Clearly, the high impact of scientists who are now abroad bears testament to the quality of the Italian education and attitude when it comes to Computer Science. The inevitable question thus arises: why are Computer Scientists who work in Italy not among the top in either the world ranking or the TIS list? I have been asking this question to various colleagues in the field, both inside and outside the Via-academy network. The consistent answer I have been receiving is that there is a clear disadvantage Computer Scientists must face when working in Italy with respect to their colleagues who work abroad. This disadvantage derives from a mixture of excessive teaching duties, a lack of large-scale funding and a limited recognition of scientific merit

Recent reports include the “Top 100 researchers- home & abroad” (which includes the quotation above) and the “Top 50 Italian Institutes“.

The H-method: a first step towards meritocracy

This type of analyses are mainly based on the H-index method (an index that attempts to measure both the productivity and impact of the published work of a scientist or scholar); it therefore suffers from various limitations deriving from factors such as the difference in average number of publications among disciplines (especially, between science and the humanities), or from the fact that it’s a purely quantitative analysis.

However, it seems to me as being an important step in the right direction: meritocracy.

p.s.
I found out there’s a recent article by Ignazio Marino on the topic [Working Toward Meritocracy in Italy, Ignazio R. Marino, Science 6 June 2008: 1289]; I couldn’t download it but here’s a short commentary on it I could find online:

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If you’d like to run a site like Stack Overflow, for example on your company’s intranet for internal use by developers, keep an eye on this project, which aims to implement a Stack Overflow-like site in Django.

SOClone will make use of Progressive Enhancement to ensure that all core functionality is available regardless of whether or not the user has JavaScript enabled – some of Stack Overflow’s core functionality such as voting, accepting answers, viewing comments, marking questions as favourites and flagging questions as offensive currently doesn’t work at all without JavaScript enabled.

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[4/10/10] Update:

another project that (judging from reviews here and there) managed to clone Stack Overflow even more successfully is CNPROG

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You’ll find a good coverage of it also on TechCrunch:

The web application it’s introducing today is dubbed Blerp, and its ambition is to turn the Web into a giant interactive message board by making it possible for visitors to add text comments and multimedia to existing web pages and share them with their friends.

Under the motto ‘layer the web!’, Blerp aims to enable people to enrich web pages with an additional layer of content with the ability to let others join in on the fun at any time. RocketOn is calling the concept Hyperlayers, and if the idea makes you think of social annotation services like Reframe It, Diigo or Fleck, that’s because it’s taking an extremely similar route with Blerp.

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