Re: Newsletter & Call for Papers WebSci'18

Hi Hugh, and everyone.

This is a great query, which I'd like to address:

On 2018-02-21 11:25, Hugh Glaser wrote:
> I am not sure what a public response of this sort to the CFP achieves (rather than a private message to the CFP poster), other than an attempt to publicly shame, which doesn't seem appropriate on the Semantic Web mailing list.

The real target of these messages is not you, me, or even the seniors,
professors, directors, conference organisers, programme committees, and
so on.

This is for the *next generation* of researchers and developers who are
following along or will hopefully read this up one day. They are the
ones who will be the change. We are only setting the stage for them to
follow through.

Of course I do hope that these ideas and the problems we are dealing
with resonate with more people. Hence, a plea for the "seniors" to
permit their "junior" colleagues to push forward. To grow their team
with a different set of ideals and awareness! Many already have for a
long time, and many are making that shift.

Neither do I actually expect these conferences/journals that have kept
their approach for so long to change overnight. As long as researchers
are constrained in how they communicate their knowledge, and how that
knowledge can be disseminated, no amount of activism here or elsewhere
will change that.

The purpose of these threads is purely about creating awareness and
building a mental infrastructure.

One by-product of all these conversations is the archival and
documentation of the state of affairs. The mere existence of this thread
shows that we are talking about this stuff, some of us are still
concerned about it, some of us are making our little contributions to
improve things.

I'm thankful for this community and the feedback that I've received. It
has indeed help me immensely - in more ways than I can express here - to
mature my ideas and join them with the others, as well as the support to
continue to pursue my principles. The evolution of these mailing list
threads serve as documentation and evaluation. It is not unique to this
mailing list; it has been going on over countless mailing lists over
several decades. If the ideas at their core are not sound, that would've
been clear by now.

And regarding the repetitiveness of my responses to CfPs over the years.
This is true. I like to keep these issues in peoples' consciousness. I'm
troubled by the typical one-way communication that these announcements
are made and their effects on the community. There tends to be little
discussion about community practices regarding conferences, and the real
decisions tend to made by a small circle of people that are content to
maintain the status-quo. I'd like to continually remind people to get
involved with influencing these processes wherever they can; to keep it
on the radar, and remind people that these processes can be questioned.

> Yes, Sarven, you are a valued member of the Semantic Web community, and so we are all interested in what you are doing, and this is the list you should be using to share it (that is genuine - there is no irony or sarcasm intended).

Thank you. Indeed, scholarly communication *is* precisely what I'm
working on. Critiquing assumptions and norms conferences in the
[Semantic] Web domain is me sharing my ideas and their evolution with
the list. They have matured, and they've had some impact - however
small. I am more than happy to take the technical aspects up a notch.

As others have pointed out, we can't separate technology from its social
implications. The Web is inherently social, as are academic processes,
and this mailing list is no exception! Voicing these ideas and prompting
others to do so is as important (if not more so) than developing tooling
and standards.

Thanks once more to all who have continued this discussion with their
various perspectives. These are all steps forward.

-Sarven
http://csarven.ca/#i

Received on Wednesday, 21 February 2018 14:33:09 UTC