Hi all
This is an account of the meeting we had in Hull during the recent Virt3c conference which Athina masterfully coordinated.
Personally it was great to catch up with people I had met last year in Manchester and to meet new people
like Biella and others. Also as a result of the conference we have two new members of the SC: Simon Lindgren (Umea, Sweden) and Maurizio Teli (Trento, Italy). Welcome aboard to both!
Were present at the meeting held over lunch on Saturday 20 March: Athina K, Stefan Merten, Johan Soderberg, George Dafermos, Gabriella Coleman, George Michaelides, Maurizio Teli, Simon Lindgren, Raoul Victor, Mathieu O'Neil.
Items discussed:
1.Peer review. After a lot of discussion the following emerged as consensus: having both signaled
and unsignaled papers would be weird. Better to have only one type: signaled. This places the cost of non-publication on the author (if they are too unhappy with their signals they can always pull out).
2.To test this out Athina proposed to do a couple of “pretend” reviews of papers – see how we go.
Everyone liked this idea.
3.George Dafermos indicated that he has some papers which might be usable in this respect. Anyone else please tell us if you have something (either activist or academic).
4.Athina and George Michaelides both proposed variations on an idea that would have unpublished papers be put in a special part of the site where they could be collectively improved (including from outside) until publication. This was uncharitably dubbed the “craphouse option” by Mathieu O'Neil who also expressed doubts about the open-ended nature of this idea.
5.Biella brought up the question of the look and feel of the journal, suggesting that images and possibly
video would be a welcome addition. Stefan Merten and Mathieu put forward a more aesthetically minimalist position (form = function?), and all agreed that a compromise would be necessary. Biella proposed to forward some examples of sites to the list.
6.Finally Johan reminded us that the next AOIR meeting is in Gotheborg where he lives. He thought it might be possible to have a panel about critical peer production stuff.
Some people objected that registration has closed etc. He thought it might be possible to contact the organisers locally anyhow –
@Johan, for me you are the point person there, if that is OK with you. We also have some AOIR folks on this list:
@Alex H if you are reading this, what do you think? Any chance of this eventuating?
Thanks for advising.
That's all I can remember about the meeting.. If anyone wants to complement please do so.
Apart from that I had a few individual discussions about the journal.
Regarding the site:
-I discussed Plone with Stefan. We came to the conclusion that it makes sense to find out more about the parallel projects Toni Prug is involved in. If they make some interesting findings we could use them for this project.
@Toni: is there a way you could keep us informed of any progress made on your side regarding setting up the site? Or of having a dialogue with other people involved? Thanks in advance for any help.
Regarding content:
-Stefan is thinking of doing a two-part activist paper explaining Oekonux.
-Johan has agreed [had his arm twisted] to write a piece on hardware hacking.
-I suggested to Johan that he should write a short couple of paragraphs about his (in my view very cogent)
criticism of Actor-Network Theory. We could gather a gaggle of such short paras into one punchy section of the journal.
-Johan and I started writing a "Declaration of Hull" exposing the aims of the journal but we ran out
of steam very quickly. We agreed that the critical aspect (criticism of the social order) was central. This will have to be combined with some elements already in the CFP for our first editorial.
Next stage: getting a few papers together to start playing. If anyone on the list wants to send
something in that would be great.
Cheers
mathieu
ps. Check out Simon Lindgren's blog for an account and pictures: http://www.simonlindgren.com/
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http://www.oekonux.org/journal