How should we deal with your data?
I thought I would pitch this question to our CoPress Google Group, but then it hit me. If we want to be a transparent, “open source” organization, the input of our community is even more important (sorry team, you’re more than welcome to weigh in too). The question I have is this:
How should we deal with your data?
Specifically, we’re collecting a wealth of information from the respondents of our September 2009 survey, the first of many attempts to guide our decisions by real world data. Data that you guys generously provide to us. This data, however, isn’t necessarily all accessible on the internet, and some of the answers to the questions you might not necessarily want spread out all across the web.
Even more specifically, all of this information you enter is currently being piped into a spreadsheet only I have access to. Thank you Google for making surveys brain dead simple. CoPress, up until this point, has been a pretty laissez faire enterprise. Team members contribute when they feel like contributing, and there has been very minimal organizational structure. One unfortunate outcome of this is that I’m not quite sure just who I should be able to share the result database from the survey with. Should everyone on the list serv have access to it, or just a select group of people? If it’s a select group of people, who are they and how do we determine this?
See the issue I’m facing? Granted, it’s definitely a first world problem, but I’d like to postpone creating a more rigid, exclusive organization as long as I can. We definitely want consistency as to who is working on the project. At the same time, though, I’d love our community to jump in and contribute as they see fit.
What do you think? What type of privacy policy should we adopt for data that is not our own?
Since a number of the questions ask for what could be considered sensitive information, publications’ identities should be kept confidential. Only the two or three people working directly on the study should have access the full thing.
Our published report on the survey, and I think there’s no doubt results ought be public, could include either a) only the answers in aggregate or b) also individual answer sets, with the names redacted.
Include a list of papers that participated, just don’t disclose what answers are whose. I’ve seen university “peer group” studies conducted this way.
I think that would strike the right balance between openness and protecting interests.