OpenWetWare steering committee/SC retreat

The OWW retreat is a relaxed opportunity to reevalute the mission and future directions of OpenWetWare.
Location: 68-121
Time: 1pm - 6pm

Location Suggestions

Location should be able to handle teleconferencing. Fast internet connection would probably be sufficient - we could use skype.

68-121 is now reserved from 1pm to 8pm --Sri Kosuri 14:54, 18 July 2006 (EDT)

Agenda

Please fill in discussion topics for the agenda here. Seeded with some of the discussion from the last SC meeting

1. What OpenWetWare is:
   • Online Notebook?
   • Collaborative Research?
   • Collaborative Education?
   • Novel Research Publishing Channel?
   • Other?
   • Can OWW be all of these things or are some of them mutually exclusive?
2. What OpenWetWare is not
   • Wikipedia has something just like this here, worth looking at.
3. What sort of decision making processes / formal organizational structure do we want?
   • What is the role of the steering committee?
     • Maintain the site?
     • Evaluate/approve user initiatives?
     • Pursue our own agenda (open publishing, protocol repository, etc)?
     • All of the above/other?
4. What are our goals?
   • Survival of the organism
     • What are the basal costs associated with keeping OWW alive?
   • Maintain the ability of the site to evolve
     • Keep barriers low for people doing new things on the site.
   • Have resources to react to new things that develop.
     • SC should be able to provide $ and resources to see though promising projects coming up from the community.
   • Grow and organize the community of superusers.
     • As it stands now, people may be less inclined to help since the SC is taking on too many of the site responsibilities. And we can't do everything, particularly as the site scales.
5. What is the best path forward?
6. Game plan for how to assess new funding opportunities
   • Funding: the private wiki installation idea that we've been discussing could have a suggested donation $ amount when you download it. This could fund the development of the public site perhaps?
   • Based on above ideas, what types of questions do we need to ask when new funding opportunities arise (or we seek them out) such that we can ensure these sources can be used to support (and are not contrary to) the goals we have set for OWW?
7. Changing wiki front page appearance
   • Should we consider converting our front page to a friendly cover rather than the table of contents?
     • Possible try making our wiki look less like a "wiki" and more like a normal website (with more style, of course)?
   • Beta-test of a possible front page in early brainstorming stages.
     • Includes items discussed during SC meeting --Video of the Month, Picture of the Week.
     • publishing on the front page? links to new publications? news? Are we a publisher of novel research?