Announcing Research Zoo – A Habitat for Guerrilla Research
Last week, I attended an ELESIG workshop at the OU run by Martin Weller and Tony Hirst. Here are some summaries of what was discussed.
However, it struck me that many people would not know how to start. Sure, there are lots of free blogging platforms, but if you want to use some of the neat tools that make the guerrilla researcher’s life so much easier, you pretty much have to roll your own. But who knows how to do that? Well, I do. So, as a weekend breakfast project, I created ResearchZoo.net with the tagline “Habitat for Guerilla Research”.
It’s really just a WordPress multisite with some modules that are particularly useful for researchers enabled. I don’t have any great plans for it, it’s just sort of a practical essay. Instead of just writing about it, I did it.
At the moment, it doesn’t do much of anything other than let anyone start a site (with no guarantee of uptime or longevity). But there are some possible future visions out there. This is what I think a site like that could become eventually:
- Be a community where guerrilla researchers across disciplines connect
- Connect practitioners with researchers but also blur the lines between practitioners and researchers
- Help formulate research aims, questions and methods by interaction before, during and after research (not only after)
- Connect funders (both micro and macro) with researchers – we could have a combination of Kickstarter, Subbable and a funding agency
Or rather I wish there was a site like that out there. It could be mine. It could be somebody else’s. By the way, I’m happy for someone more enterprising to take it on.
Let me know what you think. Particularly ideas for useful WordPress modules would be handy.