OpenWetWare:Steering committee/Goals

• Jasonk 03:09, 9 August 2006 (EDT): At the retreat we decided that the steering committee would be responsible for prioritizing the areas where OWW would expend resources (whether time or $). To serve this I think we need to have a list of short-term goals. (and probably a long-term vision as well). I put this page up just to get the ball rolling, please add/edit anything and post comments.

Short term goals (6 months)

• Since we are putting in place an organizational structure for the next 6 months, it seems like that is a good time frame for some short term goals.

Define a long-term organizational structure for OWW leadership

• The new structure will be decided upon in December, and new officers will be elected in January.

Encourage the growth of (a wide variety) of communities on OWW

• The reasoning here is that the most important thing is to continue to build a critical mass of users who are comfortable using the site in their daily research. Then if we want to role out more complicated things in the future we’ve got a user base to actually try them out with (and a userbase to suggest/develop new things in the first place). I think Jay's point at the retreat about wikis being included in OS 12, and the follow up discussion about how OWW is not principally a tool site supports this focus - the strength of OWW will be in the community of users that we've grown.
• List of communities that would fit on OWW and brief examples of projects we could prioritize in support of them.
  1. Labs
     • tutorial for adding custom recent changes for your lab
  2. Courses
  3. Research fields (e.g. fanconi anemia, synthetic biology)
     • Improved discussion areas?
     • Lab RSS feeds
  4. Institutions
     • Could build up the MIT institution page (e.g. list all shared equipment, etc) as an example for other institutions to model after
  5. Resource Centers (e.g. MIT flow facility, Caltech Microfluidic Foundry)
     • Provides a great opportunity for the user community of a resource center to troubleshoot, share protocols, and interact with the employees of the center. The caltech foundry has already expressed some interest in this, and I think it would be a great fit for the MIT flow facility as well.
• Recruiting new groups - advertising?

Recruit superusers

• Suggestions? I think having the defined goals might help, because it will provide obvious places for people to plug in.
• Welcoming committee - would help our overall retention of new people on the site, as well as more easily identify very excited folks and point them to SC-sponsored projects so they can get involved.

Medium term goals (1-1.5 years)

Shared resources

• Encourage users to contribute to shared resources pages (protocols, materials, etc).
  • Tools for tagging/categorizing protocols so that they are automatically collected.
  • Improved mechanism for creating a new protocol or material page (e.g. go through a form that automatically creates links from common areas, things like that).

Long term goals(2-3 years)

Publishing results

• Put in place mechanisms for users to share results in a way that enables them to receive credit (e.g., firm authorship, DOIs?). This would be moving into the territory of alt publishing models.
• Would be helped by a universal author ID and mechanisms/metrics for measuring contribution to the site.