I find myself once again wondering about collaboration and progress, about the fulfillment that comes of seeing one’s ideas explored, and the conflict that establishes with a culture ruled by attribution and credit.

To some extent, a great idea is merely the germ of great work. Ideas are simple, and better ideas so simple that others can understand them more easily. Work is by comparison hard, but great work tends more often to require more hands and resources to complete correctly.

In the Academy, we write, we program, we analyze, we experiment, we explore—all essentially alone, because we are in the end graded and hired, passed and tenured, on the basis of our work alone, its quantity and quality. And yet we discuss, correspond, present, riff, teach; we wave unfinished work at our social network’s neighbors, selectively inviting them to play a role, if they have time and cycles to spare.

But we typically never share the ideas we cannot hope to follow up on. Ideas are cheap, so easy to acquire that we all have piles as we mature. Where do the unpursued end up? How does one choose one, and not another, without a certainty of its eventual risks and rewards?

So. Consider the many fields of the Academy.

In whats field are practitioners most likely to talk openly with others about unfinished work, and invite others to take the supernumerary projects and pursue them? In what fields are the cards held closest to the chest, and the papers and pronouncements made by secret isolated scribblers or mutually-nondisclosed cabals?

Who shares most, in other words? Who least?

Does it break down by department? Institution? Role? The maturity of a field? The nature of the work? The culture of a community?