Wednesday, April 14, 2010: 11:45 a.m.
Horace Tabor/Molly Brown (Westin Tabor Center, Denver)
Information Technology has provided some excellent tools for sharing knowledge in all branches of Science. Most online resources for the Water Sector, however, are still limited to static pages and links to data sources or single databases. Publication is mostly still restricted to what a few editors are able to handle.
E-mail lists, the most user-inclusive application widely used, are subjected to a great deal of noise and information loss. Since the posts are not stored in an organized manner, users may have to read through long lists of messages in order to find one single piece of useful information. Moderation is often inefficient, members can be banned, but by that time spam or off-topic messages have reached the group already. At the same time, the ephemeral nature of these types of discussion results in continuous information loss. After a few days, the information posted is seldom recoverable in any meaningful way.
New technologies have certainly made it easier to share information, and collaboration tools abound. The latest developments go beyond that static information format, allowing for the creation of online groups where the user is empowered by the ability to help build the community, from a side contribution, such as product rating or a news comment, up to being essential to the application itself, like the videos posted on Youtube.
On this paper, an evaluation of some of these new tools and an assessment of their potential to impact and improve communication among the Water Resources community is performed and a reference implementation, developed based on the findings, is presented.
E-mail lists, the most user-inclusive application widely used, are subjected to a great deal of noise and information loss. Since the posts are not stored in an organized manner, users may have to read through long lists of messages in order to find one single piece of useful information. Moderation is often inefficient, members can be banned, but by that time spam or off-topic messages have reached the group already. At the same time, the ephemeral nature of these types of discussion results in continuous information loss. After a few days, the information posted is seldom recoverable in any meaningful way.
New technologies have certainly made it easier to share information, and collaboration tools abound. The latest developments go beyond that static information format, allowing for the creation of online groups where the user is empowered by the ability to help build the community, from a side contribution, such as product rating or a news comment, up to being essential to the application itself, like the videos posted on Youtube.
On this paper, an evaluation of some of these new tools and an assessment of their potential to impact and improve communication among the Water Resources community is performed and a reference implementation, developed based on the findings, is presented.