Design is stable
Reciprocal Reviews has entered development stage.
This newsletter has been super quiet, hasn’t it? It’s easy to imagine this project just quietly died, as so many do.
But, it hasn’t! For the past 8 months or so, our tiny team of Jérémie, Andrew, and I have been chipping away at two major things:
A design, accounting for all of the major complexities of accounting for reviewing labor with a flexible currency and all of the existing peer review infrastructure.
Policy, accounting for the many interacting rules, regulations, and requirements shaped by the complex ecosystem of academic peer review.
Because our time has been limited, we decided to focus on those two points above, rather than broadcasting our progress.
Today, however, that changes: the design and policy are stable and we’re beginning development. You can see our proposed design here:
Reciprocal Reviews design specification
It’s not 100% done, but we think the data schema and core functionality is relatively set and we have identified the infrastructure we think we need to build it in an open, and sustainable way. Inevitably, we’re going to find design issues as we build — all software development is iterative, after all — but this should give you a good sense of where we’re headed.
Now that we’ve reached this phase, there are a few public commitments we’re going to make as a team:
I will start writing with updates every two weeks, to help spread awareness about the release of the platform. My focus will be on key design features, just to engage everyone on this list in our design choices, to help us get feedback.
We’re going to be actively working in the open on GitHub; expect a regular cadence of commits as things come together.
ACM Transactions on Computing Education will be our first venue to adopt the platform for a pilot. As Editor-in-Chief, I’ll be developing processes and policy for the journal alongside development.
If you’re not interested in all of these details, feel free to just wait for the newsletter announcing the beta release. However, if you’re inspired to help, find us on the project Discord and we’re happy to have you find a way to help us move a bit faster.
Talk to you again in two weeks,
Amy