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Radically Transparent Research: Show Me The Codes
Mel Chua – Readiness Assessment, Fall 2012#PIC revised version of comic
Prelude: How to read this work 
Feel free to skip this prelude if you're not on my committee, interested inlicensing, or simply want to jump into the nitty gritty of Radically TransparentResearch already.For everyone else: this document was written in response to the three questionsin my Readiness Assessment, the equivalent of qualifying examinations forPurdue's Engineering Education PhD program. You can find their full originalphrasings in Appendix A. You'll notice, however, that this document is a unified whole that doesn't
quite
answer them in sequence. That's what the colored bars running down the sideindicate; red indicates this portion responds to the first question, yellow indicatesa response to the second, and blue a response to the third.If you'd like to examine some of the in-progress thoughts and notes that weretaken in the process of writing this final document, look at my blog(http://blog.melchua.com) between the dates of October 15 and 29, 2012; acompendium of posts specifically related to this is also present at the end of thedocument as Appendix B.Finally, this document is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 license. Feel free to remix and share as long as you credit this work andmake your remixes publicly available under a similar license. Commentary iswelcome at #LINK, the online home of this document.Let's get started.
What learning theories can inform and explain the kinds of learninghappening in a Radically Transparent Research (RTR) environment?
In other words, what's going on here?#PIC mini-panel of comicHere's the short graphical version.#PIC Svinicki edpsych history comic, highlighted. Possibly redrawn, possibly withminimap.Whoa. Step back from the upside-down mushroom for a moment. Before we windour way into what happens in an RTR environment, we need to explain RTR first.I'll conjecture that
radical transparency and research are two existing andseparate things that RTR joins together.
Fine, but what are those twothings?
 
Radically TransparentResearch
What are the rules and effects of radical transparency?#BLOG – cultural norms and practicesof radical transparency (from writingson/by FOSSers)membership is as low-barrier aspossibleWhat is the purpose of research?#BLOG – purpose list of variousparadigms
Radically transparent
research
refers to
research done in a radically transparent manner 
rather than
research done on something that isradically transparent.
Radically transparent communities (open communities)can and have been studied without RTR, and RTR can be done on groups thataren't open communities. For some particularly good examples of the former,see #CITATIONS. For the remainder of this document, we'll be talking about thelatter in order to keep things cleaner; when we talk about radical transparency,we know we're talking about the nature of the research being done, notnecessarily the nature of the group under study. The Changemakers project is one example of such a research project.Changemakers #CITE is a work-in-progress that draws on interviews with figuresgenerally considered to be “changemakers” in their STEM disciplines in order toidentify what their “change knowledge” is and how it was acquired. It doesn'tstudy an open community. In fact, it doesn't even study a community; all theinterviewees work in separate facilities ranging from academia to corporations tothe government, and none of their employers are particularly strong drivers of transparency; if anything, they're drivers of confidentiality. The changemakers do not comprise an open community, but the researchproject working to understand their insights and experiences is a space whereradical transparency practices are utilized. Now, some of the changemakersparticipate in that space in various ways, and (while this hasn't happened yet)it's conceivable that they may someday encounter and collaborate with eachother in that space. However, the starting grounds for that collaboration will beas
contributors to the open research space
, and any sort of radically transparentchangemakers community that may evolve will grow from that – the study isn'texamining one to begin with.Now, the Changemakers research team can be completely public on the openweb, but sometimes the group under study doesn't have such an option.
Is itpossible to use RTR with things that must be kept confidential?
Forinstance, a government or corporate social science research team might beworking on a classified product or studying a group whose nature or existencecan't be publicly revealed. Less dramatically, a college preparing foraccreditation or a lab group preparing for publication may not want to expose alltheir work to the entire world just yet.
 
 The answer is yes. When we use the word
transparency 
, we always need to ask:
transparent to whom
? Even things put out on the open web aren't transparent toeveryone, because not every human being in the world has web access or isliterate in the language we are writing in. In cases of transparency withinconfidentiality, we're simply drawing smaller and more explicit boundaries interms of who will be included within the boundaries of our transparencypractices.In other words:#PIC cushions picture with labelAnd actually, if we tilt this picture a bit and zoom in...#PIC differentiating between cushions and glassSee the cushions
and
the glass wall? The latter represents transparency, orbeing-able-to-see. The former represents participation, or being-able-to-contribute. Transparency and participation are two distinct things, and
we'retalking about Radically Transparent Research, not RadicallyParticipatory Research.
You can watch a play but be unable to affect whathappens onstage (transparency without participation), you can fill out teachingevaluations but not know how it affects your professor's future classes(participation without transparency), and of course you can have both or neither.In what may be a counterintuitive move, I'm going to claim that we actually don'tcare about participation
in the main project 
so long as certain transparencycriteria are met. This is in keeping with the source of our transparency practices;open communities are not anarchic chaos. In fact, they frequently have strictrules on who can
commit to mainline
, which means to make changes to what isconsidered to be the project's canonical version. #CITE# BLOG explain how not commiting to mainline coexists with the ability to forkand make your own mainline – you can create your own forum for participation;it's enabled by transparency,and absorbence-back into mainline is also enabledby transparency. Tie to the Four Freedoms, which you may have explainedearlier. Transparency and participation are both particular types of things:
affordances
.# BLOG definition of affordancesLet's break this down.
Properties of 
things
inthe environmentTaken in reference toan
actor 
in theenvironment
#PIC cushions#PIC blobbies
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