OpenWetWare:Steering committee
The OpenWetWare Steering Committee is charged with leading the future direction of OpenWetWare. The steering committee is open to all OWW members, and we are actively seeking participants. Please add yourself, or email any of the members for further information.
Members
Adding yourself to this list, will add you to an email list where mail concerning meetings and thoughts will be exchanged.
Barry Canton
Austin Che
John Cumbers
Drew Endy
Danielle France
Jeff Gritton
Martin Jambon
Jason Kelly
Sri Kosuri
Natalie Kuldell
Alex Mallet
Kathleen McGinness
Jenny Nguyen
Reshma Shetty
Devin Strickland
Ilya Sytchev
Ty Thomson
Projects
Software development
In order to facilitate user interactions with OpenWetWare, we would like to establish a UROP position to work on a variety of software tools:
- Tools to simplify data entry into the wiki
- Word - word macro to convert formatting to wiki markup. Improve the html->wiki markup scripts
- Excel - improve the CSV-> wiki markup converter. Add support for chart addition.
- Powerpoint - Auto-image saving and uploading of slides. Transfer of slides to word files and then convert to wiki markup.
- LaTeX - expanded math support. LaTeX->wiki converter.
- Images - expanded image format support, automated uploading of sets of images.
- For further information see this page on existing document converters.
- Tools to map wiki pages onto static websites.
- Further automate the existing script.
- Include CC license information on each dynamically created page.
- Automatically set page width to an appropriate value.
- Login
- Add support for MIT certificates.
- Write script to automatically create login accounts based on a list of email addresses in CSV format.
- Tools to integrate permanent and evolving documents.
- Discussion pages for DSpace documents
- Markup for DOI's (just as there is markup for urls and wiki pages)
Ideally, we hope to coordinate with the MediaWiki open source community on tools that are likely to be of general use to the community (MediaWiki is the open source software that OpenWetWare is based on).
People
Barry Canton, Austin Che, Sri Kosuri, Jason Kelly, Alex Mallet, Ilya Sytchev
Current status
- UROP position posted at http://web.mit.edu/urop/research/openings.html.
Community Development
The success of OpenWetWare depends critically on cultivating and maintaining an active user base. We plan to dedicate funds to enable tutorials, conference visits, advertising, and other mechanisms for recruiting new users to OpenWetWare.
Finally, we want to begin an OpenWetWare seminar series hosted at MIT. This series would discuss perspectives on open practices and communities in science. We feel this would be important for two reasons. First, it would highlight groups and individuals in science actively striving to accomplish some of the same goals as those of OpenWetWare (e.g. PLoS, Science Commons, etc.) Second, it would provide an amazing opportunity before every talk to introduce OpenWetWare to others.
People
Barry Canton, Danielle France, Jason Kelly, Sri Kosuri, Reshma Shetty
Promotional Material/Advertising
In order to help promote OpenWetWare, we will need a range of promotional material including business cards, information pamphlets, posters and banners. Promo Material:
- New logo
- Business cards
- Go with simple design (just logo and simple text), or get artist to do the whole thing? ~tmt
- Here are a few pdf's with some sample business card layouts; you can print them yourself on card stock and cut to size, or we can talk about other designs and printing. --Dcook 09:56, 13 January 2006 (EST)
- Pamphlet/Poster
- I'm thinking of a single 11x17 sheet folded in half to make a 4 page pamphlet (I guess that the size is dependent on how much text we want in it). We could get the artist to do the cover page, and perhaps the background for the other pages too. If we get the text together, we could just give it all to the artist and get them to do the whole thing. ~tmt
- How set are we on pamphlets? I personally favor posters like what we did for the SB1.0 conference. I feel like pamphlets often just get glanced at and discarded but maybe I'm wrong. --RS 18:34, 11 January 2006 (EST)
- Pamphlet or poster... how about having whatever graphics, and then putting on questions like...
- I'm thinking of a single 11x17 sheet folded in half to make a 4 page pamphlet (I guess that the size is dependent on how much text we want in it). We could get the artist to do the cover page, and perhaps the background for the other pages too. If we get the text together, we could just give it all to the artist and get them to do the whole thing. ~tmt
- Need information on DNA Ligation?
- Ever wondered where you could keep your protocols?
- Need a place to discuss scientific issues with a group of people?
- Need an easy way to keep your website up-to-date?
What do people think? Are we ok with business cards and a poster? Or do we need pamphlets?
So far we have logos and business card designs in two places.
In terms of an artist, Samantha suggested going with Jennifer from Painted Frog Studio who did the poster and logos for the Synthetic Biology 1.0 conference. Jennifer has done a lot of stuff for the Whitehead and other bio groups, which could be a plus. Samantha said that when they were interviewing artists for the synthbio poster, she asked a lot more questions that the other artist. Going with her would save some time selecting an artist. Thoughts?
- Jennifer was quite good and we are still using her work. I would also run things by Jenny Nguyen who is on the OWW steering committee and contributed some cool logos to the BioBricks foundation etc. She might have some good ideas about what might be a good theme for OWW in terms of graphics. --RS 18:34, 11 January 2006 (EST)
- I know Felice Fraenkel had some contact with Drew and maybe the lab? She seems to be good at visualizing abstract concepts which might be what we need (see the comment below). Anyone know her enough to be able to talk to her about it and see if she has comments/suggestions?--BC 14:46, 13 January 2006 (EST)
We also need to address the issue for how to communicate what we want to the artist. How does one represent the idea of on open biology community in a graphic? It seems like the ideas behind OpenWetWare might be difficult to represent graphically. Maybe we should think about abstract ways of expressing what OWW represents (adjectives and adverbs, analogies, mental images?) in order to help the artist come up with ideas.
- One concern that has already been raised is that the name "OpenWetWare" conjures up the notion of wetlab work and possibly excludes computational folk. So perhaps whatever scheme we choose should try to attract both groups. --RS 18:34, 11 January 2006 (EST)
I have been spending a lot of effort coming up with a logo for OWW but have been unsuccessful because I am trying to convince people who have no idea what to expect, and I'm pulling ideas from a broad avenue. Let's make this easier and set a list of criteria to describe what we want, for example, color scheme, number of elements, traditional, contemporary, typographic, etc. These are factors that will help narrow our canvas space, and in turn help the graphic artist, or even myself design the desired logo.
Do we want our logo to be...
- Typographical: font speaks for itself? FedEx, Banana Republic, MIT, Dell, Google, ESPN, Nature, 3M
- Image: a picture speaks 1000 words? Apple, NCRR, Gateway, Firefox
- Text in shape? UPS, McGraw Hill Education, Business Week, ABC news, WIRED
- Image + Text? Codon Devices, UT, Continental Airlines, Discover Card, NBC
- Text in image? Boston Red Sox, Regency Cinemas, Starbucks Coffee, Burger King
Additionally, we should consider...
- Ease of duplication
- Memorable
- Recognizable
- How much color to use, etc.
So, these are some things that we should keep in mind and set so that we can move on with getting a logo! :) --JN 17:16, 13 January 2006 (CST)
Contacts
Jeff Gritton, Lisa Joslin, Sriram Kosuri, Jenny Nguyen, Ty Thomson
Data management
In the long term, the success of OpenWetWare relies on the assumption that the number of users actively curating the information of OpenWetWare will scale with the amount of content generated. However, there has been little work to examine how collaborative tools can best be used to develop information resources, such as the OpenWetWare protocol collection. We believe the project would benefit dramatically from the active establishment of community standards for organizing content in OpenWetWare. We will establish a UROP position to evaluate and implement templates and other methods for organizing information in OpenWetWare.
Contacts
Jeff Gritton, Jason Kelly, Sriram Kosuri, Reshma Shetty
Integration with laboratory classes
To complement its mission to promote an open culture in biological science and engineering, OpenWetWare will be integrated into the curriculum of laboratory classes. As a pilot experiment, MIT's BE.109 Laboratory fundamentals of biological engineering will be relying heavily on OpenWetWare to disseminate course content and to serve as a shared space for students, TA's and instructors to communicate.
Contacts
Natalie Kuldell, Reshma Shetty
Meetings
Prior to the committee formation, there were ad-hoc discussions on OWW development:
Old meetings
Ideas page
