Hi Jeroen,

Thanks for pointing this out and the ramifications of this to the proper functioning of FORCE11. I think we may need to do something about our membership directory.

thanks,

Paul

Somehow I completely missed the above discussion last year. I come back to it now because while looking at the member directory I saw so many Force members from my own university that I never come across in local discussions on scholarly communication. I used the member directory to find out if a kind of Dutch satellite event for the Scholalrly Commons working group was a viable idea. That's how I found that exactly half of the 82 Dutch members registered between 17 and 27 February last year, during the 1K Challenge voting. I also saw that apart from 8 family members, 11 voters were recruited from the Utrecht School of Economics where Werner works. Without repeating all that has already been said and led to a new system in 2016 I would like to list how this (still) compromises the functioning of Force11.

1. The directory is polluted with people who probably are not very interested in Force11, let alone become active for it.
2. The directory has fake names
3. The directory has people that registered twice
4. The directory has many people without affiliation
5. People may have thought that extra outreach for Force11 in the Netherlands was not necessary because of the high number of members, thus preventing real progress for Force11 here
6. Planning an event is more difficult if the directory is polluted

One final thought I would like to share: in the aftermath of Force2015 I was quite surprised to see so many votes for Werners idea, which I thought was not that special, also because it lacked any ideas on how to reach its goal. I recall having seconds thoughts at the time about how smart Force11 people were if they flocked to support this idea. But with perhaps 41 of 46 votes being recruited I now am glad to say that after all Force people are a smart bunch, so apologies for having second thoughts back then. This is how the unethical voting behaviour compromised and still compromises our community.

How many sollicited? A few?

Would still be interested to know what "very few" means. More than a year later, when going through the membership directory I find 41 people from the Netherlands who have signed up between 17 and 27 February 2015, including 8 family members and 11 members of the Utrecht School of Economics where you work. But my guess would be that these 41 were all sollicited and there may have been more who since ended their Force11 membership and of course those that did not act on the plea to vote for this idea. No one can prove how many of these voted for your idea. My guess would be 41. Deduct that from 46 votes. Still, no rules were broken and I believe that entering the challenge was done with full integrity. It's just that solliciting should not play a role in deciding what idea holds the most for Force11 and its goals. Finally, I am still interested to learn how you would put the ideas into practice.

To me this sums it all up. This is not about rules, but about ethics. I never understood canvassing. I get a lot of requests to vote for something. They all go "please vote for our project to win this competition". I never act on that, even if they come from my best fiends or colleagues. I simply do not grap what they are thinking when they are asking around. I also feel offended and not taken seriously, as in my book they approach me because they think I may be willing to act unethically. When I ask them about that they mostly tell me not to take it so seriously, that it's just a game. 

So let's make this less of a game. My suggestion would be to – even if we keep this fully within the conference or restricted to pre-contest members – go a little bit beyond voting and ask voters to add three lines of what they think are the TWO best entries and why they think one the these two really is the best. That way it will be more difficult to canvass and the community gets an idea of what people see in a project and how it might fit the goals of Force11.

The other side of the coin

BioMed Central retracting 43 papers for fake peer review

Thanks for this, Sebastian! I totally agree.

Fully open process

In addition, you make the process fully open, such that everyone knows who has reviewed what (hence, not like the challenge, which has been called 'open' erroneously). You can even create a system in which reviewing is honored and/or rewarded in some way. In the end, you voluntarily contribute to academia by doing that.

That's an interesting assumption about whether the number of peers will outweigh non peers. I thinks it's unclear if this will be the case.