[TOS] Bridging research and implementation in open source

[David Humphrey]

> I like your three groups model.  I think it's sensible and worth pursuing. 
>  Having said that, I think the motivation issues for the faculty still 
> remain.  While those of us that lean toward practical application might 
> think that your "research" group would want to advise on how to implement 
> their results, many researchers simply do not care about implementation. 
> And perhaps more importantly, any time spend advising for implementation 
> is likely to take away from further research, and not likely to advance 
> tenure and promotion cases.  Similarly, for the third group, the teachers, 
> time spent on open source may be hard to come by for a teaching faculty 
> member.  The root problem here is that most faculty are pretty stretched, 
> and the reward systems faculty work under are very narrowly defined.

I think you're right, and I'd extend it again: open source projects are 
similarly stretched thin, and developers good enough to know how to do 
this sort of impl are going to be too busy to do it; and, for projects 
that are experiments, perhaps not motivated to make the effort.

For all these reasons, I think we need people who span one or more of 
these groups.  I find it amazing that a person would do research and not 
care about seeing it come to the world, but let's assume this to be true 
for the sake of argument: if the researcher herself doesn't care about 
this, do we have a person who can understand her research *and* would be 
  willing to advise on implementation?  Or, do we pick work that *does* 
have someone who cares enough to advise on implementation?  Maybe that's 
the proper measure of consideration.

We'll hit the same sort of issues in the other groups.  For example, in 
Mozilla, I spend a lot of time helping connect students to projects and 
people.  The project as a whole is often indifferent to their presence 
until they are working and have an issue, a patch that needs review, 
etc.  So I am able to situate them, because I straddle the project and 
academia, getting them into project work that I know will have traction 
in the community, and academic value at the same time.

So that means a group of people who can tie these three (or more if 
students are distributed across schools):

* Researcher/Research <--> Practical Application to Open Source Project
* Open Source Project (core) <--> Implementation work for applied research
* Applied Research work on project <--> teacher(s)/students

I favour lightweight structures, and don't want this to come-off as a 
design for a formal bureaucracy.  However, if we had these various 
bridges, plus some ability to connect them back to each other (TOS could 
do this), we could consider the sorts of larger more interesting work 
I'm suggesting.

In addition, I favour models that situate work within the community vs. 
trying to form an external group to work at arm's length.  It is much 
easier to get things done if you are working within the framework of the 
community.

> I'd also note that your three group model reminds me of Boyer's 4 
> scholarships model.  (Boyer, Ernest L. “Scholarship Reconsidered: 
> Priorities of the Professoriate” The Carnegie Foundation for the 
> Advancement of Teaching.  1990.)  Your group 1, researchers, lines up with 
> Boyer's scholarship of discovery; Group 2 with Boyer's scholarship of 
> integration, and Group 3 is related to scholarship of teaching.  Your 
> group-spanning "connective tissue" people even relate somewhat to Boyer's 
> fourth scholarship, scholarship of integration. 
> 
> The Boyer work was triggered to a large extent by the narrowing of the 
> reward system for higher education faculty that occurred starting around 
> 1940.  The result is to define "scholarship" as being almost exclusively 
> "research" (scholarship of discovery).  Boyer argues for recognition of 
> his other 3 scholarships as being equally valid as scholarship that should 
> be rewarded.  The Boyer model is highly cited, but it hasn't had the major 
> impact on higher education that one might have hoped.  If this model had 
> been widely and sincerely adopted, we might not be having this discussion.

This is interesting, and new to me.  Thanks for point it out.

Dave