Results – See Discussion Below
Winner: Crowdreviewing: the Sharing Economy at its Finest
Submitter: Werner Liebregts, Utrecht University
The current review process of scientific articles is outdated. Only a few reviewers assess the quality of papers before publication. Many more experts read them after publication, have a strong opinion about their contents, but are hardly able to share it to a wide audience. Academics would greatly benefit from crowdreviewing, a post-publication peer review (PPPR) process in which anyone who has read a scientific article is asked to review it according to a standardized set of questions. Read More
Discussion: The Crowd & The 1K Challenge?
The three submissions that originally garnered the most voted did this by encouraging a large number of people to sign up for membership in FORCE11 and vote for their submission, in some cases friends and family who do not appear to have had a strong connection to the ideals of the organisation. This was a process that, while allowed by the rules, could be construed as contrary to the spirit of the competition, which is about engaging the FORCE11 community. In two cases, the authors of the proposals withdrew after this was pointed out to them; in one case the author decided to accept the money and participate in a discussion of the issues involved.
What we'd like to raise now with the community is the question of how to deal with this kind of issue. On the one hand, the $1k challenge programme has been extremely successful in the past in encouraging community-based ideas. On the other, the current arrangement is, arguably at least, open to abuse. How can we reconcile the desire to encourage crowd decision making (e.g. with a low barrier to entry) while ensuring the integrity of such competitions? Or is a completely open vote perfectly viable?
