Partially Attended

I’ve started working my way through The Surprising Power of Liberating Strucutres - a hand book of techniques for collaborative work. So far I’ve tried one technique from the book - one two four all. The idea is super simple and is an alternative to open brain storming or post-it note sessions. Before describing the technique with a few comments, I’ll just point out one of the weaknesses of a group work activity like a group retrospective. ... (more)

Over the last few weeks I’ve been writing up some thoughts on the uses of blockchain in STEM. The first post I gave a general overview of my understand of blockchain. In the second post I looked at potential use cases of blockchain in STEM, and came up somewhat short. That said, a lot, really, a lot of very smart people are talking about this, and doing things in this space, so in this post I wanted to look at a few of those efforts and see how their thinking lines up or diverges from mine. ... (more)

eLife is trying another experiment in peer review. When they launched back in 2012 they introduced a form of peer review known as consultative peer review. They are now looking at a new iteration on the peer review idea. Trials in how peer review is done are quite rare, so I think this is going to be interesting to keep track of. The new idea is that once an article has been accepted for full review by one of the editors, the journal is going to publish the article, along with all comments. ... (more)

The following is not about scholarly communication, but is a post about one tool from the world of product development, how to think about marketing your product or service so that you can cross the chasm. Academic researchers are simultaneously the most innovative and conservative of users. There is so much pain in the process of academic research that there is a constant re-invention and invention of tools and proceeds, but at the same time there is also a huge time pressure, so for any new tool, technique or service to get wide spread traction is really hard in the academic market place. ... (more)

Distill is an experiment in bringing interactive documents and scholarly documents together. I’m often asked what the future of publishing might look like, and were we to embrace what the web offers it might look like distill. Two things though, make it look like a nice product. Right now paper flow into this journal is very low, and secondly they have advertised a large prize to attract work in this format. ... (more)

A startup to help you fast-track you grant application process. The hard thing here is building a robust and clean pipeline of info about grants. https://www.instrumentl.com/ ... (more)

https://www.cypress.io/ ... (more)

This is a great post on using the jobs to be done framework. There are two specific enhancements that are discussed - how to weight those jobs, and how to use granularity of the jobs to aid the design process (less granularity gives more freedom in the design phase). The authors wanted to use surveys to get a sense of importance of the under served needs, but in the end had to resort to a simple variant of card sorting. ... (more)

I think what these people are doing is creating human readable summaries of large corpora of documents or signals based on AI. At some point this kind of approach is going to mature to the point of being able to replace many traditional editorial functions, but its going to happen in finance first. https://narrativescience.com/ ... (more)

This is a great overview of the sate of designing for voice. Ben is one the best designers / tech thinkers that I’ve ever worked with, and he gives a great overview of how to think about designing for voice in this talk. <a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSFkRG_ZMKo>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSFkRG_ZMKo ... (more)