A good post from Integral Awakening:
Integral Criticism: The Solution Is Easy
"Response through authentic, unbiased, research".
The problem - this type of research takes time, from what is already a very busy life - and then, there is little compensation, outside of a "job well done".
So - despite the Integral Wiki, despite the great work being done at the P2P Foundation, despite the various integral groups - the integral research project seems to stay the province of the charismatic leaders, the "try this method" people, and the ruminations of the philosophically-oriented.
I'm thinking about ways to encourage a greater, more practical participation - what are others thoughts?
Who has a lot of time to add to either the Integral Wiki, or integral stuff to the main wiki? Who has time to participate in a online research project.
Now, that would be pretty easy to create. Say 40 people in the world - 50, maybe - decide to do the 1 Minute modules every day, for 90 days. detailing the experience, say, to Google Spreadsheets (shared). During, and after, the spreadsheets can be downloaded, put into either Access, or another database, and statistical analysis run.
That is how EASY it would be, for people to participate. But even then, who has the time?
There needs to be some carrot, I think, for this stuff. Peer to peer Foundation began discussing various ways to incentivize the wisdom of the crowds.
I wonder if this could be done with this type of integral research?
One idea would be, perhaps, some type of community blog, for the research participants, that would publish interesting content, at the same time detailing some of the results. Then, you add Google Ads, and others, to the site.
Micropayments for participation would probably run in the cents, to the tens of dollars - but there is at least a measurable carrot, no matter how small.
Of course, you would need to attract enough of an audience to have the site pay for itself - and on top of that have extra! Which is hard to do!
On the other hand, you can now get a SCOOP community site, for less than 20/month. That would be easy to raise (or simply pay for) and any extra, again, wouldn't be so much for "making" money, just to have a measurable carrot.
At any rate, it's a good question - participatory integral research projects, that use the web, and pay for themselves.
Any ideas?
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Integral Research, Google Notebook, Wiki's, Time, and Finance
Comments
Re: Integral Research, Google Notebook, Wiki's, Time, and Finance
Hmmm. I'm just wondering, even if we did online research, how well respected is that kind of research in the larger world? Not that it couldn't reveal some interesting patterns, but how well controlled are those research projects? Would the research be solid enough to actually affect integral theory?
My own sense, is that a research organization (or organizations) will need to be formed and have as it's main focus conducting, coordinating, and inspiring specific research projects. I'm thinking Mind and Life institute but geared towards integral-related research. Maybe holding a large conference each year that then inspires new research organizations to arise. For instance, partially as a result of the mind & life work, Alan Wallace was able to connect up with and set up the Santa Barbara Institute of Consciousness which is now doing heavily respected research with top-notch professionals in their field. I don't see why there shouldn't be something equivalent in the integral world, but maybe that'll just take time. In the meantime it might be really helpful to lay the groundwork for that kind of heavy duty research (the kind that could be published in major journals and could either contribute to or completely modify certain theoretical ideas) by doing web research. I'd be down, just as long as it was clear what I was contributing too, why it was helpful, and how much it would take from me. Good stuff! Re: Integral Research, Google Notebook, Wiki's, Time, and Finance
by
Kent Bye
on Fri 17 Nov 2006 07:59 AM PST | Permanent Link
Great idea.
This overlaps with a lot of what I'm doing with The Echo Chamber Project with collaborative editing. So a quick thought. There is the concept of Power Law of participation, which I talk more about in the concept of collaborative audio/film editing here. The idea is that there are small granular tasks that can be added up in interesting ways. In increases from passivity to activity where context and meaning also increases -- for example, Read / Listen / Watch media object, favorite, rate, tag, comment, subscribe, share, network, blog, playlist (and then onto Refract, Collaborate, Moderate and Lead). Digg.com uses the favorite up/down mechanism. Del.icio.us uses the tagging mechanism YouTube uses read, favorite, rate, comment, subscribe, share, playlist Each of these sites taps into the wisdom of the crowd by doing some post-filtering on websites and videos to great effect because they've reached a critical scale. The challenge that you laid out is achieving the same type of network effects with smaller clusters, but these tools above can already start to be used above with their buddy systems. I think a good starting point is to ask: "What itch do you want to scratch that you can't scratch yourself?" This is the carrot mechanism that makes open source projects work. Finding the common problem that people are trying to solve is what incentivizes people to participate. BTW, Drupal also offers all of this functionality above as well. Trackbacks
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