About te.ma

In the channels, expert curators present the most important original contributions from research and practice and place them in context. The forums are the place for thoughtful, pluralistic debates without social media noise. The database keeps all content permanently available through a search function and customisable folders.

Aims

With te.ma, we want to offer an alternative to noisy social media and the short news cycles of journalism.

te.ma aims to bring together people from a wide range of professional and personal backgrounds, improve the quality of online debates, make science accessible and provide a more solid basis for discussions on complex and controversial topics. In this way, we want to contribute to the sensible handling of controversial issues at the interface of science and society.

Concept

The concept of te.ma draws on the experience of the science-oriented Eastern Europe portal dekoder.org (honoured with the Grimme Online Award 2016 and 2021 as well as the Special Prize 2021 of the Bundesstiftung Aufarbeitung). Both projects were developed by philosopher and media maker Martin Krohs.

Channels

te.ma is a digital infrastructure that can be set up for a wide variety of subject areas. We call a subject area a channel.

When we decide to bring a channel online, we are guided by two main criteria: scientific depth and social relevance. It is also important to us that fact-based discourse is represented on the platform - without shying away from controversy. Impulses for the choice of topics come from our own team, from a network of institutes with which we are in close dialogue and from the input of our users. Click here for the discussion.

Seasons

Each channel is active for a season of (usually) six months. A season begins with overview material that presents key voices, fundamental contributions and current controversies. From week to week, the database fills up with publications from various sub-areas of the topic and keeps them accessible via a folder structure and search function. A pool of reliable documents is created as a basis for meaningful debates.

At the end of a season, all content remains accessible and the forum remains active.

Feed

The content published by the curation and editorial teams is displayed in the feeds. The basic order is chronological. If a material has a particularly high level of activity due to saves and kudos, it is moved to the front of the feed, even if it is older. In addition, contributions from users, such as posts and comments, to which there is a lot of reaction, are included in the feed.

The channel feeds contain the posts from the corresponding topic channels, the feed on the te.ma homepage shows posts from all active channels at the same time.

Formats

Our te.ma formats Re-Paper, Re-Book and Re-Web are republications of important and/or current specialist contributions (research articles, specialist books, online contributions), which are selected by the te.ma curation and provided with an explanatory introduction - our implementation of open science.

Curator's cuts are written by the te.ma curators themselves, usually according to the principle of adversarial collaboration, i.e. coming from different scientific approaches. They offer a perspective, multi-dimensional view of a research question or a social problem.

Special Inputs are guest contributions written for te.ma by academics or distinguished participants in the discourse who provide direct insight into their work: exclusive highlights on current controversies and issues.

Curation

Each te.ma channel is supervised by two or more specialised curators who are themselves active in the relevant field of research. The expert curators select contributions for publication in such a way that the respective discourse is covered as completely and without distortion as possible. Since the launch of te.ma in October 2022, 21 academic curators have been involved in the design of the thematic channels (as of October 2023). You can find out more about each curator in their personal profiles.

User account

All te.ma content is freely accessible. If you set up a user account, you can also comment and discuss, award kudos (reactions to posts by other forum participants), save posts and be informed about new publications and reactions to your own posts. We recommend creating a user account (like everything on te.ma, user accounts are free of charge) and registering with your real name: This keeps the discussion on te.ma lively and secure.

Forums: Comments and posts

The comments left under a publication (Re-Paper, Re-Book, Re-Web; Special Input, Curator's Cut) can also be found as a discussion thread in the forum.

In addition, every user - just like in social media such as Reddit or in traditional internet forums - can also start posts themselves. These can be used, for example, to formulate arguments or questions, refer to events or publications or present research contributions (both your own and those of others).

All posts can refer to each other by copying and pasting the time and date. Soon it will also be possible to tag users by their user names. In this way, every comment will have the greatest possible context and discussions can develop over the long term.

Controversy is still part of it - as long as the opponents respect each other (see also our Community Guidelines). Our Kudos system gives you the opportunity to honour high-quality contributions even if you yourself have a different point of view.

Culture and netiquette

We attach great importance to a respectful tone and constructive debate in our forums - in the interests of us all. See our Community Guidelines.

Kudos

te.ma users can choose between five Kudos options to respond to forum posts. "Kudos" means "recognition" or "respect" (kydos, Greek: fame, honour). The differentiated Kudos options of te.ma replace the likes or emoticons known from other platforms.

Kudos awards are semi-private: only the recipient can see which Kudos he or she has received. The identity of the giver remains invisible. This allows a more relaxed approach to rating than on other platforms.

Database

All te.ma publications are organised by channel and sub-topic and stored in the database. They can be easily found there long after publication and can be sorted according to various criteria and searched in full text.

Saves

Every registered user can save both curated publications and user contributions in individual database folders in order to access them again later. In future, we also want to offer the option of saving links to external "net finds" in the personal database to make te.ma an even more versatile research tool.

Search

All publications and all user posts can be searched in full text by keyword, author name, etc. The search results are displayed as complete text passages so that their relevance can be assessed at first glance.

Open science

Open science stands for a cultural change in science towards more transparency, accessibility and participation. te-ma promotes open science by creating open spaces for discourse and, whenever possible, favours specialist articles that are accessible without a paywall. For our own publications, we rely on open copyright concepts (Creative Commons, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) and assign our own DOI numbers (Digital Object Identifier).

Paywall and open access

Where scientific articles or other materials are behind a paywall, this is indicated on our platform by a closed lock symbol. We have no influence on which materials are made freely accessible by the publishers and which are not. Wherever possible, we link to free versions (open access). Many scientific articles can also be found free of charge in web archives and various repositories and online libraries.

Adversarial collaboration

In adversarial collaboration by psychologist and behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman, two scientists with fundamentally different initial hypotheses work together on the same problem. The aim is for scientifically based differences of opinion to contribute to the gain in knowledge.

At te.ma, we transfer this concept to the curation of the channels, in which specialised scientists with different views and positions also work together as colleagues. The scientific embedding of the curators also avoids the problem of false balance, as only scientifically sound positions can be represented by the curation.

German and English

We thought long and hard about it and decided in favour of German and against English as the menu and publication language at the start of Thema. Some of our topics are simply too country-specific for us to be able to deal with them in English. But over time, the voices became louder as to why we weren't available in the "language of science". From June 2024, we will gradually introduce bilingualism - in the menu navigation and in dedicated English-language channels.

Language and gender

German currently offers several language practices for dealing with gender - from the classic generic masculine to various methods of gendering and innovative, experimental language use. We reflect this diversity in our own work, because every te.ma author, as well as every user in the forum, uses the practice that he or she prefers. Different gender language practices are therefore the norm on te.ma.

Please note: Discriminatory language and other violations of the Community Guidelines are not permitted and will result in appropriate action.

Functions in preparation

The software behind te.ma is being continuously developed. Functions such as embedding images in user posts are in preparation and will gradually appear on the website.

With a young platform (launch in October 2022), minor errors may occur during operation. Should major errors or malfunctions occur that hinder the use of te.ma, please write to us at support@te.ma.

Follow te.ma

There are various ways to keep up to date with te.ma: Our newsletter informs you about the current development of the project at irregular intervals. You can follow publications, posts and comments from individual users via the bell symbol (soon we will also offer customisable email notifications). Selected content and information about the project will also be displayed on our social media channels on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Security and data protection

Details on data protection can be found in our privacy policy and our terms and conditions.

Funding

te.ma is a non-profit project that is financed exclusively by donations and grants. te.ma does not engage in any commercial activity.

The start-up funding for te.ma is provided by the non-profit Konvert Foundation. Access to the site is free of charge. The non-profit status of te.ma-gGmbH is recognised by the tax office.

June 2024