Cruelty is always possible later

Although I found Altimeter’s Success Criteria for Facebook self acclaimed ‘heuristic’ approach a little too rough and ready in its conclusions, I did like its approach to research in general;

• Use of a Creative Commons License to encourage non commercial distribution with attribution
• Disclosure of vested interests in using their clients in the research on their web site
• Embeddable report available on Slideshare
• Plenty of opportunity for peer review in the comments; although so far its all been glowing endorsements that seem to suffer from something similar Blurb Insincerity
• And finally their invitation “To make Open Research work, we hope you read it, spread it, and use it to improve.”

But the next step has to be rather than use i tot improve, should be “improve it”. Open it up to peer participation after the fact or to contributions along the way al la wikipedia unless they fear the inevitable cruelty of contributors…