Why the College of Forestry should use an Elliottpedia

After getting started on the ElliottArchive (see the History page), I woke up one morning and asked myself: "Would it be possible to convince the College of Forestry to host the ElliotArchive?" This seemed like a real long shot because academics get rewarded for peer-reviewed research publication, not for historical preservation in a wiki, but I decided to give it a try anyway.

I didn’t expect to be successful, so I decided to build the College of Forestry mockup at a new address: www.Elliottpedia.Org. You should spend a minute or so looking at the mockup website before reading further.

By 8 p.m. that evening I’d finished building the wiki-mockup, so I wrote the relevant College of Forestry person at saying:

This morning I woke up thinking about ... how difficult it's been for me to come up to speed about the Elliott State Forest ... information about it is scattered all over the place at DSL, ODF, OSU and elsewhere. So I decided it would be really useful to have people work collaboratively to create a wiki for the Elliott.

This led me to spend $12 to buy www.Elloittpedia.Org and spend a few hours slapping together a website mockup of what an Elliottpedia might look like. If you have a few minutes ... please take a quick look at www.Elliottpedia.Org.

The next morning, I had my answer from the College of Forestry:

Right now, I think everyone involved in the process is primarily concerned with sharing work products associated with the potential transition of the Elliott into a research forest. All Elliott work product documents to date can be found on either OSU’s or DSL’s websites devoted to the process (and in most cases, both). I think providing updates on the process is the maximum amount of bandwidth we can handle at this time.

That being said, your idea has merits and I agree past and present information about the Elliott is all over the place. I think the project you describe would happen at a time where the transition to a research forest is likely. We would certainly want to build out a site like you describe if that were the case. For now, it’s probably best to hide the site and we can work on building something out when we are much later in the process.

My initial reaction was understandably negative. My idea had been rejected immediately: I wasn’t worth phoning, and I wasn’t worth explaining what alternatives the College of Forestry might consider. Instead, I should just "hide the site" and go away.

What really bothered me was this response's dishonesty about the OSU and DSL websites: they didn't list a single upcoming meeting date or time for any committee or subcommittee, subcommittee memberships were completely hidden, and the only materials that had been released were summaries of what is being done ... all the raw data was being kept close to the vest which effectively precludes anyone else from preparing alternative research scenarios or actually participating in the research process.

It took me a few hours to internalize the College of Forestry's abrupt dismissal of me.

So I phoned Bob Zybach and talked about how to proceed. We initially decided to just move forward with www.ElliottArchive.Org. Together we would make a really powerful team by melding Bob’s expertise and industry connections with my communications skill, reputation and financial backing.

But it didn’t take long before I thought of a better alternative. Why should I listen to a College of Forestry administrator who is just protecting his turf? If I wanted to make an honorable attempt to convince the College of Forestry to open up its decision making and allow people to build an Elliott wiki, then I should take the sales pitch directly to end users … which in this case (at least initially) are the College of Forestry's Science Advisory Panel and DSL's Elliott Forest Research Advisory Board members. But of course this presented another problem: neither the College of Forestry nor DSL want someone like me to contact these people directly so their email addresses and phone numbers are hidden.

My next step should be obvious; I began searching the web for email addresses and phone numbers. I started with the Science Advisory Panel because it’s smaller. I found five or six email addresses and eventually found one committee member who answered the phone. He explained they were holding meetings with Zoom (but like most other College of Forestry/Elliott meetings, these Zoom meetings aren’t publicly announced) and were communicating with email and text messages. Since he was sitting next to a computer, I asked him to look at www.Elliottpedia.Org, and he rapidly became enthusiastic and wrote the following note in support of an Elliottpedia-like project:

As I mentioned earlier, I believe that an accessible, well-designed, comprehensive online presentation of the history, ecology, and management issues of the Elliott State Research Forest is an important contribution to the success of this unprecedented project. It would contribute towards public perceptions of project transparency, careful information collection and dissemination, and commitment to the ideals of the ecological research forest concept. Your Elliottpedia appears to be based on solid principles of information science, and merits a closer look as the process unfolds. I would encourage the leadership, such as Dr. Anthony Davis and Dr. Katy Kavanagh, to work with you to explore the possibilities!

Then, despite repeated requests on my part to reach out to the College of Forestry, things went essentially silent until I received a letter from Anthony Davis, Interim Dean, that told me:

1. The Science Advisory Panel will hold a secret meeting in two days, and among other things, it would discuss my ideas, such as Elliottpedia.Org.

2. I wasn't invited to attend the meeting, so I couldn't participate in the discussion of my proposal.

3. I wasn't offered a way to see the meeting's overall agenda or find out what materials the Advisory Panel would receive prior to the meeting.

4. I could send an email to elliott.research@oregonstate.edu that would be forwarded to the Science Advisory Panel. Of course, this meant I had to really hustle up: I was only given two day's notice of this secret meeting, so anything I wanted the Advisory Panel to consider needed to be written immediately if the Panel members were going to read and consider it before the meeting.

5. Even though Zoom meetings are really easy to record -- it literally takes a single mouse click to do -- I wouldn't be allowed to listen to a Zoom recording of the meeting. Instead, someone would take the time to write a "recap" of the meeting for me to read.

Anthony Davis' letter is shown on the Public Meetings Secrets page.