Case Study Committee Workplan

Timeline

18 November 2011 : FORSYS participants submit STSM opportunities to wiki
Mar - Apr 2012 : Case study technical committee (CSTC) develops example cases
May (Zvolen meeting) : CSTC reports on progress and coordinates work with other WGs
Jun 2012: CSTC provides reporting form for CS and solicits short cases from Forsys participants
June - Dec 2012 : CSTC follow up on potential cases, answer any questions, provide feedback on drafts
Jan 2013 : CTSC assesses potential for publication, solicits longer cases as needed, starts synthesis
Mar 2013: CSTC finishes CS synthesis article to inform broader FORSYS guidelines
April 2013 : Selected cases and synthesis presented at Umea conference
(technically have until 3 months after end of project (4/2013) to complete all project work)

Cases with STSM opportunities should be entered on the wiki at http://fp0804.emu.ee/wiki/index.php/Category:STSM_Opportunity
For cases generally, the idea was to create a semantic form similar to what is being developed for the DSS, but this will take some time to develop. In the meantime, maybe we can just post them directly to the standard wiki. I added a subcategory to Category:Case Studies that is Category:Forsys Case Studies (but this is just a temporary strategy). It may be important to somehow separate cases that Forsys participants plan to use to contribute towards the project guidelines from general cases in the literature, but we are not sure exactly how yet - see Forsys vs Literature question.

It seems to me that tags need to be smaller than “Cases of participatory planning in forestry”. The point is modularity. So “case study” is enough for a case study. And “case” is enough for a case. (without describing the study –methodology, theory- behind it). Then “participation” is another tag.
True in principle, but there do seem to be some differences between wiki categories and keywords more generally (although we're all just learning). The fundamental difference seems to be that there is no way to use multiple wiki categories at once to find, for example, all “cases” with “participation”. This leads to the use of long categories involving multiple concepts. Also, wiki categories are used as the title of pages and longer ones are helpful for this. As we move to the semantic wiki, it looks like the modular approach will be possible.

Investigate possible technologies for managing/sharing case study literature
- e.g. Mendeley or Citeulike

Assuming institutionalization of the wiki and not of the Cost Action per se, it does not matter whether a forsys member has delivered a case or a case study. Of course it does for the record of the Action, so a separate tag “Forsys member” should do.
This is a good point. The initial thinking is that these will be stored in different data structures: the wiki for forsys cases and a literature database (maybe Mendeley.com for the literature). However, somehow we would need to link from each to the guidelines they relate to.

Book: similar to country reports book; would require a high level of effort and good contributions
Journal special issue: what possible journals? Forest Systems, ???
Individual journal articles: just encourage/help cases submit articles individually
Wiki: as a minimum, we'll post all cases to the wiki and use the semantic forms to make connections between them
Other???

Give case study introductory presentation
Each STC member leads a subgroup on assigned task
Develop & present a time line for the work on the case studies
- incl. meeting of the STC
- incl. clear division of responsibilities

Develop two (or more) documents:
- Case Study Notes by Research Phase: organize information already generated about the case study guidelines
- 2011-11_Leuven_Case_Study_Agenda
Gather further information on case studies (STC sends request to country representatives)
- Existing forest DSS case studies
- Potential forest DSS case studies
- Other relevant literature (methods, theories, etc)