The Peer to Patent Project: Community Patent Review

The Peer to Patent Project was announced by the US Patent and Trademark Office last August. One-year pilot project will be launched at the beginning of 2007. The pilot will analyse the impact of “open, community reveiw of patent applications”. Professor Beth Simone Noveck, Director of the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School, explains the project with the following words: “The Community Patent Review pilot project will allow experts from around the globe to submit relevant information known as prior art and take advantage of collaborative web-based technologies to inform decision-making. In short, reviewers submit prior art and commnet on its relevance to specific parts of the published application. Peer reviewers will rank these submissions so that patent examiners can review the prior art deemed most relevant by the community”. The graph below shows the model of the engagement between reviewers and patents examiners.

The Community Patent Review allows the Patent Office to engage with a specific community of innovation experts using social networking tools. The engaging population is very specific and prepared to give a valuable contribution to the Patent Office. Consequently, this is a very particular case of electronic engagement in science, but it will be very interesting to see how the model will work and which results will produce.

 

Public engagement and Web 2.0 (2)

The first post on this blog was about public engagement and the use of Web 2.0 platforms to connect public organizations and citizens. Given that I am not an expert, but an user of tools such as blogs, I would like to make some considerations on these topics.

First of all, I would like to identify the actors involved in an engagement process. The governmental (national, regional, local) bodies try to interact with citizens. The idea is to involve citizens in engaging and participating to the decision making process. This can happen through communication from the bodies to the citizens. Citizens can be consulted in relation to particular decisions. Citizens can monitor government bodies’ activities and also question authorities using petition or public assemblies. All these do not look new. But Web 2.0 solutions can empower all these activities. There are several examples of electronic public engagement (See http://dowire.org/wiki/Case_Study_List for a list of e-democracy case study; Coleman S., Norris, Donald, S. 2005. A New Agenda for e-Democracy. Oxford Internet Institute). Browsing the web, we can also see that social networking software is encouraging new forms of civic activism. People are confident enough to develop solutions able to account politicians and policies. Mysociety.org and Sunlight Foundation are examples of this new activism. On the other side of the barricade, goverments, public authorities, policy makers are slowly developing solutions, which are able to fit a visible desire of digital engagement. Some exceptional cases are the first press conference on Second Life by the French socialist candidate to the Presidential election, Segolane Royale; and the open of the Swedish Embassy on Second Life.

Now let’s complicate the scenario. We do not want to discuss the engagement between governments and citizens, but between research organizations such Research Councils in the UK and citizens. Research Councils can certainly communicate with citizens, but can Research Councils consultate citizens about their decision making process? Are citizens prepared enough to be involved in decisions related to scientific and technological development? It seems to me that the consultation process requires a learning phase in which citizens become aware of the scientific issue, which needed to be discussed. Once this process is completed, all the e-democracy tools can be used in this context. The Wellcome Trust – Sanger Institute seems to move towards this direction. The Your Genome initiative is an on-line resource tool, which aims to develop awareness and knowledge on genomes and genomic science. Finally, an example of electronic public engagement in science is the The Peer to Patent Project developed by the US Patent and Trademark Office. I will discuss it in the next post.

 

Thinking on Web 2.0 and public engagement (1)

Recently, I have participated to a workshop on how Web 2.0 technologies and solutions can promote new forms of engagement between citizens and public organizations. The workshop, “Engaging with the google generation”, was organized by the Oxford Internet Institute. I will try to describe my impression of the workshop and my ideas on the topic discussed.

Before describing the ideas drawn during the workshop, it would be a good idea to answer the following question: What is Web 2.0? I do not think there is an agreement on a definition. David Wilcox talks of a transition from a “broadcast model” web (Web 1.0) to “a new phase dubbed Web 2.0 (the network as as platform, remix culture and network effects)”. Building on this differentiation, we can say that Web 2.0 open the web to interactivity between content users and content producers transforming the web from a client-server model to a networked peer-to-peer web. In other words, it becomes difficult to distinguish between users and producers: the user is the producer and the producer is the user. If you want to know more about Web 2.0, there is a very good article by Tim O’Reilly on the topic.