John recently pointed out this document from 1988: “How to do Research at the MIT AI Lab“. Well, the conditions have changed a lot with the networked information organization and exchange systems, but there might still be relevant information since it is mostly the documentation of the authors’ personal experiences.
Today many research groups at the MIT Media Laboratory use wikis and blogs for research documentation. They do live demos and enter information to project databases. What else? They write theses. But not many of them incorporate so called wisdom of crowds in their research[*]. I think the Openstudio project of PLW, up and running more than a year, is a good start in this direction. The research becomes literally live with the continuous interaction of people and machines. Brent, Amber, Luis, Tak, Kyle, and Mariana from PLW keep building experimental live systems that continuously generate information for learning and exploration. In 2007, it would be great to put together a document describing methods extracted from these live research experiences.
[*] Projects I know using the wisdom of crowds in some way:
+ Commonsense Computing at MIT Media Lab
+ Processing
+ Although closed now, Cameron Marlow‘s Blogdex