There have been various attempts that I was involved in. While nature.com had an online network, Bernard Baars and Alfredo Pereira Jr. ran a forum called brain physiology, consciousness and cognition. I became a moderator there for quite a while. The work was somewhat frustrating, because too many unqualified people were allowed in and debates led often nowhere. Later, we came up with the idea to gather top theorists in the field of consciousness science in a closed group to present and discuss their theories and more.
That was much more successful, we missed a few colleagues like Christof Koch, Giulio Tononi and Noam Chomski, who declined to participate. But most accepted our invitation, while we were following a scholarpedia article by Anil Seth, who could be regarded as an important theorist. This was followed by more than six months of presentations and discussions, producing about 1000 pages of transscript.
Due to major disagreements, there was no publication of the Online Workshop Theories of Consciousness as a whole. Still it can be regarded as a first step in the right direction.
So these days we have colleagues connecting via facebook, academia, this platform and probably many others.
How would online cooperation look like, once we fully use the potential the WWW is giving us?
It took one of our major efforts, a conference mainly held in Tucson, Arizona, almost two decades to change its name from "Towards a science of consciousness" to "The science of consciousness".
Don't let us be so slow, creating a World Wide Science...
I wrote something in my blog on Scilogs quite a while ago.
In his Nobel lecture in 1966 Richard Feyman said
“We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn’t any place to publish, in a dignified manner,what you actually did in order to get to do the work.”
I think he would have loved blogs and web 2.0 applications. We have great chances in communicating fast and worldwide.
http://www.scilogs.com/consciously_yours/feynman-and-blogs/
http://www.scilogs.com/consciously_yours/feynman-and-blogs/
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