[Eg-oversight-board] Proposal to research participation architectures in Evergreen

[Ben Shum]

Hi all,

Last year, Michelle Purcell was a student who did a study on design
practices in Evergreen (see:
http://list.evergreen-ils.org/pipermail/eg-oversight-board/2014-October/000900.html).
They have come back again to ask for further research to be conducted.

The following two paragraphs are excerpts from an email sent to Ben
Hyman and forwarded on to me in my role as Evergreen Oversight Board
Chair:

> I wanted to give you a quick status of where I am in my research and ask for your help with a matter closely related to it.  First, I've conducted seven interviews with Evergreen community members and analyzed many, many launchpad wishlist bugs.  In May I had to put my interviewing on hold as I prepared some interim results and worked on finishing my proposal which I am scheduled to defend in August.  Once defended I will resume data collection with your community.  I must say everyone has been most helpful and its been a pleasure talking with them.
>
> On another note, my advisor and I are submitting a grant proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF) based on my research.  While I ultimately plan to finish my PhD regardless of gaining funding from the NSF it would be wonderful to do so as it will help me with funding to complete my studies and raise the visibility of my research.  Earlier this year you provided me with a letter of support to give to my institutional review board.  Again, thank you.  I need to ask again for such a letter as my advisor will be the principle investigator for the grant (I cannot be since I do not have my PhD) and the grant application requires the letter be in her name.  Would you be willing to provide such a letter?  If so, below is a sample form of words you can use.  Please feel free to edit.  In it it refers to the research proposal which I've attached.   Please note that the grant application is due by 8/3/15.  If you could provide the letter by 7/30/15 that would be most helpful.

This next section is an adapted version of the requested letter of
support for the research.  The major change I made was a line where it
read "You may visit our HQ, if arranged in advance, to meet with core
members of the project." where I altered it to allow for the
possibility of multiple site visitations to various community member
groups, since there is no one headquarter site for the community.

=== BEGIN ===

Dear Dr. Gasson,

I have reviewed your research proposal, “Participation Architectures
For Crowdsourced Innovation Communities.” Your research ideas sound
very interesting and could be helpful to our community and others, and
we would like to pursue this work. To this end, we would like to be a
subject site in your research with the understanding that either party
can terminate the relations without cause at any time during the
study.

I understand that you will conduct virtual interviews with community
members and ethnographic observations of the community’s collaboration
processes and information technology use. You may choose to visit with
various community HQ sites, if arranged in advance, to meet with core
members of the project. Other data analyzed will consist of publicly
available data collected from the Internet, e.g., mailing lists, web
pages, issue tracker data, and Internet relay chat logs.

We look forward to seeing your findings and recommendations, as these emerge!

Sincerely,

Benjamin Shum
Chair, Evergreen Oversight Board

=== END ===

So, it's my fault that I wasn't able to act on this much quicker, and
unfortunately this means we have a very short notice on this request
and deadline of tomorrow, 7/30/15.  As such, I'd like to request that
if anyone has any followup questions/discussion prior to voting, to
please make them known as soon as possible.  Otherwise, I would
appreciate getting a quick +1/0/-1 from all the board members so that
we may be able to take immediate action on this.

Thanks you for your consideration.

Cheers,

-- Ben

-- 
Benjamin Shum
Evergreen Systems Manager
Bibliomation, Inc.
24 Wooster Ave.
Waterbury, CT 06708
203-577-4070, ext. 113
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