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.
George Ahunov, RPI
Barry Canton, MIT
Austin Che, MIT
John Cumbers, Brown
Drew Endy, MIT
Danielle France, MIT
Jeff Gritton, MIT
Martin Jambon, Burnham
Jason Kelly, MIT
Tom Knight, MIT
Sri Kosuri, MIT
Natalie Kuldell, MIT
Stephan Meister, Imperial
Alex Mallet, MIT
Kathleen McGinness, MIT
Jenny Nguyen, UT-Austin
Venkata Satagopam, EMBL
Reshma Shetty, MIT
Devin Strickland, U of C
Ilya Sytchev, MIT
Ty Thomson, MIT
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.
- Not clear that this should still be on the to-do list; Jason and Sri have some other ideas for making it easier to set up accounts --Alex
- Write script to automatically create login accounts based on a list of email addresses in CSV format.
- Add support for MIT certificates.
- 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).
- Note: this is straightforward with the Interwiki feature, e.g. you type [[doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/bti177]] or [[doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/bti177 | some text]]. See http://wikiomics.org/wiki/Interwiki_map
- Ok. Done. DOIs supported. --Austin 16:14, 17 February 2006 (EST)
- Note: this is straightforward with the Interwiki feature, e.g. you type [[doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/bti177]] or [[doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/bti177 | some text]]. See http://wikiomics.org/wiki/Interwiki_map
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
George Ahunov, Barry Canton, Austin Che, Sri Kosuri, Jason Kelly, Alex Mallet, Ilya Sytchev
Current status
- We have a UROP -- George Ahunov
- Software development ideas
Meetings
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
Current status
- We are brainstorming names of potential speakers for the OWW seminar series.
- Community development ideas
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
- Poster
People
Jeff Gritton, Lisa Joslin, Sriram Kosuri, Jenny Nguyen, Ty Thomson
Current status
- See (and participate in!) the logo and poster discussion.
- Promotional material ideas
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.
People
Jeff Gritton, Jason Kelly, Sriram Kosuri, Jenny Nguyen, Reshma Shetty
Current status
- We have a UROP -- Jenny Nguyen.
- Data Management ideas
- Data management meeting 2/21/06
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.
People
Natalie Kuldell, Reshma Shetty
Current status
- See the BE.109 course OWW site.
- Integration with laboratory classes ideas
- Update: Overall the course integration seems to be working reasonably well. While the BE.109 site is not being edited at a very high frequency, the edits that have been made are useful and high quality. The same appears to be true about BE.180. Having the site on a wiki also seems to facilitate all the instructors and TA's for the course contributing to course content.
Meetings
Steering committee meetings are held on the first Monday of each month, 4-5 pm, in 32-262.
- Conference calls are possible using the MIT audio bridge conference calling. Please check the meeting agenda for the phone number to call; it can change from meeting to meeting. For the March 6 meeting, we'll stick to a conference call. But 32-262 also has teleconference capability. If you would like to teleconference in, let us know and we'll try to set it up for future meetings.
Minutes and Agendas
- Prior to the committee formation, there were ad-hoc discussions on OWW development:
Schedule for future meetings
| day | 9 | 9:30 | 10 | 10:30 | 11 | 11:30 | noon | 12:30 | 1 | 1:30 | 2 | 2:30 | 3 | 3:30 | 4 | 4:30 | 5 | 5:30 | 6 | 6:30 | 7 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mon | 9 | 9:30 | 10 | 10:30 | 11 | 11:30 | noon | 12:30 | 1 | 1:30 | 2 | 2:30 | 3 | 3:30 | 4 | 4:30 | 5 | 5:30 | 6 | 6:30 | 7 |
| Tue | 9 | 9:30 | 10 | 10:30 | 11 | 11:30 | noon | 12:30 | 1 | 1:30 | 2 | 2:30 | 3 | 3:30 | 4 | 4:30 | 5 | 5:30 | 6 | 6:30 | 7 |
| Wed | 9 | 9:30 | 10 | 10:30 | 11 | 11:30 | noon | 12:30 | 1 | 1:30 | 2 | 2:30 | 3 | 3:30 | 4 | 4:30 | 5 | 5:30 | 6 | 6:30 | 7 |
| Thu | 9 | 9:30 | 10 | 10:30 | 11 | 11:30 | noon | 12:30 | 1 | 1:30 | 2 | 2:30 | 3 | 3:30 | 4 | 4:30 | 5 | 5:30 | 6 | 6:30 | 7 |
| Fri | 9 | 9:30 | 10 | 10:30 | 11 | 11:30 | noon | 12:30 | 1 | 1:30 | 2 | 2:30 | 3 | 3:30 | 4 | 4:30 | 5 | 5:30 | 6 | 6:30 | 7 |
