On June 3rd, 2019 I wrote 6/30/2019 new revews schedule v2.
Denny and I are thinking of ways in which in 2020 we can involve the community as reviewers on Experiment moving editorial review and review calls off of staff time and to either volunteer time or paid time.
The first step towards this is testing our review platform. Below I will outline a new proposal for reviews schedule that we will discuss with Nicole at Tuesday meeting today.
I propose that we continue to review projects a minimum of 2x a month. It can be on the 1st and 3rd Monday of each month or Nicole can set her own schedule. As long as projects get reviewed with 14 days of submission, we are good. Nicole would handle all reviews and video calls for all projects.
Nicole would still review and onboard all grant challenge projects. Though, to my knowledge we don't have any scheduled from now until the end of 2019.
Project reviews will be "approved" by another staff member that is not the "reviewer". In this case, the reviews that Nicole does will be approved by Cindy or Denny.
Cindy and Denny will rebuild the reviews platform during the week of August 13th and deliver something on August 20th.
Denny will continue to operate our weekly newsletter.
The plan is to test this out until October 1st and re-evaluate.
This will be up for discussion during Tuesday meeting.
remove need for unpaid staff
A big motivator for this change is we recognize that though for most months this year Experiment has been cash flow positive, Experiment is not a sustainable platform until it can make more money than it spends without any unpaid staff time. For the past year Denny and I have been putting in unpaid time. Our intention is to build a system so that Denny and I don't need to put in unpaid time and any staff who are working on the platform are paid a minimum of $15/hour.
start to transition the platform to a community operated
We built the reviews platform in the summer of 2018 to move everything off of Google Docs and onto our own platform. In the summer of 2018, I recruited about a dozen funded researchers to help with reviews using our new platform. The reviewers never stuck around.
We have learned a lot in the last year about how our reviews work with the new platform and what features the platform needs based on the actions we do manually.
We would like to one day give the platform over to the community and perhaps even make the platform community owned. This is one step in that direction.