OpenWetWare:Steering committee/Meeting - October 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
Coordinator
- Nature wikiReviews -- they are just going to try out one review, I think it's going to go nowhere unless they make a more serious effort. I offered to have them periodically publish reviews that live on OWW in the meantime: we would serve as a sort of buffer (in that we're OK with non-peer reviewed content) and also would provide a support base for wiki-editing / scientists who are already familiar with it. Will let you know if anything comes of it. In the meantime, if anyone is interested in following up with another publisher about this, I suspect there would be some takers.
Communications
News and highlights
- MIT course 20.109 is highlighted this month, and I hope to do a highlight on PHYC500 in November. For now, there is a link to the OWW blog portal as a news item. I also am unable to make the SC meeting this month.
Outreach
- Recent Survey Stats: Julius B. Lucks 09:40, 4 October 2007 (EDT)
- The survey has been live for 18 days
- There have been almost 100 views of the survey
- There have been 14 surveys filled
I suggest leaving the survey as a news item for the rest of October. I suspect though that we are going to need to advertise it in a more proactive way if we are to get feedback from a significant portion of the oww community.
Software
Lots of neato stuff happened. Bill:
- overhauled the OpenWetWare:Software/User_management
- set up the default page that new users get as their User: page - you can see the template here
- installed several RSS extensions and added some examples of their use
- added examples of how to use the DPL extension
- added examples of how to use the Simpleforms extension
And Austin:
- uninstalled the google maps extensions (try wibbit if you now want a map, i.e. see OpenWetWare:Map)
- and the ShowHide extension (replaced by toggle)
- and installed wibbit, the Exhibit mediawiki extension. You can see it's table editor in the row of editing icons now. The table editor is pretty awesome. We need some documentation/outreach explaining the new tool to existing users.
- more info here: OpenWetWare:Software/Extensions#Removed_extensions
Wordpress blogs:
- Bill is working on a way to syndicate the blogs through feedburner.com, which speeds up google indexing and provides analytics
- and will eventually find a way to reconcile the wordpress and oww user tables so they are the same
- for now email Jason if you or someone you know wants to have a blog hosted by OWW. We should document and streamline this process.
- for now the blog portal is linked from the oww mainpage as a news item, but soon it should be possible (with the rss extensions and feedburner) to provide a dynamic list of recent posts
Add comments and suggestions etc. about extensions and other software topics to OpenWetWare:Software#Comments
I'm going to compose these updates into a more readable form and post them to the SC blog with a 'software' tag -Mac Cowell
Publishing
Board
- We've launched a search for a managing director -- see OpenWetWare:Hiring.
- We're writing a community page for PLoS Biology. Comments welcome. We hope to submit by Oct 15.