OpenWetWare:Steering committee/Outreach chairs

Goals

Reformat these for the goals:

• I think we need different chairs for different regions since face time is the best way to convince people
• Perhaps the regional chairs should also try to get people at individual institutions to do some leg work. For example, being at Harvard I have a much better chance of convincing people in my immediate vicinity rather than trying to convince people at MIT.
  • I agree, it would be best to have local people. We need to set-up a recruitment campaign
• We need to define a list of regions to try to get chairs for: now we have Lucks (Boston), Vincent (London). We need Bay area - any others. (I will be able to take over the Bay Area in Jan '08 and will try to find a replacement for Boston in the mean time).
• It would be helpful to have a list of well put-together pages as examples to show people what kind of quality content they can expect.
  • I agree, we should try to buid a portfolio of communication tools.
  • Presentations has links to site walkthroughs that various people have given, the ones for PLoS and Nature are pretty up-to-date guides to cool pages on the site.
• Perhaps we can do some screencasts to put up on YouTube (or somethnig else) to give people a tour of the site - this could be good material to mail out.
• That said, maybe we can make a presentation that regional people can do at local lab groups to convince. (Maybe just a 15 minute highlight presentation.)

Current Action List

• getting communication tools updated.
• Defining the actual OWW community (labs,regions and countries represented), and how we would like to see it growing first.
• starting to the campaign to recruit local outreach officers in these regions.
  • approach already registered Labs to find local people.
• List forums, websites or media where we could advertise about OWW.

Current SC Report

We have been discussing how best to structure the outreach effort. On an organizational level, we have agreed that it is best to have people based in each area to be able to put a face to recruitment. The structure will consist of local outreach chairs in major academic areas. The responsibility of these people are to recruit and organize volunteers to head up the outreach on a school-by-school basis (and maybe eventually on a department-by-department basis to be organized by the school-level people).

The responsibilities of the local people will be to put up recruitment materials (flyers, emails, etc.), and try to give some department, or lab group presentations. Ideally we will have a set of standard materials for the local people to present - maybe a presentation, standard fliers, etc.

We need to do two main things from here - try to find regional outreach chairs, and start to prepare these materials. As a first step to prepare the materials, we are starting to collect some basic information on OWW:

• the existing oww community - the labs, regions and countries represented
  • this will also help us recognize where we need to concentrate our efforts
• combine existing resources together: Getting Started, Why Join? and OWW Presentations, Highlights
• Some basic OWW facts - number of users, hits, etc.
• list of pages that we can do a wiki tour with (similar to NCBI coffee breaks)
  • Prepare an outreach officer recruitment document that describes the position.

Please see the Outreach page for more specific details. Once these materials are gathered, we can get started putting them together into a nice compelling introduction to OWW in terms of what features it has, and what it can provide.

Targets for the next SC meeting

• Submit to the SC a wiki document to present the goals behind OWW and the advantages to be part of it (basically a PR document, created from existing resources, that will be used later by outreach officers).
• Survey on the current status of the OWW community (geographical distribution, areas of interests, status of the organizations involved, type of information hosted), and suggest a strategy to stimulate the OWW growth in some existing, or not existing, areas (would be great to team up with the analytics chair).
• Recruit some additional outreach officers (at least 1 outreach officer per continent).We could use this nice combination of Google Earth and a picture album to visualize who is where.

OWW Outreach Documentation

OpenWetWare:Community_development

Facts about OWW

• gathering on one page some important statistics and some fun ones:
  • nb users, nb labs, nb countries, ...
  • nb visits per day, most watched page, least watch page ...
  • (random thought) stories about what OWW has enabled....

Wiki tour of OWW

• Self explanatory wiki page describing what you can find on OWW, how you can contribute, and how it could benefit you.
• Existing resources:
  • Getting Started
  • Why Join?
  • Presentations of OWW

OWW presentation

• same as above except that it should be a PowerPoint file

OWW video

• short video clip (1-2min) presenting what is OWW and why people should join.

OWW flyer

• pdf flyer that could be sent to local officers/labs. So they can put it on campus/labs.