OpenWetWare steering committee/SC retreat

The OWW retreat discussed at the last meeting will be held at MIT, next Tuesday (7/25). We'll be starting at 1pm, talking about OWW for the afternoon, and then going out for dinner afterwards.

Location Suggestions

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

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?
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
   • OK, done, now what?
   • 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
   • 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?