At work we are part of a EU funded research project.

[hbons@mastodon.social]

@tante “your florps are looking good today, but keep an eye on the twootles ok?”

[tante@tldr.nettime.org]

This is not criticism of the project or the people doing that (soul-crushing) work. It's criticism of the funding structure and metrics applied to research and other public funding contexts.

[tante@tldr.nettime.org]

@hbons "Could you all please use your private accounts to click on the shloink button?"

[kineticdiplomacy@infosec.exchange]

@tante my favourite counter question: What was the cost per like? What was the impact?

[tante@tldr.nettime.org]

@kineticdiplomacy Yeah but in this context we as a consortium have to do it. It's not the people tracking that's fault.

[kineticdiplomacy@infosec.exchange]

@tante true. Still, if every EU project would name the cost, it might change the policy at some point.

[onepict@chaos.social]

@tante I think it's a feeling of pressure. For example with NGI Assure, Funding box (partners for assure) and NGI for a long time were only on Twitter and Linkedin.

So when we did do some releases etc, I did feel pressure to post on a network where they were

Librecast - Decentralisation and Privacy with Multicast

(librecast.net)

There is a bigger question to put to the EU and it's partners, particularly FundingBox who run getonepass.eu where it's basically the main gateway for small projects to apply for EU funding.

Why aren't they here?

[max@poliverso.org]

@tante

In my experience, EU funded research projects are much more useful to companies than to European people. They're just a way to have their business paid by someone else.

[tehabe@norden.social]

@tante social media is a mistake, even if it is decentral and open

[svines@gts.svines.rodeo]

@tante every time I hear stories like this I think more about how David Graeber was right. There has been a hostile takeover of our entire economy and government by useless MBAs generating this kind of bureaucracy to justify their own existence and make them feel important #BullshitJobs

[koen_hufkens@mastodon.social]

@tante I've always thought these issues rather easy to address. For projects I keep short blog posts of stuff covered. This is to be recycled in yearly reports (so you don't have to harass people for details on their work on a tight deadline), but also for easy socials. It turns the logic around, with the socials as a side effect.

[konosocio@mastodon.online]

@tante I can't say I disagree. However, is it money well spent if the researchers only talk about their issues and findings among themselves? What would be a better way to engage with the rest of the world...?

[raoofphysics@scholar.social]

@tante I am the one doing the counting at our end. I hate what I have become. Apparently, this is the value of a PhD in science communication.

[robotistry@mstdn.ca]

@konosocio @tante Money can be well spent and still not be important to the rest of the world. Scientists can be obsessively consumed with answering questions and learning about topics that almost nobody else cares about but that turn out, much later, to have been critically important in unexpected ways.

(Obligatory xkcd: https://m.xkcd.com/877/ )

Instead of using social media to reach out, I'd love to see scientists take any money used for that and use it to document things that don't normally get documented officially in a shared repository, like:

What things did you try that didn't work?

Was there a thing you were expecting to happen that didn't?

Did something unexpected happen but you didn't have time/a venue to write it up?

What ideas do you have that you can't get funding for?

What questions would you like to work on but you don't have an idea for how to solve them?