all communications should be on open standards based platforms/servers” would be a starting point. Then fund the infrastructure.

ulrikehahn: Want to push back a bit on Mark’s comments about ‘academics’ and ‘senior academics’ - there is huge variability in what institutions prioritise across countries. My uni spends hundreds of thousands on Moodle which is an environment for online communication with students. But there is nothing at all for academics science comm.

ulrikehahn: Maybe also useful to know that UK academics don’t have tenure (abolished by Thatcher) and professorial secretaries are a thing of the past.

Mark: I realize institutions are lagging in support for all involved. And in California the majority of academics are not tenured - that raises the issue of support for part timers.

Johanna: I would LOVE to see an AP-based peer review and publication system. The research products themselves would need to be secured and embargoed through the process, but if we want to get out of Elseviers’, etc, controls, there could be a workflow system on an open protocol for prepub, review, feedback, and eventual publication.