OpenWetWare:Organizing discussion pages
Discussion Topic: What is the best mechanism to organize all the various discussions taking place about OpenWetWare itself. (At this point I am leaving it up to the various scientific communities on OWW to organize their own discussion areas).
Proposal: There will undoubtably be many discussion taking place about the various areas of OWW at any given time. Due to the large number of discussions it will be impractical to organize all these discussions on one page in the community portal (or one discussion board). Instead, discussions about various sub-areas should live on the talk page associated with that area's 'main page' (e.g. materials, protocols, main page, recruitment, etc.) As an example I have reformated the protocols discussion page into a rough example of this. The key point is that each sub-topic is a subheading of Talk:Protocols (e.g Talk:Protocols/Tags).
Community Portal: In this scheme the community portal will address the problem of: How do we encourage users to move from just editing in their "lab space" to contributing to communal protocols, materials, etc? Thus, the community portal will point to the main disucssion sub-areas (e.g. Talk:Main Page). It will also point to a few "hot" discussion topics in those areas (e.g. Talk:Main Page/Appearance) -- largely for recuitment purposes (i.e. "look how active the community is!"). It is largely intended to be a jumping off point for new 'power users'.
Example of use: So how would a 'power user' utilize this scheme to keep up to participate in discussions on a daily basis? If I was interested in participating in development of the Protocols and Main Page, I would include 'Talk:Protocols' and 'Talk:Main Page' in my personal special:RecentChanges. If I was only intersted in a sub-category of another section, then I would include only that (e.g. 'Talk:OpenWetWare:Presentations/What to wear?').
Comments??
