The Personal Research Portal: Web2ForDev

My proposal for a thematic showcase for the Web2forDev – Participatory Web for Development conference has been accepted. Thus, I’d be presenting The personal research portal: web 2.0 driven individual commitment with open access for development in Rome next 25th to 27th September, 2007.

As you might have noticed, this communication is quite similar to the one I’ll be presenting in York three weeks before. But, even if the abstract applies for both presentations, the focus is quite different.

In York the focus will be on research and diffusion of research. So, the stress will be, in one hand, in scholarly networking and old and new ways of knowledge sharing and building among colleagues. On the other hand, and over all, the stress will be put in self-archiving and self-publishing as parallel ways of scientific diffusion, dealing also with old and new ways of peer review. Put short: I’ll speak about the concept over the tools.

In Rome the focus will be on open access for development. There, the stress will be on new ways to access scientific knowledge by developing countries’ researchers and, reversely, on digital identities, networking and presence on the Net by these researchers. Put short: I’ll speak about the tools over the concept.

On one hand I’m afraid I won’t be able to explain really brand new things from one conference to the other one — they’re just 20 days away one from each other. On the other hand, I believe there is so much to be explored in the field of web 2.0 and how these concept and tools can be applied to research and development (a different thing?), that the potential debate will provide what I might be lacking of, hence I expect to come back home full of new learning, ideas and interesting input.

Update:
Eric Gundersen will also attend the conference, presenting Portal 2.0: Using Social Software to Connect Geographically Dispersed Teams, which seems to have a pretty similar approach to my paper. Shouldn’t miss it! :)

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If you need to cite this article in a formal way (i.e. for bibliographical purposes) I dare suggest:

Peña-López, I. (2007) “The Personal Research Portal: Web2ForDev” In ICTlogy, #45, June 2007. Barcelona: ICTlogy.
Retrieved month dd, yyyy from https://ictlogy.net/review/?p=558

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1 Comment to “The Personal Research Portal: Web2ForDev” »

  1. I love the idea of “personal research portals” to in essence let people have smarter “notebooks.” After seeing my friends start wikis when they went back to school to manage their ever evolving pile of research, I am convinced this could work for people in a professional setting. If I were to do it again, I would log all the research I did for masters thesis in a wiki and bookmark my sources in del.icio.us to make it publicly available. Then people could stumble upon it and either benefit from it or give me leads :).

    I’m spoiled now that my team has set up a Drupal (open source CMS) based intranet that has a wiki and an internal blog. Our next step is to get Google gears working so we can use the tools while we’re offline and then have them sync back up when we re-connect.

    I look forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback on the functionality we are building in the portals that we create for development agencies.

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