Title: THE ORGANISATIONAL DIMENSION IN FIDIS

We have indicated in “ ” the different issues related to the contribution of a community in the population of terms.

Not surprisingly, the behaviour of the FIDIS community does not make an exception about these aspects. The contribution of the members of the FIDIS community has been unequal, and not up to the level that would be sufficient to generate in a sustainable way a high quality and lively shared Ontology adopted and used by everyone. 

Practically, in the first version, we have observed a variety of behaviours related to the level of participation. For example the more “teckies” and the more junior people were the more important contributors. The more senior and knowledgable persons appeared to be the less likely to contribute (this is only true as a general trend). Several reasons were probably at the origin of these behaviours. The first reason is that the more senior people are the less inclined to adopt new practices (like WIKIs), since they consider their existing practices very effective, and have no reasons to change. The second reason is that they are the ones that may perceive the less benefit from an exchange process that they consider as unbalanced. Being much experimented, they are the more busy, but also less likely to benefit from the contribution of others. In other words in a open exchange, they may perceive they have more to lose (for instance their time) than to gain, and besides they have already have established efficient knowledge circuit (typically direct ones with other experts). 

Several measures have been initiated to reverse this situation, and increase user participation. The first one is technical and ergonomical, and was aimed at reducing the cost of using the platform (in particular the time necessary to browse the content or to author content). Thus faster hardware was put in place, and the navigation and the esthetical aspects were improved. 

A second measure was to increase the transparency of the system and in particular: to make visible the contribution of the different FIDIS members so that active authors would be recognised for their efforts and their activities. Practically, a WIKI page logging the different actions is available making very visible what are the different contributions is available to all the visitors. Besides, each author of a contribution is invited to “sign” the entries in which they have contributed. Other measures are being considered, such as some action aiming at populating the content with enough material in order to reach a critical mass. 

This organisational dimension is a very difficult one, and maybe this is the most important factors to make this WIKI a success. 

We are very aware of the question, and we are working at it, and each new iteration of this WIKI is aimed at overcoming these difficulties, so as to reach as stage in which the WIKI will have become sustainable, and will not need exogenous stimulation (such as infusion of resources, effort and attention).