OpenWetWare:Steering committee/Meeting - July 2007

SC Reports

Brief reports on the month's activity should be written by each chair 2 days before the SC meeting. At the meeting each chair will bring up any open issues that require discussion, but won't need to recount everything described below.

Analytics

I'm currently out of office, and haven't had time to prepare the stats for June. Thanks for everyones input on the distilled statistics, I'll summarize it on the wiki shortly.

I will probably not have the time available over the summer to hack the perl scripts to produce this limited version of the stats automatically (I'm currently writing my PhD thesis...). I'll try to evaluate how much work it may be for the next SC meeting though. Maybe this could be considered to be put on the list for the new developer, including automatic updates of stats onto OWW.

[Unfortunately I'm also double booked for the time of the SC meeting, but I'll try my best to make it].

--Mattias 09:10, 12 July 2007 (EDT)

Coordinator

• Held meeting to discuss the new accounts policy, settled on a standard approach for approving accounts.
  • We blocked one user for advertising (essay writing services spam) and rolled back her edits. I'd like to propose that the process for blocking a user be:
    1. Anyone on admin team can decide immediately to temporarily block someone
       • Speed is important here as we blocked this last person as they were in the process of posting more spam.
    2. Admin team votes whether to make the block permanent (guidelines will need to be defined here over time, but hopefully this won't be a common thing).
    3. Blocked person can appeal decision to the SC for a vote (until we get much larger I don't see this happening).
• OpenWetWare blogs are up thanks to ilya and jenny.
  • If you'd like to start a blog, please contact Jason R. Kelly.

News and highlights

• new this month:

Hoatlin lab highlight (up ~6/15)

Brown iGEM video (up 7/11)

• on deck:

Austin's extensions (could go in current video highlight slot, which is overdue to get swapped out)

Lab highlight should probably get swapped before the end of the month

>> any suggestions (preferably non-MIT)?

• future:

20.109(F07) Laboratory Fundamentals in Biological Engineering class highlight this fall

other nominations??

Notes

• Going to highlight Austin and his OWW extensions, would be good to highlight a specific extension that we wanted users to know about (special recent changes was suggested).

Outreach

Update on the OWW Survey:

• only minor changes have been done.
• We plan to implement it on an online form system (wufoo) during the coming month.
• A trial version will be sent to SC to chack how user friendly it is.
• If we are all happy with it, September could be a good time to advertise it on the website.

Recruiting more outreach officers:

• We have started to email some folks to join us as outreach officers, so we can get a bigger task force, and a better geographical repartition.

Publishing

• Discussion of Elsevier inclusion of citation index
• Discussion of interactions with other publishers

Notes

• John is going to put together a blog post for the SC blog about how scientific publishers should change in the open science environment. Hopefully, we can use this discussion to guide our policies w.r.t. partnering with publishers down the line.
• Also, we're getting back to scopus to find out how 'free' the service is -- e.g. if you follow their link do you need to have an account to see everything?

Board

• Senior Technology Developer, Bill Flanagan, will be starting soon. He'll be attending future SC meetings and will work on implementing new features.

Notes

• Approved the SC blog, as well allowing a trial group of user-bloggers to see to work out bugs in the system / decide if we want to offer it more broadly to users.