OpenWetWare:Community/Project brainstorming

• Going to collect stuff here from around the site. (like from OpenWetWare:Ideas, OpenWetWare:Community development, OpenWetWare:Information management, OpenWetWare:Design)

Intro

• this page is inspired by our previous brainstorming of software ideas.
• Please feel add/edit, and feel free to come up with a better organizational structure. I just tried to put it in 4 or 5 general categories that seemed to make sense for community topics.

Recruiting New Users

Invitations

• Jason R. Kelly 08:44, 8 August 2007 (EDT): Should have a button/page that allows people to easily invite their friends/labmates to join OWW. This is more relevant if we establish lab groups, etc, where we are storing the connections between users. E.g. a person could join and then invite their whole lab, adding all of them to the group 'Endy lab' or whatever all in one shot.

Agree--Dan 14:04, 13 February 2008 (CST)

• • wjf 14:10, 13 February 2008 (CST):I did something like this before. It's pretty simple. Al would be needed would be a form and an emai message. Hmm... let's think about it. I like the idea. You would also get an email message when the user joined.

T-shirts

• OpenWetWare:Design/T-shirt

Supporting Existing Users (getting typical community members to be more open)

Information contribution

System for maintaining and organizing community writing of Help pages

• So people can find out where they can plug in; what's the best pages to work on, etc.

OWW journal clubs

• --Vincent 05:58, 7 December 2006 (EST): Organizing a section of OWW where several journal clubs would be hosted (Computational Biology, Synthetic Biology, Lab Techniques in Microbiology ...) -- Has it been tried before ? Not at the lab level but with article discussions openly discussed by OWW users.

A given OWW journal club would have a focus on a defined area (use of categories), a place where people could suggest articles to be reviewed , and a selected article (voted every 2 weeks for example) being open for discussion through an open forum. It could be concluded by a conference call if people are motivated (more constraining to organize). It would be great to build a rich literature review that OWW could share and point to in the rest of the wiki.

Dear OWWers, I started an online journal club page with a draft here: Journal Club. Have a look and extend at your leisure. So far it's only a static article review. But with the excellent chat feature that was added recently, people could gather on a specific article page and really discuss world-wide. Jasu 09:41, 18 April 2007 (EDT)

OWW Short Course

• Lon 13:33, 30 November 2006 (CST): Although there are protocol and course pages on OWW, both containing educational information and objectives, it might be good to have some more refined experiments. By this, I mean for newcomers to the biological sciences (new lab members, new labs) or those moving into new areas to have a set of standard experiments they could perform to establish good laboratory techniques and to be able to communicate problems with OWW members and/or their labmates. This could also be an alternative for lab instructors to use. This could be something like an updated and more encompassing Short Course in Microbial Genetics (or any another good lab manual).

Adopt-a-protocol

• This would be similar to the protocol curator idea. Basically a push to have people sign up to be curators, and maybe work on getting some scientific currency associated with that. "e.g. im a curator for protocol X on OWW" would mean something. But could just boot up by recruiting people to be curators...

Moved to Talk:Protocols/Template.

Information management

Categorizing pages

• Strategies to get this going? Wikipedia seems to do it fairly well.

SuperUsers (e.g SC-types)

Community Portal / Community To DO list

• How does someone who wants to help out mroe on the nuts and bults of OWW ind out how to plug in?

Steering committee

• Steering committee is the volunteer community voice of OWW that meets monthly to decide what are the most pressing new initiates or challenges facing OWW.
• Adding chairs seemed to be a good way to enable people to plug in, are there are other ideas?

SC Blog

• how do we get more people to post?

Discussion space

• The mailing list is one approach, blogs are another, chat rooms - what's the best way to let community members talk about how to make OWW better?
  • We've talked about trying a forum, we could revisit that idea.

Supporting open science generally

OWW mini-grants

• These would be small grants to sponsor open science projects invovling OWW

Community norms & values (encoding openness and sharing in the community in a persistent way)

Etiquette page

• We currently have a page on Etiquette. We may need better ways to inform new users of this, as well as to keep it up to date as the community evovles