Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Share your content - How and Why

Hello everyone! It's just over a week until we meet in San Francisco to have our session. We want to help you get your content out there and available. Here I'll quickly outline why you may want to do this and how we can help.

Why Share?

Initially it seems obvious to share your slides and content. Maybe someone in the audience didn't catch everything that you said, wants to review, or really admires a figure you made. Sometimes I hear academics say that they are scared to share their content though. Common comments are "someone will take it and present it as theirs," "I'll get scooped if I show my data," or "this breaks anonymous peer review." 

While this is a decision everyone has to make for themselves, I personally prefer to make anything that I present in a public setting fully available. I do this for several reasons:

1) Putting your work out there establishes a concrete date of record for you showing results. If someone tries to scoop your work, you can easily show your dated content. 

2) It encourages crowd source review and verification. If I present model results, then make the model easily available, it is likely that others will use/test drive the model. This helps find bugs and encourage improvement!

3) Funding agency compliance. Many funding agencies demand that work they fund (especially government funded) be in the public domain.

4) Good will. In the end, we are all here to try to solve geoscience problems. If you have made progress on the problem, why keep the solution private! 

While many of the comments above are directed at scientific research instead of education topics, they can be adapted to meet topics like open course-ware. 

How to Share

We hope that you will want to make the content of your presentations and any associated media available for everyone in the session! You can write a post on your blog, post content to GitHub or SlideShare, or share from cloud hosts like Dropbox. No matter how you do it, let us know. We'll build up a page with links to everyone's content. If you are interested in writing a blog, but don't know where to start, check out the AGU Bloggers Forum on Tuesday at 5 PM!

Until Next Week,
John Leeman

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