Teresa Chan presented on the history and development of the Academic Life in Emergency Medicine (ALiEM) community. I first came across this group through the KeyLIME podcast, although I’m not quite sure how / if Teresa was involved at all.
Teresa made some useful comments about the practical challenges of building and growing a learning community, especially when many contributions are made by volunteers. When grassroots communities start, it’s easy to have a more relaxed and flexible attitude towards structure. But as they grow, the community needs stricter structure, frameworks, and organisational guidelines.
They also need capital and infrastructure. You can give these resources away for free, but you can’t create and host them for free. Which means you sometimes need to have uncomfortable conversations around monetisation. But, paying for server-space and admin-related work isn’t something that participants and members of communities typically think about.
While these are important and relevant points, I can’t help but feel that the lessons presented here today are fairly well-known in other communities. For example, the open-source software development community has known for decades about the challenges of managing and coordinating volunteer contributions for increasingly high-stakes projects.
Teresa also talked about how ‘digital scholarship’ might simply be considered a part of ‘scholarship’. I may be wrong, but I got the impression that the #meded community isn’t especially aware of the strong history of digital scholarship outside medical education. People like George Veletsianos, Mark Carrigan, Stephen Downes, Tony Bates, Donald Clark, George Siemens, and so on, have been talking about digital scholarship for decades.