Open Infrastructure Tracking Project: guide

Last updated: 2023-07-06
URL for this page: https://hackmd.io/@investinopen/oitp
URL for this site: https://hackmd.io/@investinopen/how-we-work

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This project is no longer actively maintained. Content added by IOI staff prior to 2023-07-07 will remain online for the forseeable future at: https://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/investinopen/items

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What is the Open Infrastructure Tracking Project (OITP)?

The Open Infrastructure Tracking Project (OITP) aims to monitor funding and resourcing for the open technology research relies on. The project site runs on TagTeam, an open-source, collaborative tagging platform developed and maintained by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

How to contribute to OITP?

• Tag for OITP (IOI staff only) - read on!
• Follow the project on Mastodon and Twitter to read and share the latest tagged articles and resources. There is also an #oitp public channel in IOI's Slack space.

Tagging for OITP

As of 2023-06, IOI staff select and tag content for OITP.

Getting started

Step 1: Set up your account on the Harvard instance of TagTeam. ("To create an account on the Harvard University instance of TagTeam, go to the front page, click sign in at the upper right corner, and sign up.")

Step 2: Send a request to IOI's OITP administrator to start tagging. OITP is one of several hubs hosted on the Harvard instance of TagTeam. There may be a delay of a day or two before your TagTeam signup is processed by the system.

Step 3: Log in to your new TagTeam account. From this page, install the TagTeam bookmarklet. It allows you to quickly add items to OITP when you are surfing around the web.

Guides and tutorials on using TagTeam software: http://bit.ly/tagteam-basics

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Tagworthy content

Within the context of open infrastructure for scholarly communication and research, IOI is particularly interested in tracking news and commentary in the following topic areas:

• adjacent issues, models
• assessment; evaluation
• best practices
• business models
• codes of conduct
• collective action
• community
• debates
• diversity, equity, inclusion
• ethics
• events, conferences, symposia, workshops, etc.
• financial management
• funders
• funding
• governance
• labour
• lifecycle
• maintenance
• milestones
• nonprofit
• obstacles
• open scholarship
• open source software
• philanthropy; effective altruism
• policies, including national science strategies
• principles; values
• publishing
• revenues
• standards
• strategies
• surveys
• sustainability
• terminology, definitions
• theory
• trends

Content suitable for inclusion in OITP can be discovered in a number of ways, including via alert services (Google Alerts, Talkwalker) and relevant discussion lists, Slack channels, Twitter feeds and hashtags, etc. We also subscribe to several infrastructure-related automatic feeds from the Open Access Tracking Project (OATP).

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Tag language

List of OITP's top tags, with scope notes: https://hackmd.io/@investinopen/tags

OITP acronyms and abbreviations: https://hackmd.io/@investinopen/oitp-acronyms

Other tags accumulated by OITP: https://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/investinopen/tags

See also: OATP's short list of curated, approved tags (with scope notes) and very long list of uncurated, accumulated tags, all related to the movement for open access to scholarship.

Much of our tag language comes from OATP's list of approved tags, copied directly or modified to make sense within the open infrastructure ecosystem.

We will maintain a record of decisions about our tags.

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Checklist

When adding a new item to the hub, please remember to:

1. Add at least one tag from OITP's list of top tags (in the Tags field).
2. Aim to add at least two additional tags that will help someone trying to retrieve or discover this work in the future; consider how the work helps to build a case for or against open infrastructure and try to express that via tag language.
3. Include the year of publication (in the Title field).
4. Clean up the URL (in the URL field).

URL example

• Cleaned up URL: https://ala-events.zoom.us/rec/play/0VDRJahEXQcjCPtKP8qeAyKV0PYhzp625iChkSbyXwBYMSqIoYMwSO71ZFVTmUMdxSAtsUTvUqVAZ8wV.rXujx2oomJJcp3B7
• Messy URL: https://ala-events.zoom.us/rec/play/0VDRJahEXQcjCPtKP8qeAyKV0PYhzp625iChkSbyXwBYMSqIoYMwSO71ZFVTmUMdxSAtsUTvUqVAZ8wV.rXujx2oomJJcp3B7?continueMode=true&_x_zm_rtaid=aYrpQE7WS3ai2pqSfstq5Q.1650028812163.1c8b3ed43bd529be9d52d7aee4fa287c&_x_zm_rhtaid=696

5. Include a quote or summary indicating the work's relevance to open infrastructure (in the Description field).
6. For acronyms, please also include full phrase (in either Title or Description fields).

Example of a tagged item:

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Tips

Modifying tags

To add an automatic filter to tags in OITP, see this short video (internal access only).

Older content

For content that was published more than six months ago, please add the date of publication to the 'Date published' field. Otherwise older content will be automatically pushed out to the OITP social feeds on Twitter and Mastodon. In addition, please add the date of publication to the 'Title' field.

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Previously tagged items

If a URL has already been tagged for OITP or for another hub in the Harvard TagTeam instance, you will see an blue "Update TagTeam" label in the upper righthand corner of the bookmarklet-activated pop-up window.

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Translated description

For content in languages other than English, add a tag for that language (eg "french", "arabic", etc). In the Description field, include an English-language translation of the key points of the article. See example below.

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Dissemination

Currently OITP content is publicly available via:

1. the OITP hub on the Harvard instance of TagTeam: https://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/investinopen/items
2. Twitter: https://twitter.com/oitp_ioi. Started on 2022-05-10. The Twitter feed is automatically populated via RSS from OITP, by way of an IFTT-hosed RSS to Twitter app.
3. Mastodon: https://indieweb.social/@oitp_ioi. Started on 2022-11-22. The feed is automatically populated via RSS from OITP, by way of the MastoFeed tool.

IOI also has a public Slack channel that automatically receives OITP content through RSS protocol. We use the Slack RSS integration app. Started on 2022-03-31.

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Lifecycle plan

Data contained in each tag library in the OITP can be exported in Atom and JSON formats.

A more comprehensive lifecycle plan is under development.

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Acknowledgements

The OITP is modelled on Peter Suber's exemplary Open Access Tracking Project (OATP).

We have imitated its name, tags, and discovery methods and adopted its underlying open-source TagTeam software. We continue to draw inspiration from the dedication and persistence of OATP's founder and community of taggers, and the urgent relevance of its daily content.

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See also

• IOI's geoscheme
• IOI's list of tags (used in both OITP and IOI's Zotero library)
• OITP acronyms and abbreviations
• Archived copy of this page (via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine): https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://hackmd.io/@investinopen/oitp

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This page first published: 2022-04-06

tags: about-us process tools

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This work is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Users are free to share, remix, and adapt this work. (Please attribute Invest in Open Infrastructure in any derivative work).