Hi Dan,<br><br>In addition to what Reshma said:<br><br>Many thanks for your generous feedback! We would like to encourage as much feedback as possible from OWW users to help guide the steering committee.<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">I also like the chatting feature, but I have yet to meet up with<br>anyone online at the same time as me. Is this client an interface to<br>
an IRC backend? i.e. do you have an IRC server that I can connect to<br>with a different client? There are a group of us who hang out in<br>irc://irc.freenode.net/#bioinformatics and I imagine some who would<br>love to join the conversation.<br>
</blockquote><div><br>This is a great point and something we will look into. If you can think of any ways that we might advertise the chatting feature more so more users use it, that would be great. One of my main interests is to figure out how OWW can bring people together more, and I think the chatting feature is one place that we can do that.<br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br>The main question about the system that I have is this, I was<br>wondering why the registration of OpenWetWare is so restrictive - How<br>
come you don't allow freer editing of pages and content? Perhaps you<br>benefit from having more control over your users and more 'restricted'<br>content, however, the success of Wikipedia suggests that 'the more the<br>
better'. I know registration is only a few clicks, along with a slight<br>delay, but that will put a lot of people off. Perhaps you think it is<br>better to exclude such 'casual' users, but I don't think it is good<br>
policy. I would like to see more 'open' access to all the features of<br>the site.</blockquote><div><br>Interesting thoughts. Basically it boils down to the target audience of OWW which is more along the lines of professional scientists and students of science rather than people casually interested in science. Of course anyone is welcome to read and re-use the content of OWW, but we require registration so that we have a solid provenance link between content and who wrote it. This is because the information on OWW is primarily scientific in nature - protocols, experimental plans, experimental data, etc. We take this very seriously because we want the integrity of the data and associated discussion on OWW to be as high as possible. We are even considering trying to promote OWW contributions as cite-able material in which the current scientific value system mandates a name to be associated with the content.<br>
<br>We also have a slightly different article model than wikipedia - rather than having one page per topic, we really have one page per person per topic. That is, multiple researchers working on the same topic will have different views on the topic that should all be equally represented. It makes things different enough that we have to consider that when we talk about how OWW is structured.<br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br><br>I am still exploring the content of the site - there is a lot to look<br>at, and for a newbie like me, a lot to take in! It is really great to<br>
find such a mature project like this, and I am very much enjoying<br>moving around the site and finding new content.</blockquote><div><br>How are you finding stuff on the site? Internal search engine? Google? Following Links? Recent Changes? - We would really appreciate feedback in this area so that we can improve.<br>
</div><div><br>Thanks again,<br><br>Julius<br>OWW Outreach Chair <br></div></div><br>--------------------------------------------------------------------<br><a href="http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Julius_B._Lucks">http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Julius_B._Lucks</a><br>
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