From jasonk at MIT.EDU Tue Apr 3 19:07:18 2007 From: jasonk at MIT.EDU (Jason Kelly) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 19:07:18 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] SC Meeting Tomorrow (Weds) at Noon EST Message-ID: <7c085c480704031607m34c3e7ck3c29c6da113e9f8d@mail.gmail.com> Hi SC, Reminder that the SC meeting will be tomorrow (Weds) @ Noon EST, and will be virtual. Please either call 617-324-7520 or VOIP to sip:sc at openwetware.org -- If you are having problems doing that shoot Austin an email (austin at csail.mit.edu). Try to call in 5-10 minutes early if possible. We'll also have the chat room open here: http://openwetware.org/wiki/Special:Chat/OpenWetWare:Steering_committee/Meeting_-_April_2007 Please suggest topics for discussion: http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Steering_committee_next_meeting Also, please browse the updates from the chairs before the meeting: http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Steering_committee/Meeting_-_April_2007 For the meeting format, we'll run through the chairs at the start of the meeting and they can bring up any topics for discussion they have. Then we'll move on to the things on the suggested topics page. Thanks, talk to you tomorrow, jason From skosuri at MIT.EDU Tue Apr 3 19:42:44 2007 From: skosuri at MIT.EDU (Sri Kosuri) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 19:42:44 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] OpenWetWare is Hiring! Message-ID: <2b0cb7a10704031642m3fd3714k98068a77831da4e6@mail.gmail.com> Hi all, We are hiring and we are hoping you can help. We are trying to get the best people we can, so we're casting as wide a net as possible. We are hiring for two positions as described below. Could people post these on relevant lists or send them to people you think might be interested? Postings through craiglist, MIT, and NatureJobs are currently pending. If people have questions, please have them email hiring at openwetware.org Thanks, Sri Kosuri Job Postings: --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Do you want to change the future of scientific and engineering research? Are you looking for a unique opportunity to empower researchers to openly share information? OpenWetWare is a community of thousands of researchers from around the world who freely share their ideas, results, tools, and wisdom. Our project has largely been volunteer driven to date; we are now looking to hire two full time employees. Senior technology developer *Responsibilities:* Define and carryout lead software development and technology integration in support of OpenWetWare. Cultivate and respond to community input. Leverage internal volunteer development resources and establish productive relationship with external open source projects. Oversee outsourced server operations. Help lead development of our long term technology development strategy. *Requirements:* Deep experience and proficiency with Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. Familiarity with MediaWiki a plus. Awareness and understanding of ongoing external web 2.0 trends and projects. Should be able to develop and carryout independent projects. Must be able to foster productive relationships with existing and growing OWW user community. Apply through MIT Senior knowledge developer *Responsibilities:* Lead improvements to the OWW community and knowledge structure. Develop and implement knowledge management resources that improve the sharing of information via OWW. Lead conversations with OWW users and Technology Developers to ensure continuing relevance of ongoing knowledge management improvements. Help lead development of our long term community and knowledge development strategy. *Requirements:* Excellent communication, writing, organizational, and knowledge management skills. Awareness of ongoing external web 2.0 trends and projects. Fanatical enthusiasm for open research and communication. Apply through MIT Questions? Email hiring at openwetware.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-sc/attachments/20070403/f21cd6b8/attachment.htm From austin at csail.mit.edu Tue Apr 3 20:09:51 2007 From: austin at csail.mit.edu (Austin Che) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2007 20:09:51 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] SC Meeting Tomorrow (Weds) at Noon EST In-Reply-To: <7c085c480704031607m34c3e7ck3c29c6da113e9f8d@mail.gmail.com> (Jason Kelly's message of "Tue, 3 Apr 2007 19:07:18 -0400") References: <7c085c480704031607m34c3e7ck3c29c6da113e9f8d@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <87bqi580fk.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> > will be virtual. Please either call 617-324-7520 or VOIP to > sip:sc at openwetware.org -- If you are having problems doing that shoot > Austin an email (austin at csail.mit.edu). Try to call in 5-10 minutes > early if possible. It should be simple for anyone with a headset connected to their computer to use voip. If you don't have SIP compatible software, I recommend SJphone: http://www.sjlabs.com/sjp.html After download, all you have to do is enter sc at openwetware.org into the number to call box and it should just work. You shouldn't need to register with anyone. You can test it out immediately. If you connect successfully, if you're the only person in the conference room, it'll tell you that and play you music. -- Austin Che (617)253-5899 From jasonk at MIT.EDU Thu Apr 5 01:30:17 2007 From: jasonk at MIT.EDU (Jason Kelly) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 01:30:17 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] Meeting Notes and Action List Message-ID: <7c085c480704042230s1bb0d475pbc5810b5f81bdc06@mail.gmail.com> Hi SC, Great meeting today, we are a well-oiled machine ;) The action list for this month is here: http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Steering_committee_actions The notes (and audio) are here, I just added notes from the meeting after everyone's reports: http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Steering_committee/Meeting_-_April_2007 As usual, please add/edit anything I forgot or got wrong. Thanks! jason p.s. meetings are now the first Weds of the month, so the next one will be 5/2/07. From bcanton at MIT.EDU Thu Apr 12 09:27:07 2007 From: bcanton at MIT.EDU (Barry Canton) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 09:27:07 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] Private wikis? Message-ID: <52c0d2160704120627o39af7585l208578cf9fcf8c56@mail.gmail.com> How do we think the private wiki test is going? I'd be especially interested to hear from those with private wikis. I got a request on behalf of some MIT faculty behind the SMART program (Singapore-MIT alliance) who want to build their website on OWW. As expected they are put off by the lack of access control and are now wondering if it's possible to keep their entire site private. My feeling is that we shouldn't give out private wikis unless we think people are likely to use the public site significantly too. What do others think? Do we have enough info. to decide a general policy for granting private wikis? Barry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-sc/attachments/20070412/ae6dc434/attachment.htm From rshetty at MIT.EDU Thu Apr 12 17:43:23 2007 From: rshetty at MIT.EDU (Reshma Shetty) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 17:43:23 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] Private wikis? In-Reply-To: <52c0d2160704120627o39af7585l208578cf9fcf8c56@mail.gmail.com> References: <52c0d2160704120627o39af7585l208578cf9fcf8c56@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <6e9f40380704121443n6db86f9br3f4d67215fc1cd8@mail.gmail.com> OpenWetWare's mission is to promoter the *open* sharing of information in biological science and engineering. So the only way to justify expending any resources on private wiki's is if it encourages folks to digitize information as they go and this information gets eventually made public. Unfortunately, there are a few problems with the private wiki test 1) we won't know if people will actually make pages public after some time for easily 1-3 years. (The timescale for people to do experiments and eventually publish them.) 2) we haven't made it trivial for people to "publish" a page to OpenWetWare from a private wiki. Perhaps this could be addressed by the technology developer that we are trying to hire. 3) the experiment is uncontrolled. Potentially digitizing information early on privately doesn't make the information any more likely to go public later. But how do we know? 4) Making private wiki's available could in fact make things worse because given the option of making things private or public, folks might be more likely to make things private given an easy way of doing so. Again, there is no way to "control" for this. I'd actually rather not have a general policy for giving out private wiki's because 1) we shouldn't make any guarantees about the private wiki's. It is a trial right now which means it could go away at some point. 2) we don't want private wiki's to take off. Shouldn't we keep the number of private wiki's as low as possible? Of course, the caveats to the above are that it may be strategically useful to have more people become "dependent" on OpenWetWare (in terms of getting support in the future) and that we could explore charging for private wiki's to fund the public site. Just some thoughts ... I'm open to discussion. -Reshma On 4/12/07, Barry Canton wrote: > > How do we think the private wiki test is going? I'd be especially > interested to hear from those with private wikis. > > I got a request on behalf of some MIT faculty behind the SMART program > (Singapore-MIT alliance) who want to build their website on OWW. As > expected they are put off by the lack of access control and are now > wondering if it's possible to keep their entire site private. > > My feeling is that we shouldn't give out private wikis unless we think > people are likely to use the public site significantly too. > > What do others think? Do we have enough info. to decide a general policy > for granting private wikis? > > Barry > > _______________________________________________ > OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List > sc at openwetware.org > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-sc/attachments/20070412/f5a5a783/attachment.htm From sjkoch at unm.edu Fri Apr 13 00:58:26 2007 From: sjkoch at unm.edu (Steven J. Koch) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 22:58:26 -0600 Subject: [OWW-SC] Private Wiki Feedback from Steve Koch In-Reply-To: <7c085c480704122052vf992529ucc71262776facb05@mail.gmail.com> References: <52c0d2160704120627o39af7585l208578cf9fcf8c56@mail.gmail.com> <6e9f40380704121443n6db86f9br3f4d67215fc1cd8@mail.gmail.com> <7c085c480704122052vf992529ucc71262776facb05@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <000f01c77d88$5f6b24b0$1e416e10$@edu> Hi all, Here are some of my thoughts on the private wiki trial -- I am very happy to clarify these thoughts and / or respond to more questions. First, thank you to everyone for all of the great work you have done starting up OWW and to OWW for providing my lab with the private wiki space and the tech support to go with it! The private wiki has been a huge help to starting up my lab and I am very appreciative to have it. I do realize I am getting a lot for free. I agree with Reshma that the time scale for the uncontrolled experiment with private wikis is pretty long. Especially in my case as I had an empty lab three months ago and I am pretty slow anyway. So far, I think I have had a small but positive effect on OWW. I am hosting one course now (http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/PHYC500) -- unfortunately student participation was sabotaged by a co-instructor, but even then I think at least a couple students explored OWW because of this. I expect much more student participation in the future. I also recently put up my basic lab pages on the public site (http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/Koch_Lab) and added one protocol (http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/Koch_Lab:Protocols/Dig-bio_PCR and http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/Koch_Lab:Protocols/Dig-bio_PCR/pRL574_4411_P CR). I have in mind to put up a whole bunch of protocols that I have accumulated over the years and which I haven't had the know-how or impetus to put online until now. Part of the reason I took the time to put the one protocol on OWW was out of a feeling of sort of guilt about the private wiki -- otherwise I am sure I would have delayed more. The obvious question about your experiment with private wikis is: what would my lab be contributing to OWW if not for the private wiki? My feeling is that without the private wiki I would not have had sufficient motivation to use OWW for my course or my lab pages. Part of this was because having the private wiki made it extremely worthwhile to learn the basic wiki syntax etc. I would guess that at this point I would still be exploring hosting my own wiki, possibly MediaWiki, Social Text, or JotSpot. Using MediaWiki (and the exact OWW build) makes it much easier for us to contribute to OWW (though a "publish button" mechanism would be nice). So, my subjective opinion is that the private wiki was essential to my small contributions to OWW--and more importantly, I am committed to OWW and Open Science and I really do think that once my students start doing experiments and my lab gets going, that we'll have a whole bunch of useful contributions to OWW. (On the couple year time frame that Reshma mentioned.) So from my perspective and in my case, I think your investment in the private wiki was and will be very much worth it. I think this would only be true for labs who have a strong desire to be open, which may not always be true. Another question is: why do I think I need the private wiki? I do agree with most of the thinking about this: nobody really cares about whose turn it is to bring beer to the picnic or whatever, and most private pages will be ignored. If it were just me and I didn't have to worry about students or collaborators, I would not have worried about the private wiki. For students, I am cautious about subjecting them to an experiment with Open Science, even though I think it's the right way to go. I think they have enough risks already working with a new assistant professor. For collaborators, I know that some of the people I work with are still in the frame of mind that measured secrecy is essential to success and not getting scooped. While I think the best defense against getting scooped is complete openness (see my thoughts here: http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/Science_2.0/Brainstorming), I'm not yet in the position to force my more experienced collaborators and mentors into upgrading to Science 2.0. But I am in the position to invite them to my private wiki, create some private pages, bug them to put them on the public OWW, and gradually convert them (and their students). I agree with Reshma that you should avoid having an official policy for now. I think anyone who has a private wiki should be committed to open science -- and right now, you are sort of selecting that way and have some arbitrary control. In my case, I was attracted to OWW's mission and signed up not knowing about the private option. I wrote in my sign-up form that I was concerned about being 100% open and then was offered the private wiki. It should be clear to anyone that private wikis cost OWW money in terms of people's time and server space. So, charging is reasonable and also probably affordable once I have a grant. If you believe in private wikis as being a net positive for OWW, though, not charging is the simplest. If I paid some kind of fee, I would feel much less guilty about my slow contributions to the public site :) OK, Thank you once again to everyone, I think you have created a wonderful community! --Steve Steven J. Koch, Assistant Professor, Physics and Astronomy Center for High Technology Materials, University of New Mexico 1313 Goddard SE, MSC04-2710, Albuquerque, NM 87106 Office: (505) 272-7822 Fax: (505) 272-7801 sjkoch at unm.edu www.openwetware.org/wiki/Koch_Lab ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Reshma Shetty Date: Apr 12, 2007 5:43 PM Subject: Re: [OWW-SC] Private wikis? To: Barry Canton Cc: sc at openwetware.org OpenWetWare's mission is to promoter the *open* sharing of information in biological science and engineering. So the only way to justify expending any resources on private wiki's is if it encourages folks to digitize information as they go and this information gets eventually made public. Unfortunately, there are a few problems with the private wiki test 1) we won't know if people will actually make pages public after some time for easily 1-3 years. (The timescale for people to do experiments and eventually publish them.) 2) we haven't made it trivial for people to "publish" a page to OpenWetWare from a private wiki. Perhaps this could be addressed by the technology developer that we are trying to hire. 3) the experiment is uncontrolled. Potentially digitizing information early on privately doesn't make the information any more likely to go public later. But how do we know? 4) Making private wiki's available could in fact make things worse because given the option of making things private or public, folks might be more likely to make things private given an easy way of doing so. Again, there is no way to "control" for this. I'd actually rather not have a general policy for giving out private wiki's because 1) we shouldn't make any guarantees about the private wiki's. It is a trial right now which means it could go away at some point. 2) we don't want private wiki's to take off. Shouldn't we keep the number of private wiki's as low as possible? Of course, the caveats to the above are that it may be strategically useful to have more people become "dependent" on OpenWetWare (in terms of getting support in the future) and that we could explore charging for private wiki's to fund the public site. Just some thoughts ... I'm open to discussion. -Reshma On 4/12/07, Barry Canton < bcanton at mit.edu > wrote: > > How do we think the private wiki test is going? I'd be especially interested to hear from those with private wikis. > > I got a request on behalf of some MIT faculty behind the SMART program (Singapore-MIT alliance) who want to build their website on OWW. As expected they are put off by the lack of access control and are now wondering if it's possible to keep their entire site private. > > My feeling is that we shouldn't give out private wikis unless we think people are likely to use the public site significantly too. > > What do others think? Do we have enough info. to decide a general policy for granting private wikis? > > Barry > > _______________________________________________ > OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List > sc at openwetware.org > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc > > _______________________________________________ OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List sc at openwetware.org http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc From hoatlinm at ohsu.edu Fri Apr 13 03:20:03 2007 From: hoatlinm at ohsu.edu (Maureen Hoatlin) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 00:20:03 -0700 Subject: [OWW-SC] Private wikis? In-Reply-To: <52c0d2160704120627o39af7585l208578cf9fcf8c56@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Hi All, My lab has a private wiki and we are also active users of the public wiki. A little history might be helpful... When I started on OWW I mainly wanted a private wiki but because that option wasn?t around at the time, I started using the public wiki first. I?m glad it happened that way because If I?d had immediate access to the private wiki I might have just kept to myself and lurked around in my little Oregon world. Now I understand more about what OWW is about and I?ve become a believer. I find that I want to have as much as possible to the public wiki. For some new lab projects we are just posting everything in the open. For example, we are working on modeling a protein and my summer student posted his methods ( http://openwetware.org/wiki/Victor_Wong). My hope is that a colleague will get interested in the project and we will work together entirely in the open (so far, no luck on that but one can always hope....). Right now I?m hosting a class (using Reshma?s lovely template) and some of the other faculty here have expressed discomfort about posting, lectures, slides, schedules and so on. This is just what people are used to-- protecting and hiding everything. I explain how much I?ve learned from reading the other wikis and how great it is to contribute, not just unilaterally consume. Based on my experience, I think the more people use the public site the more comfortable they will be with the OWW mission of open sharing. So if OWW offers private wikis, then the labs ideally should also be active on the public side. I don?t know how you would enforce this though. I?m absolutely thrilled to be one of the test cases for the private wiki on OWW. We?ve decided to use the private wiki only for developing preliminary data in a format for publication. We are essentially working on drafts of papers with the intent that once the paper is published we will move that whole section onto the public side. The private wiki has transformed the way we communicate preliminary results in my lab. I can?t imagine doing work without it now. It would be a huge handicap. We were actively looking at a wikifarm (Sourceground) to host our private lab wiki when the private option became possible on OWW. In my opinion, having the private wiki option on OWW could ultimately advance the mission of sharing because otherwise some people might just go to wikifarms or use new operating systems with integrated wikis and drift away from OWW. -Maureen On 4/12/07 6:27 AM, "Barry Canton" wrote: > How do we think the private wiki test is going? I'd be especially interested > to hear from those with private wikis. > > I got a request on behalf of some MIT faculty behind the SMART program > (Singapore-MIT alliance) who want to build their website on OWW. As expected > they are put off by the lack of access control and are now wondering if it's > possible to keep their entire site private. > > My feeling is that we shouldn't give out private wikis unless we think people > are likely to use the public site significantly too. > > What do others think? Do we have enough info. to decide a general policy for > granting private wikis? > > Barry > > > _______________________________________________ > OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List > sc at openwetware.org > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-sc/attachments/20070413/f3ed41c5/attachment.htm From austin at csail.mit.edu Sat Apr 14 00:38:25 2007 From: austin at csail.mit.edu (Austin Che) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 00:38:25 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] Private wikis? References: Message-ID: <87wt0f7epq.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> Here's my semi-long perspective on private wikis. First, we've been discussing the same issues for a while: http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare_talk:Software/Subwikis http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Software/Private_Pages but let me rehash my current thoughts on this. It seems from the feedback so far that the private wikis are clearly useful to everyone who uses them. So what are the issues? "The cost/time issue": We can pretty easily calculate how much a private wiki costs in terms of server cost. We could see how much space and network usage a subwiki uses, use what we're paying for the server, and calculate a per KB disk and network usage cost (my quick estimates for an average subwiki is around a dollar a month). In terms of time, I don't spend much time worrying about the subwikis. "People can go elsewhere for private wiki": Before I gave myself a private subwiki, I didn't keep my lab notes on the wiki. But now I put most of my scientific thinking on the wiki. It certainly wasn't because I didn't know how to setup my own wiki or didn't have access to a server. If it was that much trouble for me to maintain my own wiki, I'm sure very few people would set up a wiki at all. Now I think there we can safely say that having as much science be digital as possible can only be beneficial down the road. We can guess what will happen down the line as wikis become easy but as of right now, getting a OWW subwiki is easier than anything else I know about. "People shouldn't be afraid of people editing their stuff": I agree. If that's why people are requesting private wikis, we need to work on educating people better and perhaps get them used to the public wiki first like Maureen's experience. "There's no need for private wikis as everything should be public": Unfortunately, there are things which should remain private. The OWW board has a private wiki. One could argue that the operation of the board of OpenWetWare should be open and transparent to set an example. There are many practical concerns and honestly I don't think we can argue that all information should always be public. "OpenWetWare's mission is to promote the open sharing of information": I think the only way the primary open site can be sustained is by providing useful tools to the scientists who use the site. The primary asset of OpenWetWare (and perhaps the only one) is the community of people who use it and rely on it (anyone could just create an OWW2 with our database dump). By providing tools such as private wikis that encourage people to come back to the site can only help with the site's future. "People will put stuff on the private wiki that they would have put on the public wiki": Note that if we believe that anyone can make their own private wiki site easily, then we aren't making the problem any worse with our own hosted private wikis. My guess is that without private wikis, most of the information would have stayed on individuals' computers and that moving them to a private wiki on OWW's servers is only one step away from being on the public wiki. However, I don't think this is a problem specific to private wikis but a general problem of creating incentives for people to contribute to the public wiki (regardless of whether there's a private wiki). If we solve the problem of people WANTING to contribute to the public wiki (reputation system? each edit gets entered into a raffle for an ipod?), then we solve the underlying problem and don't have to worry about the private wikis. So what do I think? I think everyone (individuals, groups, labs) should be allowed to have a private wiki. We work out the cost and agree on a policy for payment. Payment could be in terms of edits to the public wiki, service to the community, or money. OpenWetWare is in a better position to provide private wikis for scientists than other services and I think we should take advantage of that to help build the community. We need to create incentives for people to want to edit the public site regardless of us hosting private wikis as private wikis will always exist somewhere out there. Thus, I see very little reason for us to not host private wikis. -- Austin Che (617)253-5899 From tk at csail.mit.edu Mon Apr 16 11:06:07 2007 From: tk at csail.mit.edu (tk@csail.mit.edu) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 11:06:07 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] Wikis and patents Message-ID: <20070416110607.edl6fc0wkg00w4cg@imap.csail.mit.edu> The patent office has decided wikis are not good information sources. This likely has implications to users doing lab notebooks etc. in a wiki like format. http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1168336936842 From rshetty at MIT.EDU Mon Apr 16 11:34:03 2007 From: rshetty at MIT.EDU (Reshma Shetty) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 11:34:03 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] Wikis and patents In-Reply-To: <20070416110607.edl6fc0wkg00w4cg@imap.csail.mit.edu> References: <20070416110607.edl6fc0wkg00w4cg@imap.csail.mit.edu> Message-ID: <6e9f40380704160834q48721262xf13fd3a1c25163ee@mail.gmail.com> >From the article linked below, it sounds like the patent office no longer considers Wikipedia an acceptable research source. However, in general a lab notebook is generally used to document the time and inventor of the patentable invention. So it is not clear to me that the patent office would necessarily reject original invention documentation using a wiki (i.e. lab notebook) as invalid. -Reshma On 4/16/07, tk at csail.mit.edu wrote: > > The patent office has decided wikis are not good information sources. > This likely has implications to users doing lab notebooks etc. in a > wiki like format. > > http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1168336936842 > > > _______________________________________________ > OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List > sc at openwetware.org > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-sc/attachments/20070416/0a23bee6/attachment.htm From hoatlinm at ohsu.edu Mon Apr 16 11:51:12 2007 From: hoatlinm at ohsu.edu (Maureen Hoatlin) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 08:51:12 -0700 Subject: [OWW-SC] Wikis and patents In-Reply-To: <6e9f40380704160834q48721262xf13fd3a1c25163ee@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: My understanding is that a public disclosure of an invention before filing compromises a patent. So if you use an open wiki it would establish the date of the invention and other details but it would also be a public disclosure. Right? I?ve been curious about this. -Maureen On 4/16/07 8:34 AM, "Reshma Shetty" wrote: >> >From the article linked below, it sounds like the patent office no longer >> considers Wikipedia an acceptable research source. However, in general a lab >> notebook is generally used to document the time and inventor of the >> patentable invention. So it is not clear to me that the patent office would >> necessarily reject original invention documentation using a wiki ( i.e. lab >> notebook) as invalid. > > -Reshma > > On 4/16/07, tk at csail.mit.edu < tk at csail.mit.edu > > wrote: >> The patent office has decided wikis are not good information sources. >> This likely has implications to users doing lab notebooks etc. in a >> wiki like format. >> >> http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1168336936842 >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List >> sc at openwetware.org >> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc >> > > > _______________________________________________ > OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List > sc at openwetware.org > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-sc/attachments/20070416/e004810e/attachment.htm From tk at csail.mit.edu Mon Apr 16 12:34:26 2007 From: tk at csail.mit.edu (tk@csail.mit.edu) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 12:34:26 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] Wikis and patents In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20070416123426.kdroxs1k6vxyc808@imap.csail.mit.edu> That's right, although in the US you have a year from the first public disclosure to file. This won't help you if you intend to file in foreign countries. And disclosing the material is likely a bad idea even if you intend to file in the US only, since others may then be able to file broader patents around your specific work. I'm more interested in using wikis as a way to invalidate patents than I am in filing them. If they are not trusted, then this becomes much more difficult. Quoting Maureen Hoatlin : > My understanding is that a public disclosure of an invention before filing > compromises a patent. So if you use an open wiki it would establish the date > of the invention and other details but it would also be a public disclosure. > Right? I?ve been curious about this. > > -Maureen > From lucks at fas.harvard.edu Mon Apr 16 23:33:32 2007 From: lucks at fas.harvard.edu (Julius Lucks) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 23:33:32 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] SMBE Conference Message-ID: Hi All, I'm not sure this is the best place to ask this, but is anyone going to the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution meeting in June (https://smbe2007.dal.ca/). Please email me if you are with regards to sharing accomodation, and with alternative places to post this message if this is the wrong place! Cheers, Julius ----------------------------------------------------- http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Lucks ----------------------------------------------------- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-sc/attachments/20070416/2f33d992/attachment.htm From austin at csail.mit.edu Tue Apr 17 09:02:10 2007 From: austin at csail.mit.edu (Austin Che) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 09:02:10 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] SMBE Conference In-Reply-To: (Julius Lucks's message of "Mon, 16 Apr 2007 23:33:32 -0400") References: Message-ID: <877isbkvcd.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> > I'm not sure this is the best place to ask this, but is anyone going > to the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution meeting in June > (https://smbe2007.dal.ca/). > > Please email me if you are with regards to sharing accomodation, and > with alternative places to post this message if this is the wrong > place! Maybe we should have a page on the wiki with a list of conferences, people who are attending, and if you're looking for someone to share accommodations with... -- Austin Che (617)253-5899 From lucks at fas.harvard.edu Tue Apr 17 23:24:25 2007 From: lucks at fas.harvard.edu (Julius Lucks) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 23:24:25 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] SMBE Conference In-Reply-To: <877isbkvcd.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> References: <877isbkvcd.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> Message-ID: Hi All, I have created a conferences page: http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/Conferences Please post conferences you are interested in going to and whether or not you would like to share travel/accomodation with other oww members. What is the best way to advertise this page so that other members can see it? A highlight perhaps? Cheers, Julius ----------------------------------------------------- http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Lucks ----------------------------------------------------- On Apr 17, 2007, at 9:02 AM, Austin Che wrote: > >> I'm not sure this is the best place to ask this, but is anyone going >> to the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution meeting in June >> (https://smbe2007.dal.ca/). >> >> Please email me if you are with regards to sharing accomodation, and >> with alternative places to post this message if this is the wrong >> place! > > Maybe we should have a page on the wiki with a list of > conferences, people who are attending, and if you're looking for > someone to share accommodations with... > > -- > Austin Che (617)253-5899 > _______________________________________________ > OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List > sc at openwetware.org > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-sc/attachments/20070417/cbbc91c0/attachment.htm From austin at csail.mit.edu Thu Apr 19 00:10:04 2007 From: austin at csail.mit.edu (Austin Che) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:10:04 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] usernames In-Reply-To: <7c085c480704181944p5dd22187sca68732e102c769@mail.gmail.com> (Jason Kelly's message of "Wed, 18 Apr 2007 22:44:29 -0400") References: <87lkgpl6d4.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <1176934546.1298.31.camel@jeremy-muhlich.med.harvard.edu> <46269AC8.8050101@mit.edu> <87bqhll3cz.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <7c085c480704181723p1cfad1ffl3c3553a39893538b@mail.gmail.com> <6e9f40380704181732vbdf8a30l40e5e5fe4d6d43ec@mail.gmail.com> <87ejmhw3rh.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <7c085c480704181852r7cd5f72ar12d6bdbb43a64a23@mail.gmail.com> <871wihw108.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <7c085c480704181944p5dd22187sca68732e102c769@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <87r6qhuhr7.fsf_-_@nitsua.mit.edu> Redirecting to oww sc list from extensions list. "Jason Kelly" wrote: > ugh. The point is that everybody has already solved this problem for > themselves - we're not the first site that has asked them for a > login/password. When I have to log in somewhere that has a lot of > people I have a backup username that is usually available -- mine is > JKelly555. If it's some place that is a smaller community then I'll > check my primary username, mine is jasonk. I mean if FirstLast is so > easy to remember then why isn't everyone using it already? I'd rather > let people choose whatever username they think will be easiest to > remember, rather than assuming FirstLast16 will be easier to remember > (keep in mind there will be duplicate names). The reason most places aren't using longer usernames is probably due to several factors. There's the historical accident of unix and the mail system. Unix systems are limited to lowercase usernames with up to 8 characters (much too short for full names) and don't allow spaces. Same with mail. Google doesn't let me use "Austin Che" for a user name because putting spaces into my email address would cause me to never receive any mails. Secondly, for most websites which require a user name, they aren't using the user name as a unique 1-to-1 mapping with a real person. It is rather a mapping to an account. One user could have multiple accounts and the issue of registering is less for person identification and more because a database needs a unique identifier. For example, one can have multiple google, aim, yahoo, or amazon accounts and they wouldn't care. The next reason is that for most sites, people want anonymity. The purpose of a username is to hide the real person. Note that for sites like facebook and myspace where an account is equal to a physical person, there isn't a made up user name. You log in with your email address which is a substitute for a personal identifier. In general it seems like sites which want a single person behind an account don't have user names at all. Now on OWW, it appears the goal has been to have each account associated with a real person and to not allow anonymity. We could go with the email address as login approach but this requires software changes. Thus, why not use something for user names which actually is more associated with that person like their real name? > Not clear that RealName+number will be easier to remember. Do you > have some proof of that? I'm not suggesting that people use RealName+number. First, we have no evidence that there's a single name conflict on OWW as it is and people can't just use Real Name. People have been creating wiki pages of the form "Real Name" indiscriminately and redirecting to their user pages anyway. This would be equivalent if we just encouraged them to get User:Real Name in the first place and this would not pollute the main namespace with user pages. I'm suggesting we encourage people to use their real name instead of things like streptomyces, plasticsurgeryresearch, or even austin and if conflicts arise, they just pick something else based on their full name. I would guess most people either stay logged in or the user name is saved by the browser so no matter what it is, it's just as easy to remember. But it makes it much easier for me when looking at the recent changes to remember who a particular user name refers to. It also makes it much easier for me to remember what the user name is of *another* user. How am I supposed to remember that Tom's user name is his initials, Drew's user name is his last name, Ilya's user name is his first name, Jason's is his first name + last initial, Reshma's is first initial + last name, etc? BTW, here's wikipedia's extensive user name policy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Username_policy Note the section on username disambiguation. > So then practically, everyone on the site has a valid, unique email, > right? I'm not sure why a link that emails you your username and > password wouldn't solve all these problems.... Someone needs to write that code. And at least for me (and I would say for most people), I have more email addresses than names. So when I need to enter my email address on a website to recover my username, I would have no chance of getting it right if not for the fact that I store the email address I use for every site on my computer. -- Austin Che (617)253-5899 From jasonk at MIT.EDU Thu Apr 19 00:43:18 2007 From: jasonk at MIT.EDU (Jason Kelly) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:43:18 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] usernames In-Reply-To: <87r6qhuhr7.fsf_-_@nitsua.mit.edu> References: <46269AC8.8050101@mit.edu> <87bqhll3cz.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <7c085c480704181723p1cfad1ffl3c3553a39893538b@mail.gmail.com> <6e9f40380704181732vbdf8a30l40e5e5fe4d6d43ec@mail.gmail.com> <87ejmhw3rh.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <7c085c480704181852r7cd5f72ar12d6bdbb43a64a23@mail.gmail.com> <871wihw108.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <7c085c480704181944p5dd22187sca68732e102c769@mail.gmail.com> <87r6qhuhr7.fsf_-_@nitsua.mit.edu> Message-ID: <7c085c480704182143t62e8f1d1h592c90c44a898840@mail.gmail.com> Yeah, I think one good point is that we're not looking for anonymity here, so it would be great to have a system where as soon as someone signed up you would know their full name . (unlike current system where they need to fill in their userpage). I'd happily adopt the facebook model -- e.g. log in with email address, but you can search people by real names and use schools for disambiguation. I think most people could remember which email address they signed in with -- it seems to work fine for facebook, I think the 10 different email phenomenon may be specific to you austin :) Trouble here is that it would need some coding to implement this. While we could require people to have username FirstLast with the existing system, I'm a little hesitant because although we may not have name conflicts now we should expect to have them in the future. If we are going to implement a new login system, I'd like to go with something that can scale as the site grows -- and I think FirstLast only works for the first JasonKelly. Unless people can think of a clever way to deal with poor JasonKelly2. thanks, jason On 4/19/07, Austin Che wrote: > > Redirecting to oww sc list from extensions list. > > "Jason Kelly" wrote: > > > ugh. The point is that everybody has already solved this problem for > > themselves - we're not the first site that has asked them for a > > login/password. When I have to log in somewhere that has a lot of > > people I have a backup username that is usually available -- mine is > > JKelly555. If it's some place that is a smaller community then I'll > > check my primary username, mine is jasonk. I mean if FirstLast is so > > easy to remember then why isn't everyone using it already? I'd rather > > let people choose whatever username they think will be easiest to > > remember, rather than assuming FirstLast16 will be easier to remember > > (keep in mind there will be duplicate names). > > The reason most places aren't using longer usernames is probably > due to several factors. There's the historical accident of unix > and the mail system. Unix systems are limited to lowercase > usernames with up to 8 characters (much too short for full names) > and don't allow spaces. Same with mail. Google doesn't let me use > "Austin Che" for a user name because putting spaces into my email > address would cause me to never receive any mails. > > Secondly, for most websites which require a user name, they aren't > using the user name as a unique 1-to-1 mapping with a real > person. It is rather a mapping to an account. One user could have > multiple accounts and the issue of registering is less for person > identification and more because a database needs a unique > identifier. For example, one can have multiple google, aim, yahoo, > or amazon accounts and they wouldn't care. > > The next reason is that for most sites, people want anonymity. The > purpose of a username is to hide the real person. > > Note that for sites like facebook and myspace where an account is > equal to a physical person, there isn't a made up user name. You > log in with your email address which is a substitute for a > personal identifier. In general it seems like sites which want a > single person behind an account don't have user names at all. > > Now on OWW, it appears the goal has been to have each account > associated with a real person and to not allow anonymity. We could > go with the email address as login approach but this requires > software changes. Thus, why not use something for user names which > actually is more associated with that person like their real name? > > > Not clear that RealName+number will be easier to remember. Do you > > have some proof of that? > > I'm not suggesting that people use RealName+number. First, we have > no evidence that there's a single name conflict on OWW as it is > and people can't just use Real Name. People have been creating > wiki pages of the form "Real Name" indiscriminately and > redirecting to their user pages anyway. This would be equivalent > if we just encouraged them to get User:Real Name in the first > place and this would not pollute the main namespace with user > pages. I'm suggesting we encourage people to use their real name > instead of things like streptomyces, plasticsurgeryresearch, or > even austin and if conflicts arise, they just pick something else > based on their full name. I would guess most people either stay > logged in or the user name is saved by the browser so no matter > what it is, it's just as easy to remember. But it makes it much > easier for me when looking at the recent changes to remember who a > particular user name refers to. It also makes it much easier for > me to remember what the user name is of *another* user. How am I > supposed to remember that Tom's user name is his initials, Drew's > user name is his last name, Ilya's user name is his first name, > Jason's is his first name + last initial, Reshma's is first > initial + last name, etc? > > BTW, here's wikipedia's extensive user name policy: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Username_policy > Note the section on username disambiguation. > > > So then practically, everyone on the site has a valid, unique email, > > right? I'm not sure why a link that emails you your username and > > password wouldn't solve all these problems.... > > Someone needs to write that code. And at least for me (and I would > say for most people), I have more email addresses than names. So > when I need to enter my email address on a website to recover my > username, I would have no chance of getting it right if not for > the fact that I store the email address I use for every site on my > computer. > > -- > Austin Che (617)253-5899 > _______________________________________________ > OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List > sc at openwetware.org > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc > From austin at csail.mit.edu Thu Apr 19 14:55:45 2007 From: austin at csail.mit.edu (Austin Che) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 14:55:45 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] usernames References: <46269AC8.8050101@mit.edu> <87bqhll3cz.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <7c085c480704181723p1cfad1ffl3c3553a39893538b@mail.gmail.com> <6e9f40380704181732vbdf8a30l40e5e5fe4d6d43ec@mail.gmail.com> <87ejmhw3rh.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <7c085c480704181852r7cd5f72ar12d6bdbb43a64a23@mail.gmail.com> <871wihw108.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <7c085c480704181944p5dd22187sca68732e102c769@mail.gmail.com> <87r6qhuhr7.fsf_-_@nitsua.mit.edu> <7c085c480704182143t62e8f1d1h592c90c44a898840@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <87lkgojiry.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> "Jason Kelly" mumbled mindlessly: > Yeah, I think one good point is that we're not looking for anonymity > here, so it would be great to have a system where as soon as someone > signed up you would know their full name . (unlike current system > where they need to fill in their userpage). I still don't understand what's wrong with putting that info in the user name in the first place. > I'd happily adopt the facebook model -- e.g. log in with email > address, but you can search people by real names and use schools for > disambiguation. I think most people could remember which email > address they signed in with -- it seems to work fine for facebook, I > think the 10 different email phenomenon may be specific to you austin > :) Trouble here is that it would need some coding to implement this. It would actually need lots of coding if you want to toss out the user system. What link would it create when you signed something? What would a user's page be? MediaWiki is inherently user based and requires users to have user pages. An alternative would be to assign random strings to users i.e. User:x214g90kueatn but they log in with their email. But to me, this is much more confusing than logging in with their name. > While we could require people to have username FirstLast with the > existing system, I'm a little hesitant because although we may not > have name conflicts now we should expect to have them in the future. > If we are going to implement a new login system, I'd like to go with > something that can scale as the site grows -- and I think FirstLast > only works for the first JasonKelly. Unless people can think of a > clever way to deal with poor JasonKelly2. The point is that we don't have to implement anything new at all to get something which improves on the current situation. Someone could currently create an account called JasonKelly. Would you get upset? Would it confuse people? Who gets the right to the page "Jason Kelly"? What if their favorite username is jasonk and now they are stuck with jasonk2? It's not like those issues don't already exist. So I can't think of any reason to not move people to use more descriptive user names where ever possible as it requires absolutely no change in technology. -- Austin Che (617)253-5899 From rshetty at MIT.EDU Thu Apr 19 15:21:37 2007 From: rshetty at MIT.EDU (Reshma Shetty) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:21:37 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] usernames In-Reply-To: <87lkgojiry.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> References: <7c085c480704181723p1cfad1ffl3c3553a39893538b@mail.gmail.com> <6e9f40380704181732vbdf8a30l40e5e5fe4d6d43ec@mail.gmail.com> <87ejmhw3rh.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <7c085c480704181852r7cd5f72ar12d6bdbb43a64a23@mail.gmail.com> <871wihw108.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <7c085c480704181944p5dd22187sca68732e102c769@mail.gmail.com> <87r6qhuhr7.fsf_-_@nitsua.mit.edu> <7c085c480704182143t62e8f1d1h592c90c44a898840@mail.gmail.com> <87lkgojiry.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> Message-ID: <6e9f40380704191221q1834a18aue2029259bae5bdf8@mail.gmail.com> I'm confused on two points ... 1) Austin are you proposing that we move to encouraging use of FirstnameLastname as the username for all future accounts or also try to move current account holders? In general, I thought that we had been trying all along to have people's username reflect their real name in some way. I consider the usernames that don't reflect a person's real name to be a failure of our ability to check username requests. I don't see how moving to a more uniform username scheme like FirstnameLastname addresses this problem? 2) Wouldn't an alternative approach be to seed the person's user page with their name and affiliation automatically upon account creation. (Presumably this is doable with some coding effort?) Thus, every user page would be seeded with some information about the person? Is this an acceptable policy? -Reshma On 4/19/07, Austin Che wrote: > > "Jason Kelly" mumbled mindlessly: > > > Yeah, I think one good point is that we're not looking for anonymity > > here, so it would be great to have a system where as soon as someone > > signed up you would know their full name . (unlike current system > > where they need to fill in their userpage). > > I still don't understand what's wrong with putting that info in > the user name in the first place. > > > I'd happily adopt the facebook model -- e.g. log in with email > > address, but you can search people by real names and use schools for > > disambiguation. I think most people could remember which email > > address they signed in with -- it seems to work fine for facebook, I > > think the 10 different email phenomenon may be specific to you austin > > :) Trouble here is that it would need some coding to implement this. > > It would actually need lots of coding if you want to toss out the > user system. What link would it create when you signed something? > What would a user's page be? MediaWiki is inherently user based > and requires users to have user pages. An alternative would be to > assign random strings to users i.e. User:x214g90kueatn but they > log in with their email. But to me, this is much more confusing > than logging in with their name. > > > While we could require people to have username FirstLast with the > > existing system, I'm a little hesitant because although we may not > > have name conflicts now we should expect to have them in the future. > > If we are going to implement a new login system, I'd like to go with > > something that can scale as the site grows -- and I think FirstLast > > only works for the first JasonKelly. Unless people can think of a > > clever way to deal with poor JasonKelly2. > > The point is that we don't have to implement anything new at all > to get something which improves on the current situation. Someone > could currently create an account called JasonKelly. Would you get > upset? Would it confuse people? Who gets the right to the page > "Jason Kelly"? What if their favorite username is jasonk and now > they are stuck with jasonk2? It's not like those issues don't > already exist. So I can't think of any reason to not move people > to use more descriptive user names where ever possible as it > requires absolutely no change in technology. > > -- > Austin Che (617)253-5899 > _______________________________________________ > OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List > sc at openwetware.org > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-sc/attachments/20070419/835f1d64/attachment.htm From austin at csail.mit.edu Thu Apr 19 15:58:04 2007 From: austin at csail.mit.edu (Austin Che) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:58:04 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] usernames In-Reply-To: <6e9f40380704191221q1834a18aue2029259bae5bdf8@mail.gmail.com> (Reshma Shetty's message of "Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:21:37 -0400") References: <7c085c480704181723p1cfad1ffl3c3553a39893538b@mail.gmail.com> <6e9f40380704181732vbdf8a30l40e5e5fe4d6d43ec@mail.gmail.com> <87ejmhw3rh.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <7c085c480704181852r7cd5f72ar12d6bdbb43a64a23@mail.gmail.com> <871wihw108.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <7c085c480704181944p5dd22187sca68732e102c769@mail.gmail.com> <87r6qhuhr7.fsf_-_@nitsua.mit.edu> <7c085c480704182143t62e8f1d1h592c90c44a898840@mail.gmail.com> <87lkgojiry.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <6e9f40380704191221q1834a18aue2029259bae5bdf8@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <878xcojfw3.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> "Reshma Shetty" spake sagely: > I'm confused on two points ... > > 1) Austin are you proposing that we move to encouraging use of > FirstnameLastname as the username for all future accounts or also try to > move current account holders? We can do both. The first is trivial and requires no work. The second is technically quite easy for single accounts (not sure how difficult it'd be for many accounts). Note, I'm actually suggesting Firstname Lastname with the space so people's user page would be User:Firstname Lastname which could be a direct substitute for the many Firstname Lastname pages that currently exist in the main namespace. > In general, I thought that we had been trying all along to have people's > username reflect their real name in some way. I consider the usernames that > don't reflect a person's real name to be a failure of our ability to check > username requests. I don't see how moving to a more uniform username scheme > like FirstnameLastname addresses this problem? Sure better checking of usernames is necessary and that's not the problem I'm suggesting we deal with (in fact, with a uniform scheme, we could just auto generate the user name). But as far as I know, there's not a stated username policy on OWW at all. And there's a difference between using a username that reflects their real name in some way and their actual real name. > 2) Wouldn't an alternative approach be to seed the person's user page with > their name and affiliation automatically upon account creation. (Presumably > this is doable with some coding effort?) Thus, every user page would be > seeded with some information about the person? Is this an acceptable > policy? Seeding a user page is a great idea but I think a different issue than the actual username. -- Austin Che (617)253-5899 From jasonk at MIT.EDU Thu Apr 19 16:09:07 2007 From: jasonk at MIT.EDU (Jason Kelly) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 16:09:07 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] usernames In-Reply-To: <878xcojfw3.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> References: <87ejmhw3rh.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <7c085c480704181852r7cd5f72ar12d6bdbb43a64a23@mail.gmail.com> <871wihw108.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <7c085c480704181944p5dd22187sca68732e102c769@mail.gmail.com> <87r6qhuhr7.fsf_-_@nitsua.mit.edu> <7c085c480704182143t62e8f1d1h592c90c44a898840@mail.gmail.com> <87lkgojiry.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <6e9f40380704191221q1834a18aue2029259bae5bdf8@mail.gmail.com> <878xcojfw3.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> Message-ID: <7c085c480704191309w66ae25a9sa8adb8132534b9c0@mail.gmail.com> So what is the policy for duplicate names in this scheme? I also like the idea of seeding the userpage, creates incentive to edit your page... Thanks, jason On 4/19/07, Austin Che wrote: > "Reshma Shetty" spake sagely: > > > I'm confused on two points ... > > > > 1) Austin are you proposing that we move to encouraging use of > > FirstnameLastname as the username for all future accounts or also try to > > move current account holders? > > We can do both. The first is trivial and requires no work. The > second is technically quite easy for single accounts (not sure how > difficult it'd be for many accounts). Note, I'm actually > suggesting Firstname Lastname with the space so people's user page > would be User:Firstname Lastname which could be a direct > substitute for the many Firstname Lastname pages that currently > exist in the main namespace. > > > In general, I thought that we had been trying all along to have people's > > username reflect their real name in some way. I consider the usernames that > > don't reflect a person's real name to be a failure of our ability to check > > username requests. I don't see how moving to a more uniform username scheme > > like FirstnameLastname addresses this problem? > > Sure better checking of usernames is necessary and that's not the > problem I'm suggesting we deal with (in fact, with a uniform > scheme, we could just auto generate the user name). But as far as > I know, there's not a stated username policy on OWW at all. And > there's a difference between using a username that reflects their > real name in some way and their actual real name. > > > 2) Wouldn't an alternative approach be to seed the person's user page with > > their name and affiliation automatically upon account creation. (Presumably > > this is doable with some coding effort?) Thus, every user page would be > > seeded with some information about the person? Is this an acceptable > > policy? > > Seeding a user page is a great idea but I think a different issue > than the actual username. > > -- > Austin Che (617)253-5899 > _______________________________________________ > OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List > sc at openwetware.org > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc > From jennytnguyen at gmail.com Thu Apr 19 16:17:06 2007 From: jennytnguyen at gmail.com (Jenny Nguyen) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:17:06 -0500 Subject: [OWW-SC] usernames In-Reply-To: <7c085c480704191309w66ae25a9sa8adb8132534b9c0@mail.gmail.com> References: <7c085c480704181852r7cd5f72ar12d6bdbb43a64a23@mail.gmail.com> <871wihw108.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <7c085c480704181944p5dd22187sca68732e102c769@mail.gmail.com> <87r6qhuhr7.fsf_-_@nitsua.mit.edu> <7c085c480704182143t62e8f1d1h592c90c44a898840@mail.gmail.com> <87lkgojiry.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <6e9f40380704191221q1834a18aue2029259bae5bdf8@mail.gmail.com> <878xcojfw3.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <7c085c480704191309w66ae25a9sa8adb8132534b9c0@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: At UT, they designate students with an electronic ID that we use to log into everything (much like the IDs at MIT except ours are a little easier to remember). I think when they first implemented it, they used FirstnameLastname, and then in years after that is varied as follows... 1. JennyNguyen 2. JNguyen 3. NguyenJ 4. JN23 <--random numbers 5. JN235 And I have no idea what the UT IDs look like for the class of 2001, but they seem to get more distinguished, but still contain the initials of the individual. I know that OWW hasn't reached enough users as UT has students to get to assigning that many numbers behind the username, but this may be a possible option for signing up for OWW and receiving an e-mail with your username and password on it. I wouldn't be against that, and at least the people first signing up for OWW would get their full name :). Not sure how they dealt with duplicates. On 4/19/07, Jason Kelly wrote: > > So what is the policy for duplicate names in this scheme? > > I also like the idea of seeding the userpage, creates incentive to > edit your page... > > Thanks, > jason > > On 4/19/07, Austin Che wrote: > > "Reshma Shetty" spake sagely: > > > > > I'm confused on two points ... > > > > > > 1) Austin are you proposing that we move to encouraging use of > > > FirstnameLastname as the username for all future accounts or also try > to > > > move current account holders? > > > > We can do both. The first is trivial and requires no work. The > > second is technically quite easy for single accounts (not sure how > > difficult it'd be for many accounts). Note, I'm actually > > suggesting Firstname Lastname with the space so people's user page > > would be User:Firstname Lastname which could be a direct > > substitute for the many Firstname Lastname pages that currently > > exist in the main namespace. > > > > > In general, I thought that we had been trying all along to have > people's > > > username reflect their real name in some way. I consider the > usernames that > > > don't reflect a person's real name to be a failure of our ability to > check > > > username requests. I don't see how moving to a more uniform username > scheme > > > like FirstnameLastname addresses this problem? > > > > Sure better checking of usernames is necessary and that's not the > > problem I'm suggesting we deal with (in fact, with a uniform > > scheme, we could just auto generate the user name). But as far as > > I know, there's not a stated username policy on OWW at all. And > > there's a difference between using a username that reflects their > > real name in some way and their actual real name. > > > > > 2) Wouldn't an alternative approach be to seed the person's user page > with > > > their name and affiliation automatically upon account > creation. (Presumably > > > this is doable with some coding effort?) Thus, every user page would > be > > > seeded with some information about the person? Is this an acceptable > > > policy? > > > > Seeding a user page is a great idea but I think a different issue > > than the actual username. > > > > -- > > Austin Che (617)253-5899 > > _______________________________________________ > > OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List > > sc at openwetware.org > > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc > > > _______________________________________________ > OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List > sc at openwetware.org > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-sc/attachments/20070419/593331e3/attachment.htm From yeem at MIT.EDU Thu Apr 19 16:52:31 2007 From: yeem at MIT.EDU (M. Yee) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 16:52:31 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [OWW-SC] usernames In-Reply-To: References: <7c085c480704181852r7cd5f72ar12d6bdbb43a64a23@mail.gmail.com> <871wihw108.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <7c085c480704181944p5dd22187sca68732e102c769@mail.gmail.com> <87r6qhuhr7.fsf_-_@nitsua.mit.edu> <7c085c480704182143t62e8f1d1h592c90c44a898840@mail.gmail.com> <87lkgojiry.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <6e9f40380704191221q1834a18aue2029259bae5bdf8@mail.gmail.com> <878xcojfw3.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <7c085c480704191309w66ae25a9sa8adb8132534b9c0@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: MIT lets everyone have their little username but assigns each person an alias, which is always [First initial]-[full last name][index] where [index] = [index]++ for each duplicate and 0 is omitted. So, when I first got here, there was some other guy named Michael Yee, and he was M-yee and I got M-yee1. Then some time ago he graduated and got rehired by MIT, so now I'm M-yee and he's M-yee1. It's funny, some combinations are pretty common; I just checked and found S-lee26. In any case, this way you can let people pick whatever they want for a username, but still keep track of them in a predictable way...uh, if you don't mind the redundancy of having two names attached to each person. Mike On Thu, 19 Apr 2007, Jenny Nguyen wrote: > At UT, they designate students with an electronic ID that we use to log into > everything (much like the IDs at MIT except ours are a little easier to > remember). I think when they first implemented it, they used > FirstnameLastname, and then in years after that is varied as follows... > > > 1. JennyNguyen > 2. JNguyen > 3. NguyenJ > 4. JN23 <--random numbers > 5. JN235 > > And I have no idea what the UT IDs look like for the class of 2001, but they > seem to get more distinguished, but still contain the initials of the > individual. I know that OWW hasn't reached enough users as UT has students > to get to assigning that many numbers behind the username, but this may be a > possible option for signing up for OWW and receiving an e-mail with your > username and password on it. I wouldn't be against that, and at least the > people first signing up for OWW would get their full name :). Not sure how > they dealt with duplicates. > > On 4/19/07, Jason Kelly wrote: > > > > So what is the policy for duplicate names in this scheme? > > > > I also like the idea of seeding the userpage, creates incentive to > > edit your page... > > > > Thanks, > > jason > > > > On 4/19/07, Austin Che wrote: > > > "Reshma Shetty" spake sagely: > > > > > > > I'm confused on two points ... > > > > > > > > 1) Austin are you proposing that we move to encouraging use of > > > > FirstnameLastname as the username for all future accounts or also try > > to > > > > move current account holders? > > > > > > We can do both. The first is trivial and requires no work. The > > > second is technically quite easy for single accounts (not sure how > > > difficult it'd be for many accounts). Note, I'm actually > > > suggesting Firstname Lastname with the space so people's user page > > > would be User:Firstname Lastname which could be a direct > > > substitute for the many Firstname Lastname pages that currently > > > exist in the main namespace. > > > > > > > In general, I thought that we had been trying all along to have > > people's > > > > username reflect their real name in some way. I consider the > > usernames that > > > > don't reflect a person's real name to be a failure of our ability to > > check > > > > username requests. I don't see how moving to a more uniform username > > scheme > > > > like FirstnameLastname addresses this problem? > > > > > > Sure better checking of usernames is necessary and that's not the > > > problem I'm suggesting we deal with (in fact, with a uniform > > > scheme, we could just auto generate the user name). But as far as > > > I know, there's not a stated username policy on OWW at all. And > > > there's a difference between using a username that reflects their > > > real name in some way and their actual real name. > > > > > > > 2) Wouldn't an alternative approach be to seed the person's user page > > with > > > > their name and affiliation automatically upon account > > creation. (Presumably > > > > this is doable with some coding effort?) Thus, every user page would > > be > > > > seeded with some information about the person? Is this an acceptable > > > > policy? > > > > > > Seeding a user page is a great idea but I think a different issue > > > than the actual username. > > > > > > -- > > > Austin Che (617)253-5899 > > > _______________________________________________ > > > OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List > > > sc at openwetware.org > > > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List > > sc at openwetware.org > > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc > > > From lucks at fas.harvard.edu Fri Apr 20 16:52:37 2007 From: lucks at fas.harvard.edu (Julius Lucks) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 16:52:37 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] Alternative Welcome System and Home Pages Message-ID: <5121D462-7AC4-41F3-835F-F4A1778E4995@fas.harvard.edu> Hi All, Vincent and I have been thinking a lot about how to get oww members to contribute more content so that we can grow the existing oww community, and attract new members by pointing to high quality examples of content on oww. One of the things that struck us is that there doesn't seem to be an easy way for a complete wiki novice to get into editing. The existing welcome email is very long and has many links for people to follow and I think it is confusing to a novice. Also I have spent some time browsing around OWW and it seems hard for someone completely new to the site to find content by just surfing around. So Vincent and I want to propose a new welcome system that involves automatically creating a 'home page' for new users when their account is created. I'll give you all the reasons why we think this is a good idea, but to see for yourself, please look at our mock home page at http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Steering_committee/ Outreach_chairs/mock_home_page or the one I am playing around with for myself at http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/Lucks The idea is that every user has 3 pages made for them when their account is created: the typical User page, a home page, and a sample project page (more about this one below). The User page can be used to show more personal information, but the idea behind the home page is to give people a hands-on quick introduction to the wiki-way in terms of their own academic projects. The home page is set up in such a way as to provide both an introduction, and an example system for how people might think about posting their academic content. Being an experienced user, I often find that wiki's give too much freedom in the choice of page and section names, formatting options, etc. The home page would give users something to work off of rather than having to come up with a system on their own. The home page also has a section listing seperate project pages for individual projects. The third page automatically created is a sample project page that gives a skeleton outline of what kind of info it would be good to have in describing a project on the wiki. The idea is the same here - that people can just start to fill this out instead of having to come up with some system on their own. I'm not sure about the technical difficulties of creating these pages, but this is something along the lines of Reshma's recent suggestion of filling in the User page. The benefits of this system we think are as follows: * hands on introduction to the wiki for a new users OWN content rather than a standard tutorial page that they would have to read and then apply to a page they create * having tutorial info on the page gives the user an incentive to start editing and personalizing right away (to remove the tutorial info) * having a scaffold of pages is much easier for someone to handle than having a blank slate - we can emphasize that they can customize at any time * the scaffold promotes good naming conventions and structuring of content on the wiki - if everyone did this it could help people find information easier because they would be automatically familiar with how other people structure their content from knowing how they do their own * this is more along the lines of what scientists need. Wikipedia works well because ALL the articles are in theory collaborated on by everyone, and a simple User page suffices to identify someone. Scientists work on many projects and so need a place to put specific information about these projects in a place where they have at least semi-ownership to acknowledge that they are the principle person on the project, even though others may edit. I think having a project page system like this is more along the lines of what people think of now in their non-wiki science and how they might use a private wiki if they have one. This makes it an easier transition into opening up the data and might facilitate faster content migration from the private wikis to the public one. * the system is flexible and we can think of a way for people to easily hook into lab websites and what not, but this allows someone not affiliated with an OWW lab to get going easily The mock page could use some work, but I hope you all can give some good feedback on the general concept. Cheers, Julius and Vincent ----------------------------------------------------- http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Lucks ----------------------------------------------------- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-sc/attachments/20070420/cea1c34c/attachment.htm From enobarber at gmail.com Fri Apr 20 21:44:41 2007 From: enobarber at gmail.com (Reid Williams) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 18:44:41 -0700 Subject: [OWW-SC] Alternative Welcome System and Home Pages In-Reply-To: <5121D462-7AC4-41F3-835F-F4A1778E4995@fas.harvard.edu> References: <5121D462-7AC4-41F3-835F-F4A1778E4995@fas.harvard.edu> Message-ID: I think this is an excellent idea. There were a few phrases that seemed too imperative to me ("Please add something about yourself there") that I changed. regards, -reid On 4/20/07, Julius Lucks wrote: > Hi All, > > Vincent and I have been thinking a lot about how to get oww members to > contribute more content so that we can grow the existing oww community, and > attract new members by pointing to high quality examples of content on oww. > One of the things that struck us is that there doesn't seem to be an easy > way for a complete wiki novice to get into editing. The existing welcome > email is very long and has many links for people to follow and I think it is > confusing to a novice. Also I have spent some time browsing around OWW and > it seems hard for someone completely new to the site to find content by just > surfing around. > > > So Vincent and I want to propose a new welcome system that involves > automatically creating a 'home page' for new users when their account is > created. I'll give you all the reasons why we think this is a good idea, > but to see for yourself, please look at our mock home page at > > http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Steering_committee/Outreach_chairs/mock_home_page > > or the one I am playing around with for myself at > > http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/Lucks > > The idea is that every user has 3 pages made for them when their account is > created: the typical User page, a home page, and a sample project page (more > about this one below). The User page can be used to show more personal > information, but the idea behind the home page is to give people a hands-on > quick introduction to the wiki-way in terms of their own academic projects. > The home page is set up in such a way as to provide both an introduction, > and an example system for how people might think about posting their > academic content. Being an experienced user, I often find that wiki's give > too much freedom in the choice of page and section names, formatting > options, etc. The home page would give users something to work off of > rather than having to come up with a system on their own. > > The home page also has a section listing seperate project pages for > individual projects. The third page automatically created is a sample > project page that gives a skeleton outline of what kind of info it would be > good to have in describing a project on the wiki. The idea is the same here > - that people can just start to fill this out instead of having to come up > with some system on their own. > > I'm not sure about the technical difficulties of creating these pages, but > this is something along the lines of Reshma's recent suggestion of filling > in the User page. The benefits of this system we think are as follows: > > * hands on introduction to the wiki for a new users OWN content rather than > a standard tutorial page that they would have to read and then apply to a > page they create > * having tutorial info on the page gives the user an incentive to start > editing and personalizing right away (to remove the tutorial info) > * having a scaffold of pages is much easier for someone to handle than > having a blank slate - we can emphasize that they can customize at any time > * the scaffold promotes good naming conventions and structuring of content > on the wiki - if everyone did this it could help people find information > easier because they would be automatically familiar with how other people > structure their content from knowing how they do their own > * this is more along the lines of what scientists need. Wikipedia works > well because ALL the articles are in theory collaborated on by everyone, and > a simple User page suffices to identify someone. Scientists work on many > projects and so need a place to put specific information about these > projects in a place where they have at least semi-ownership to acknowledge > that they are the principle person on the project, even though others may > edit. I think having a project page system like this is more along the > lines of what people think of now in their non-wiki science and how they > might use a private wiki if they have one. This makes it an easier > transition into opening up the data and might facilitate faster content > migration from the private wikis to the public one. > * the system is flexible and we can think of a way for people to easily hook > into lab websites and what not, but this allows someone not affiliated with > an OWW lab to get going easily > > The mock page could use some work, but I hope you all can give some good > feedback on the general concept. > > Cheers, > > Julius and Vincent > > ----------------------------------------------------- > http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Lucks > ----------------------------------------------------- > > > > > _______________________________________________ > OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List > sc at openwetware.org > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc > > From lucks at fas.harvard.edu Fri Apr 20 21:59:57 2007 From: lucks at fas.harvard.edu (Julius Lucks) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 21:59:57 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] Alternative Welcome System and Home Pages In-Reply-To: References: <5121D462-7AC4-41F3-835F-F4A1778E4995@fas.harvard.edu> Message-ID: <23ADBA8F-6560-4FDC-8650-798567494062@fas.harvard.edu> Excellent! Yes - this is just a concept - the details of the actual pages that would be created is something I thought the SC could come up with as a group. Thanks for the changes. Julius ----------------------------------------------------- http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Lucks ----------------------------------------------------- On Apr 20, 2007, at 9:44 PM, Reid Williams wrote: > I think this is an excellent idea. There were a few phrases that > seemed too imperative to me ("Please add something about yourself > there") that I changed. > > regards, > -reid > > > > On 4/20/07, Julius Lucks wrote: >> Hi All, >> >> Vincent and I have been thinking a lot about how to get oww >> members to >> contribute more content so that we can grow the existing oww >> community, and >> attract new members by pointing to high quality examples of >> content on oww. >> One of the things that struck us is that there doesn't seem to be >> an easy >> way for a complete wiki novice to get into editing. The existing >> welcome >> email is very long and has many links for people to follow and I >> think it is >> confusing to a novice. Also I have spent some time browsing >> around OWW and >> it seems hard for someone completely new to the site to find >> content by just >> surfing around. >> >> >> So Vincent and I want to propose a new welcome system that involves >> automatically creating a 'home page' for new users when their >> account is >> created. I'll give you all the reasons why we think this is a >> good idea, >> but to see for yourself, please look at our mock home page at >> >> http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Steering_committee/ >> Outreach_chairs/mock_home_page >> >> or the one I am playing around with for myself at >> >> http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/Lucks >> >> The idea is that every user has 3 pages made for them when their >> account is >> created: the typical User page, a home page, and a sample project >> page (more >> about this one below). The User page can be used to show more >> personal >> information, but the idea behind the home page is to give people a >> hands-on >> quick introduction to the wiki-way in terms of their own academic >> projects. >> The home page is set up in such a way as to provide both an >> introduction, >> and an example system for how people might think about posting their >> academic content. Being an experienced user, I often find that >> wiki's give >> too much freedom in the choice of page and section names, formatting >> options, etc. The home page would give users something to work >> off of >> rather than having to come up with a system on their own. >> >> The home page also has a section listing seperate project pages for >> individual projects. The third page automatically created is a >> sample >> project page that gives a skeleton outline of what kind of info it >> would be >> good to have in describing a project on the wiki. The idea is the >> same here >> - that people can just start to fill this out instead of having to >> come up >> with some system on their own. >> >> I'm not sure about the technical difficulties of creating these >> pages, but >> this is something along the lines of Reshma's recent suggestion of >> filling >> in the User page. The benefits of this system we think are as >> follows: >> >> * hands on introduction to the wiki for a new users OWN content >> rather than >> a standard tutorial page that they would have to read and then >> apply to a >> page they create >> * having tutorial info on the page gives the user an incentive to >> start >> editing and personalizing right away (to remove the tutorial info) >> * having a scaffold of pages is much easier for someone to handle >> than >> having a blank slate - we can emphasize that they can customize at >> any time >> * the scaffold promotes good naming conventions and structuring of >> content >> on the wiki - if everyone did this it could help people find >> information >> easier because they would be automatically familiar with how other >> people >> structure their content from knowing how they do their own >> * this is more along the lines of what scientists need. Wikipedia >> works >> well because ALL the articles are in theory collaborated on by >> everyone, and >> a simple User page suffices to identify someone. Scientists work >> on many >> projects and so need a place to put specific information about these >> projects in a place where they have at least semi-ownership to >> acknowledge >> that they are the principle person on the project, even though >> others may >> edit. I think having a project page system like this is more >> along the >> lines of what people think of now in their non-wiki science and >> how they >> might use a private wiki if they have one. This makes it an easier >> transition into opening up the data and might facilitate faster >> content >> migration from the private wikis to the public one. >> * the system is flexible and we can think of a way for people to >> easily hook >> into lab websites and what not, but this allows someone not >> affiliated with >> an OWW lab to get going easily >> >> The mock page could use some work, but I hope you all can give >> some good >> feedback on the general concept. >> >> Cheers, >> >> Julius and Vincent >> >> ----------------------------------------------------- >> http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Lucks >> ----------------------------------------------------- >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List >> sc at openwetware.org >> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc >> >> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-sc/attachments/20070420/e717cca1/attachment.htm From jasonk at MIT.EDU Mon Apr 23 01:50:46 2007 From: jasonk at MIT.EDU (Jason Kelly) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 01:50:46 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] Alternative Welcome System and Home Pages In-Reply-To: <5121D462-7AC4-41F3-835F-F4A1778E4995@fas.harvard.edu> References: <5121D462-7AC4-41F3-835F-F4A1778E4995@fas.harvard.edu> Message-ID: <7c085c480704222250m33e86962u8ccca271f0e79321@mail.gmail.com> Yeah, I like this idea a lot. Thanks for the good work, guys. Putting up some default info about the person, plus simple instructions on how to edit that info will help to 'break the ice' on editing for sure. I'm a little unclear on whether you'd want to have a separate UserPage and 'Homepage', rather than just seeding the userpage with the things you described in the homepage. thanks, jason On 4/20/07, Julius Lucks wrote: > Hi All, > > Vincent and I have been thinking a lot about how to get oww members to > contribute more content so that we can grow the existing oww community, and > attract new members by pointing to high quality examples of content on oww. > One of the things that struck us is that there doesn't seem to be an easy > way for a complete wiki novice to get into editing. The existing welcome > email is very long and has many links for people to follow and I think it is > confusing to a novice. Also I have spent some time browsing around OWW and > it seems hard for someone completely new to the site to find content by just > surfing around. > > > So Vincent and I want to propose a new welcome system that involves > automatically creating a 'home page' for new users when their account is > created. I'll give you all the reasons why we think this is a good idea, > but to see for yourself, please look at our mock home page at > > http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Steering_committee/Outreach_chairs/mock_home_page > > or the one I am playing around with for myself at > > http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/Lucks > > The idea is that every user has 3 pages made for them when their account is > created: the typical User page, a home page, and a sample project page (more > about this one below). The User page can be used to show more personal > information, but the idea behind the home page is to give people a hands-on > quick introduction to the wiki-way in terms of their own academic projects. > The home page is set up in such a way as to provide both an introduction, > and an example system for how people might think about posting their > academic content. Being an experienced user, I often find that wiki's give > too much freedom in the choice of page and section names, formatting > options, etc. The home page would give users something to work off of > rather than having to come up with a system on their own. > > The home page also has a section listing seperate project pages for > individual projects. The third page automatically created is a sample > project page that gives a skeleton outline of what kind of info it would be > good to have in describing a project on the wiki. The idea is the same here > - that people can just start to fill this out instead of having to come up > with some system on their own. > > I'm not sure about the technical difficulties of creating these pages, but > this is something along the lines of Reshma's recent suggestion of filling > in the User page. The benefits of this system we think are as follows: > > * hands on introduction to the wiki for a new users OWN content rather than > a standard tutorial page that they would have to read and then apply to a > page they create > * having tutorial info on the page gives the user an incentive to start > editing and personalizing right away (to remove the tutorial info) > * having a scaffold of pages is much easier for someone to handle than > having a blank slate - we can emphasize that they can customize at any time > * the scaffold promotes good naming conventions and structuring of content > on the wiki - if everyone did this it could help people find information > easier because they would be automatically familiar with how other people > structure their content from knowing how they do their own > * this is more along the lines of what scientists need. Wikipedia works > well because ALL the articles are in theory collaborated on by everyone, and > a simple User page suffices to identify someone. Scientists work on many > projects and so need a place to put specific information about these > projects in a place where they have at least semi-ownership to acknowledge > that they are the principle person on the project, even though others may > edit. I think having a project page system like this is more along the > lines of what people think of now in their non-wiki science and how they > might use a private wiki if they have one. This makes it an easier > transition into opening up the data and might facilitate faster content > migration from the private wikis to the public one. > * the system is flexible and we can think of a way for people to easily hook > into lab websites and what not, but this allows someone not affiliated with > an OWW lab to get going easily > > The mock page could use some work, but I hope you all can give some good > feedback on the general concept. > > Cheers, > > Julius and Vincent > > ----------------------------------------------------- > http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Lucks > ----------------------------------------------------- > > > > > _______________________________________________ > OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List > sc at openwetware.org > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc > > From lucks at fas.harvard.edu Mon Apr 23 09:53:12 2007 From: lucks at fas.harvard.edu (Julius Lucks) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 09:53:12 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] Alternative Welcome System and Home Pages In-Reply-To: <7c085c480704222250m33e86962u8ccca271f0e79321@mail.gmail.com> References: <5121D462-7AC4-41F3-835F-F4A1778E4995@fas.harvard.edu> <7c085c480704222250m33e86962u8ccca271f0e79321@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <47F9C061-8969-4DF3-8FC9-6365459E682C@fas.harvard.edu> Hey Jason, Well I guess it is a little subjective, but I would argue for a separate 'Homepage' and User page for the following reasons: * The User page can be used for more personal info like other interests/hobbies, etc - some info on getting to know the oww member behind the science. * The Homepage can be used to focus on the science. * The Homepage serves as a portal for individual project pages: the naming convention for the project pages would be [[Homepage/ project_page]] - i.e., the Homepage name would be the base for all the project pages. Having a separate Homepage in the main wiki namespace I think is more useful than having them all inside the User: namespace since the main name space is where we are having scientific content at the moment. (I guess we could make a namespace for all of these Homepage and project pages.) Also, having the project page fall under a user's Homepage lends some kind of 'ownership' or at least 'foundership' to the project content, even though anyone can contribute at any time. This can be put to good use in advertising to potential new users as a way for them to keep some of the attribution for their work, since I imagine many new users are afraid of losing attribution. Another way to put it is this structure is closer to normal authorship identification of work, and will be more familiar and thus less of a jump for new users to get used to. (Note that of course one could always look into the history logs to see who created a page, but these logs are a complication I don't want to have to introduce to a new potential user.) * If new users can follow the [[Homepage/project_page]] convention, then they automatically start to learn good page naming habits, which is non-trivial given that you can name pages almost anything. * This naming convention also promotes self-organization of a lot of scientific content on OWW which is something I think we need to work on. Just browsing through the site and only navigating through clicking on links (and not typing any URLs), it is non-trivial to get from the front page of oww to some scientific content - at least for me, and I imagine for a new user. Having all this info in one place (with this naming convention) allows users to go to where they are familiar with the structure to look for new content - given that they are used to the structure from their own [[Homepage/project_page]] pages. Having all the info in this structure makes it really easy for us to scrape content and create some navigation pages like: a page that lists all the user Home pages, a page that lists all the projects that are ongoing, etc. * This system is a little bit like the lab Homepage system, but on a user level. Labs can then just link their user Homepages to start to form the lab pages, and people are familiar with lab Homepages which will lessen the learning curve. Julius ----------------------------------------------------- http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Lucks ----------------------------------------------------- On Apr 23, 2007, at 1:50 AM, Jason Kelly wrote: > Yeah, I like this idea a lot. Thanks for the good work, guys. > Putting up some default info about the person, plus simple > instructions on how to edit that info will help to 'break the ice' on > editing for sure. > > I'm a little unclear on whether you'd want to have a separate UserPage > and 'Homepage', rather than just seeding the userpage with the things > you described in the Homepage. > > thanks, > jason > > On 4/20/07, Julius Lucks wrote: >> Hi All, >> >> Vincent and I have been thinking a lot about how to get oww >> members to >> contribute more content so that we can grow the existing oww >> community, and >> attract new members by pointing to high quality examples of >> content on oww. >> One of the things that struck us is that there doesn't seem to be >> an easy >> way for a complete wiki novice to get into editing. The existing >> welcome >> email is very long and has many links for people to follow and I >> think it is >> confusing to a novice. Also I have spent some time browsing >> around OWW and >> it seems hard for someone completely new to the site to find >> content by just >> surfing around. >> >> >> So Vincent and I want to propose a new welcome system that involves >> automatically creating a 'Home page' for new users when their >> account is >> created. I'll give you all the reasons why we think this is a >> good idea, >> but to see for yourself, please look at our mock Home page at >> >> http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Steering_committee/ >> Outreach_chairs/mock_Home_page >> >> or the one I am playing around with for myself at >> >> http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/Lucks >> >> The idea is that every user has 3 pages made for them when their >> account is >> created: the typical User page, a Home page, and a sample project >> page (more >> about this one below). The User page can be used to show more >> personal >> information, but the idea behind the Home page is to give people a >> hands-on >> quick introduction to the wiki-way in terms of their own academic >> projects. >> The Home page is set up in such a way as to provide both an >> introduction, >> and an example system for how people might think about posting their >> academic content. Being an experienced user, I often find that >> wiki's give >> too much freedom in the choice of page and section names, formatting >> options, etc. The Home page would give users something to work >> off of >> rather than having to come up with a system on their own. >> >> The Home page also has a section listing seperate project pages for >> individual projects. The third page automatically created is a >> sample >> project page that gives a skeleton outline of what kind of info it >> would be >> good to have in describing a project on the wiki. The idea is the >> same here >> - that people can just start to fill this out instead of having to >> come up >> with some system on their own. >> >> I'm not sure about the technical difficulties of creating these >> pages, but >> this is something along the lines of Reshma's recent suggestion of >> filling >> in the User page. The benefits of this system we think are as >> follows: >> >> * hands on introduction to the wiki for a new users OWN content >> rather than >> a standard tutorial page that they would have to read and then >> apply to a >> page they create >> * having tutorial info on the page gives the user an incentive to >> start >> editing and personalizing right away (to remove the tutorial info) >> * having a scaffold of pages is much easier for someone to handle >> than >> having a blank slate - we can emphasize that they can customize at >> any time >> * the scaffold promotes good naming conventions and structuring of >> content >> on the wiki - if everyone did this it could help people find >> information >> easier because they would be automatically familiar with how other >> people >> structure their content from knowing how they do their own >> * this is more along the lines of what scientists need. Wikipedia >> works >> well because ALL the articles are in theory collaborated on by >> everyone, and >> a simple User page suffices to identify someone. Scientists work >> on many >> projects and so need a place to put specific information about these >> projects in a place where they have at least semi-ownership to >> acknowledge >> that they are the principle person on the project, even though >> others may >> edit. I think having a project page system like this is more >> along the >> lines of what people think of now in their non-wiki science and >> how they >> might use a private wiki if they have one. This makes it an easier >> transition into opening up the data and might facilitate faster >> content >> migration from the private wikis to the public one. >> * the system is flexible and we can think of a way for people to >> easily hook >> into lab websites and what not, but this allows someone not >> affiliated with >> an OWW lab to get going easily >> >> The mock page could use some work, but I hope you all can give >> some good >> feedback on the general concept. >> >> Cheers, >> >> Julius and Vincent >> >> ----------------------------------------------------- >> http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Lucks >> ----------------------------------------------------- >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List >> sc at openwetware.org >> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc >> >> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-sc/attachments/20070423/1c9f3d2d/attachment.htm From rshetty at MIT.EDU Mon Apr 23 10:14:25 2007 From: rshetty at MIT.EDU (Reshma Shetty) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 10:14:25 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] Alternative Welcome System and Home Pages In-Reply-To: <47F9C061-8969-4DF3-8FC9-6365459E682C@fas.harvard.edu> References: <5121D462-7AC4-41F3-835F-F4A1778E4995@fas.harvard.edu> <7c085c480704222250m33e86962u8ccca271f0e79321@mail.gmail.com> <47F9C061-8969-4DF3-8FC9-6365459E682C@fas.harvard.edu> Message-ID: <6e9f40380704230714k6602305cn69080dd40a4f3171@mail.gmail.com> Hey all, I think I agree with Jason that I don't necessarily see a reason for a separate homepage and user page. Julius, what naming convention did you envision using for naming the homepage? i.e. what would my homepage be called? One motivation for having the pages all linked from the person's userpage is that it becomes quite easy to encourage good naming conventions... [[Special:Mypage]] goes to the logged in user's page. [[Special:Mypage/Projects]] goes to a page off the logged in user's user page. That way you're not relying on folks typing in a new name for a page by hand and thus generally end up with better page names. (You just say in the how-to ... edit this page: [[Special:Mypage]]). With regards to the issue of scientific content in the user namespace versus the main namespace ... I am not sure that that matters so much. -Reshma PS I agree with Julius that scientific content is not easily browsable or well-organized on OWW. That's why I played around with the page http://openwetware.org/wiki/Escherichia_coli last week. All the lists of pages are generated dynamically from the dynamic page list extension based on categories. But this is a topic for a different thread. On 4/23/07, Julius Lucks wrote: > > Hey Jason, > Well I guess it is a little subjective, but I would argue for a separate > 'Homepage' and User page for the following reasons: > > * The User page can be used for more personal info like other > interests/hobbies, etc - some info on getting to know the oww member behind > the science. > * The Homepage can be used to focus on the science. > * The Homepage serves as a portal for individual project pages: the > naming convention for the project pages would be [[Homepage/project_page]] - > i.e., > the Homepage name would be the base for all the project pages. Having a > separate Homepage in the main wiki namespace I think is more useful than > having them all inside the User: namespace since the main name space is > where we are having scientific content at the moment. (I guess we could > make a namespace for all of these Homepage and project pages.) Also, having > the project page fall under a user's Homepage lends some kind of 'ownership' > or at least 'foundership' to the project content, even though anyone can > contribute at any time. This can be put to good use in advertising to > potential new users as a way for them to keep some of the attribution for > their work, since I imagine many new users are afraid of losing > attribution. Another way to put it is this structure is closer to normal > authorship identification of work, and will be more familiar and thus less > of a jump for new users to get used to. (Note that of course one could > always look into the history logs to see who created a page, but these logs > are a complication I don't want to have to introduce to a new potential > user.) > * If new users can follow the [[Homepage/project_page]] convention, then > they automatically start to learn good page naming habits, which is > non-trivial given that you can name pages almost anything. > * This naming convention also promotes self-organization of a lot of > scientific content on OWW which is something I think we need to work on. > Just browsing through the site and only navigating through clicking on links > (and not typing any URLs), it is non-trivial to get from the front page of > oww to some scientific content - at least for me, and I imagine for a new > user. Having all this info in one place (with this naming convention) > allows users to go to where they are familiar with the structure to look for > new content - given that they are used to the structure from their own > [[Homepage/project_page]] pages. Having all the info in this structure > makes it really easy for us to scrape content and create some navigation > pages like: a page that lists all the user Home pages, a page that lists all > the projects that are ongoing, etc. > * This system is a little bit like the lab Homepage system, but on a user > level. Labs can then just link their user Homepages to start to form the > lab pages, and people are familiar with lab Homepages which will lessen the > learning curve. > > Julius > > > ----------------------------------------------------- > http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Lucks > ----------------------------------------------------- > > > > On Apr 23, 2007, at 1:50 AM, Jason Kelly wrote: > > Yeah, I like this idea a lot. Thanks for the good work, guys. > Putting up some default info about the person, plus simple > instructions on how to edit that info will help to 'break the ice' on > editing for sure. > > I'm a little unclear on whether you'd want to have a separate UserPage > and 'Homepage', rather than just seeding the userpage with the things > you described in the Homepage. > > thanks, > jason > > On 4/20/07, Julius Lucks wrote: > > Hi All, > > Vincent and I have been thinking a lot about how to get oww members to > contribute more content so that we can grow the existing oww community, > and > attract new members by pointing to high quality examples of content on > oww. > One of the things that struck us is that there doesn't seem to be an easy > way for a complete wiki novice to get into editing. The existing welcome > email is very long and has many links for people to follow and I think it > is > confusing to a novice. Also I have spent some time browsing around OWW > and > it seems hard for someone completely new to the site to find content by > just > surfing around. > > > So Vincent and I want to propose a new welcome system that involves > automatically creating a 'Home page' for new users when their account is > created. I'll give you all the reasons why we think this is a good idea, > but to see for yourself, please look at our mock Home page at > > > http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Steering_committee/Outreach_chairs/mock_ > Home_page > > or the one I am playing around with for myself at > > http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/Lucks > > The idea is that every user has 3 pages made for them when their account > is > created: the typical User page, a Home page, and a sample project page > (more > about this one below). The User page can be used to show more personal > information, but the idea behind the Home page is to give people a > hands-on > quick introduction to the wiki-way in terms of their own academic > projects. > The Home page is set up in such a way as to provide both an introduction, > and an example system for how people might think about posting their > academic content. Being an experienced user, I often find that wiki's > give > too much freedom in the choice of page and section names, formatting > options, etc. The Home page would give users something to work off of > rather than having to come up with a system on their own. > > The Home page also has a section listing seperate project pages for > individual projects. The third page automatically created is a sample > project page that gives a skeleton outline of what kind of info it would > be > good to have in describing a project on the wiki. The idea is the same > here > - that people can just start to fill this out instead of having to come up > with some system on their own. > > I'm not sure about the technical difficulties of creating these pages, but > this is something along the lines of Reshma's recent suggestion of filling > in the User page. The benefits of this system we think are as follows: > > * hands on introduction to the wiki for a new users OWN content rather > than > a standard tutorial page that they would have to read and then apply to a > page they create > * having tutorial info on the page gives the user an incentive to start > editing and personalizing right away (to remove the tutorial info) > * having a scaffold of pages is much easier for someone to handle than > having a blank slate - we can emphasize that they can customize at any > time > * the scaffold promotes good naming conventions and structuring of content > on the wiki - if everyone did this it could help people find information > easier because they would be automatically familiar with how other people > structure their content from knowing how they do their own > * this is more along the lines of what scientists need. Wikipedia works > well because ALL the articles are in theory collaborated on by everyone, > and > a simple User page suffices to identify someone. Scientists work on many > projects and so need a place to put specific information about these > projects in a place where they have at least semi-ownership to acknowledge > that they are the principle person on the project, even though others may > edit. I think having a project page system like this is more along the > lines of what people think of now in their non-wiki science and how they > might use a private wiki if they have one. This makes it an easier > transition into opening up the data and might facilitate faster content > migration from the private wikis to the public one. > * the system is flexible and we can think of a way for people to easily > hook > into lab websites and what not, but this allows someone not affiliated > with > an OWW lab to get going easily > > The mock page could use some work, but I hope you all can give some good > feedback on the general concept. > > Cheers, > > Julius and Vincent > > ----------------------------------------------------- > http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Lucks > ----------------------------------------------------- > > > > > _______________________________________________ > OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List > sc at openwetware.org > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc > > > > > _______________________________________________ > OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List > sc at openwetware.org > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-sc/attachments/20070423/25861137/attachment.htm From lucks at fas.harvard.edu Mon Apr 23 10:29:56 2007 From: lucks at fas.harvard.edu (Julius Lucks) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 10:29:56 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] Alternative Welcome System and Home Pages In-Reply-To: <6e9f40380704230714k6602305cn69080dd40a4f3171@mail.gmail.com> References: <5121D462-7AC4-41F3-835F-F4A1778E4995@fas.harvard.edu> <7c085c480704222250m33e86962u8ccca271f0e79321@mail.gmail.com> <47F9C061-8969-4DF3-8FC9-6365459E682C@fas.harvard.edu> <6e9f40380704230714k6602305cn69080dd40a4f3171@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <28885505-16B2-44C9-9143-FC7CF7829A1A@fas.harvard.edu> Hey Reshma, I imagined the home pages to be called whatever the User page is, but without the User: namespace prefix - my 'homepage' is just [[Lucks]], and I guess yours would be [[Rshetty]]. I like your thought about the [[Special:Mypage]] usage and how that simplifies things. But how hard would it be to create another version of [[Special:Mypage]] that would be [[Special:Homepage]] or something that would just point to your homepage? Would you need to create another namespace for the homepages? Just playing devil's advocate here. This is totally my opinion, but I like keeping all the scientific content in the same namespace so that the content on the users's project pages is in the same place as the lab's scientific content. Cheers, Julius ----------------------------------------------------- http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Lucks ----------------------------------------------------- On Apr 23, 2007, at 10:14 AM, Reshma Shetty wrote: > Hey all, > > I think I agree with Jason that I don't necessarily see a reason > for a separate homepage and user page. > > Julius, what naming convention did you envision using for naming > the homepage? i.e. what would my homepage be called? > > One motivation for having the pages all linked from the person's > userpage is that it becomes quite easy to encourage good naming > conventions... > > [[Special:Mypage]] goes to the logged in user's page. > [[Special:Mypage/Projects]] goes to a page off the logged in user's > user page. > > That way you're not relying on folks typing in a new name for a > page by hand and thus generally end up with better page names. > (You just say in the how-to ... edit this page: [[Special:Mypage]]). > > With regards to the issue of scientific content in the user > namespace versus the main namespace ... I am not sure that that > matters so much. > > -Reshma > > PS I agree with Julius that scientific content is not easily > browsable or well-organized on OWW. That's why I played around > with the page http://openwetware.org/wiki/Escherichia_coli last > week. All the lists of pages are generated dynamically from the > dynamic page list extension based on categories. But this is a > topic for a different thread. > > On 4/23/07, Julius Lucks wrote: > Hey Jason, > > Well I guess it is a little subjective, but I would argue for a > separate 'Homepage' and User page for the following reasons: > > * The User page can be used for more personal info like other > interests/hobbies, etc - some info on getting to know the oww > member behind the science. > * The Homepage can be used to focus on the science. > * The Homepage serves as a portal for individual project pages: > the naming convention for the project pages would be [[Homepage/ > project_page]] - i.e ., > the Homepage name would be the base for all the project pages. > Having a separate Homepage in the main wiki namespace I think is > more useful than having them all inside the User: namespace since > the main name space is where we are having scientific content at > the moment. (I guess we could make a namespace for all of these > Homepage and project pages.) Also, having the project page fall > under a user's Homepage lends some kind of 'ownership' or at least > 'foundership' to the project content, even though anyone can > contribute at any time. This can be put to good use in advertising > to potential new users as a way for them to keep some of the > attribution for their work, since I imagine many new users are > afraid of losing attribution. Another way to put it is this > structure is closer to normal authorship identification of work, > and will be more familiar and thus less of a jump for new users to > get used to. (Note that of course one could always look into the > history logs to see who created a page, but these logs are a > complication I don't want to have to introduce to a new potential > user.) > * If new users can follow the [[Homepage/project_page]] > convention, then they automatically start to learn good page naming > habits, which is non-trivial given that you can name pages almost > anything. > * This naming convention also promotes self-organization of a lot > of scientific content on OWW which is something I think we need to > work on. Just browsing through the site and only navigating > through clicking on links (and not typing any URLs), it is non- > trivial to get from the front page of oww to some scientific > content - at least for me, and I imagine for a new user. Having > all this info in one place (with this naming convention) allows > users to go to where they are familiar with the structure to look > for new content - given that they are used to the structure from > their own [[Homepage/project_page]] pages. Having all the info in > this structure makes it really easy for us to scrape content and > create some navigation pages like: a page that lists all the user > Home pages, a page that lists all the projects that are ongoing, etc. > * This system is a little bit like the lab Homepage system, but on > a user level. Labs can then just link their user Homepages to > start to form the lab pages, and people are familiar with lab > Homepages which will lessen the learning curve. > > Julius > > > ----------------------------------------------------- > http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Lucks > ----------------------------------------------------- > > > > On Apr 23, 2007, at 1:50 AM, Jason Kelly wrote: > >> Yeah, I like this idea a lot. Thanks for the good work, guys. >> Putting up some default info about the person, plus simple >> instructions on how to edit that info will help to 'break the ice' on >> editing for sure. >> >> I'm a little unclear on whether you'd want to have a separate >> UserPage >> and 'Homepage', rather than just seeding the userpage with the things >> you described in the Homepage. >> >> thanks, >> jason >> >> On 4/20/07, Julius Lucks < lucks at fas.harvard.edu> wrote: >>> Hi All, >>> >>> Vincent and I have been thinking a lot about how to get oww >>> members to >>> contribute more content so that we can grow the existing oww >>> community, and >>> attract new members by pointing to high quality examples of >>> content on oww. >>> One of the things that struck us is that there doesn't seem to be >>> an easy >>> way for a complete wiki novice to get into editing. The existing >>> welcome >>> email is very long and has many links for people to follow and I >>> think it is >>> confusing to a novice. Also I have spent some time browsing >>> around OWW and >>> it seems hard for someone completely new to the site to find >>> content by just >>> surfing around. >>> >>> >>> So Vincent and I want to propose a new welcome system that involves >>> automatically creating a 'Home page' for new users when their >>> account is >>> created. I'll give you all the reasons why we think this is a >>> good idea, >>> but to see for yourself, please look at our mock Home page at >>> >>> http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Steering_committee/ >>> Outreach_chairs/mock_Home_page >>> >>> or the one I am playing around with for myself at >>> >>> http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/Lucks >>> >>> The idea is that every user has 3 pages made for them when their >>> account is >>> created: the typical User page, a Home page, and a sample project >>> page (more >>> about this one below). The User page can be used to show more >>> personal >>> information, but the idea behind the Home page is to give people >>> a hands-on >>> quick introduction to the wiki-way in terms of their own academic >>> projects. >>> The Home page is set up in such a way as to provide both an >>> introduction, >>> and an example system for how people might think about posting their >>> academic content. Being an experienced user, I often find that >>> wiki's give >>> too much freedom in the choice of page and section names, formatting >>> options, etc. The Home page would give users something to work >>> off of >>> rather than having to come up with a system on their own. >>> >>> The Home page also has a section listing seperate project pages for >>> individual projects. The third page automatically created is a >>> sample >>> project page that gives a skeleton outline of what kind of info >>> it would be >>> good to have in describing a project on the wiki. The idea is >>> the same here >>> - that people can just start to fill this out instead of having >>> to come up >>> with some system on their own. >>> >>> I'm not sure about the technical difficulties of creating these >>> pages, but >>> this is something along the lines of Reshma's recent suggestion >>> of filling >>> in the User page. The benefits of this system we think are as >>> follows: >>> >>> * hands on introduction to the wiki for a new users OWN content >>> rather than >>> a standard tutorial page that they would have to read and then >>> apply to a >>> page they create >>> * having tutorial info on the page gives the user an incentive to >>> start >>> editing and personalizing right away (to remove the tutorial info) >>> * having a scaffold of pages is much easier for someone to handle >>> than >>> having a blank slate - we can emphasize that they can customize >>> at any time >>> * the scaffold promotes good naming conventions and structuring >>> of content >>> on the wiki - if everyone did this it could help people find >>> information >>> easier because they would be automatically familiar with how >>> other people >>> structure their content from knowing how they do their own >>> * this is more along the lines of what scientists need. >>> Wikipedia works >>> well because ALL the articles are in theory collaborated on by >>> everyone, and >>> a simple User page suffices to identify someone. Scientists work >>> on many >>> projects and so need a place to put specific information about these >>> projects in a place where they have at least semi-ownership to >>> acknowledge >>> that they are the principle person on the project, even though >>> others may >>> edit. I think having a project page system like this is more >>> along the >>> lines of what people think of now in their non-wiki science and >>> how they >>> might use a private wiki if they have one. This makes it an easier >>> transition into opening up the data and might facilitate faster >>> content >>> migration from the private wikis to the public one. >>> * the system is flexible and we can think of a way for people to >>> easily hook >>> into lab websites and what not, but this allows someone not >>> affiliated with >>> an OWW lab to get going easily >>> >>> The mock page could use some work, but I hope you all can give >>> some good >>> feedback on the general concept. >>> >>> Cheers, >>> >>> Julius and Vincent >>> >>> ----------------------------------------------------- >>> http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Lucks >>> ----------------------------------------------------- >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List >>> sc at openwetware.org >>> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc >>> >>> > > > _______________________________________________ > OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List > sc at openwetware.org > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-sc/attachments/20070423/485bfdc7/attachment.htm From bcanton at MIT.EDU Mon Apr 23 10:48:38 2007 From: bcanton at MIT.EDU (Barry Canton) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 10:48:38 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] Alternative Welcome System and Home Pages In-Reply-To: <28885505-16B2-44C9-9143-FC7CF7829A1A@fas.harvard.edu> References: <5121D462-7AC4-41F3-835F-F4A1778E4995@fas.harvard.edu> <7c085c480704222250m33e86962u8ccca271f0e79321@mail.gmail.com> <47F9C061-8969-4DF3-8FC9-6365459E682C@fas.harvard.edu> <6e9f40380704230714k6602305cn69080dd40a4f3171@mail.gmail.com> <28885505-16B2-44C9-9143-FC7CF7829A1A@fas.harvard.edu> Message-ID: <52c0d2160704230748w2d10c4b7w7bb08af299abaf11@mail.gmail.com> I'm a big fan of auto-generating content for new users as you guys propose. It seems to make more intuitive sense for every user to have one main page rather than two different pages for biography and projects. I think I would always want to list my projects on my biography page because they are a very current part of my biography. Regardless of how user/home pages are implemented, users will still be likely to name pages outside of the user namespace. I actually prefer if content isn't mainly in sub-pages from user pages because it discourages collaboration and comments from the community (I am less likely to edit a page if I feel it's "owned" by someone). I'm not sure that keeping content in some sort of organized hierarchy in any namespace matters very much given that search is much more efficient on the wiki than browsing. It may be very hard to keep the wiki browseable in the future. Barry On 4/23/07, Julius Lucks wrote: > > Hey Reshma, > I imagined the home pages to be called whatever the User page is, but > without the User: namespace prefix - my 'homepage' is just [[Lucks]], and I > guess yours would be [[Rshetty]]. > > I like your thought about the [[Special:Mypage]] usage and how that > simplifies things. But how hard would it be to create another version > of [[Special:Mypage]] that would be [[Special:Homepage]] or something that > would just point to your homepage? Would you need to create another > namespace for the homepages? Just playing devil's advocate here. > > This is totally my opinion, but I like keeping all the scientific content > in the same namespace so that the content on the users's project pages is in > the same place as the lab's scientific content. > > Cheers, > > Julius > > ----------------------------------------------------- > http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Lucks > ----------------------------------------------------- > > > > On Apr 23, 2007, at 10:14 AM, Reshma Shetty wrote: > > Hey all, > > I think I agree with Jason that I don't necessarily see a reason for a > separate homepage and user page. > > Julius, what naming convention did you envision using for naming the > homepage? i.e. what would my homepage be called? > > One motivation for having the pages all linked from the person's userpage > is that it becomes quite easy to encourage good naming conventions... > > [[Special:Mypage]] goes to the logged in user's page. > [[Special:Mypage/Projects]] goes to a page off the logged in user's user > page. > > That way you're not relying on folks typing in a new name for a page by > hand and thus generally end up with better page names. (You just say in the > how-to ... edit this page: [[Special:Mypage]]). > > With regards to the issue of scientific content in the user namespace > versus the main namespace ... I am not sure that that matters so much. > > -Reshma > > PS I agree with Julius that scientific content is not easily browsable or > well-organized on OWW. That's why I played around with the page > http://openwetware.org/wiki/Escherichia_coli last week. All the lists of > pages are generated dynamically from the dynamic page list extension based > on categories. But this is a topic for a different thread. > > On 4/23/07, Julius Lucks wrote: > > > > Hey Jason, > > Well I guess it is a little subjective, but I would argue for a separate > > 'Homepage' and User page for the following reasons: > > > > * The User page can be used for more personal info like other > > interests/hobbies, etc - some info on getting to know the oww member behind > > the science. > > * The Homepage can be used to focus on the science. > > * The Homepage serves as a portal for individual project pages: the > > naming convention for the project pages would be [[Homepage/project_page]] - > > i.e ., > > the Homepage name would be the base for all the project pages. Having a > > separate Homepage in the main wiki namespace I think is more useful than > > having them all inside the User: namespace since the main name space is > > where we are having scientific content at the moment. (I guess we could > > make a namespace for all of these Homepage and project pages.) Also, having > > the project page fall under a user's Homepage lends some kind of 'ownership' > > or at least 'foundership' to the project content, even though anyone can > > contribute at any time. This can be put to good use in advertising to > > potential new users as a way for them to keep some of the attribution for > > their work, since I imagine many new users are afraid of losing > > attribution. Another way to put it is this structure is closer to normal > > authorship identification of work, and will be more familiar and thus less > > of a jump for new users to get used to. (Note that of course one could > > always look into the history logs to see who created a page, but these logs > > are a complication I don't want to have to introduce to a new potential > > user.) > > * If new users can follow the [[Homepage/project_page]] convention, > > then they automatically start to learn good page naming habits, which is > > non-trivial given that you can name pages almost anything. > > * This naming convention also promotes self-organization of a lot of > > scientific content on OWW which is something I think we need to work on. > > Just browsing through the site and only navigating through clicking on links > > (and not typing any URLs), it is non-trivial to get from the front page of > > oww to some scientific content - at least for me, and I imagine for a new > > user. Having all this info in one place (with this naming convention) > > allows users to go to where they are familiar with the structure to look for > > new content - given that they are used to the structure from their own > > [[Homepage/project_page]] pages. Having all the info in this structure > > makes it really easy for us to scrape content and create some navigation > > pages like: a page that lists all the user Home pages, a page that lists all > > the projects that are ongoing, etc. > > * This system is a little bit like the lab Homepage system, but on a > > user level. Labs can then just link their user Homepages to start to form > > the lab pages, and people are familiar with lab Homepages which will lessen > > the learning curve. > > > > Julius > > > > > > ----------------------------------------------------- > > http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Lucks > > ----------------------------------------------------- > > > > > > > > On Apr 23, 2007, at 1:50 AM, Jason Kelly wrote: > > > > Yeah, I like this idea a lot. Thanks for the good work, guys. > > Putting up some default info about the person, plus simple > > instructions on how to edit that info will help to 'break the ice' on > > editing for sure. > > > > I'm a little unclear on whether you'd want to have a separate UserPage > > and 'Homepage', rather than just seeding the userpage with the things > > you described in the Homepage. > > > > thanks, > > jason > > > > On 4/20/07, Julius Lucks < lucks at fas.harvard.edu> wrote: > > > > Hi All, > > > > Vincent and I have been thinking a lot about how to get oww members to > > contribute more content so that we can grow the existing oww community, > > and > > attract new members by pointing to high quality examples of content on > > oww. > > One of the things that struck us is that there doesn't seem to be an > > easy > > way for a complete wiki novice to get into editing. The existing > > welcome > > email is very long and has many links for people to follow and I think > > it is > > confusing to a novice. Also I have spent some time browsing around OWW > > and > > it seems hard for someone completely new to the site to find content by > > just > > surfing around. > > > > > > So Vincent and I want to propose a new welcome system that involves > > automatically creating a 'Home page' for new users when their account is > > > > created. I'll give you all the reasons why we think this is a good > > idea, > > but to see for yourself, please look at our mock Home page at > > > > > > http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Steering_committee/Outreach_chairs/mock_ > > Home_page > > > > or the one I am playing around with for myself at > > > > http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/Lucks > > > > The idea is that every user has 3 pages made for them when their account > > is > > created: the typical User page, a Home page, and a sample project page > > (more > > about this one below). The User page can be used to show more personal > > information, but the idea behind the Home page is to give people a > > hands-on > > quick introduction to the wiki-way in terms of their own academic > > projects. > > The Home page is set up in such a way as to provide both an > > introduction, > > and an example system for how people might think about posting their > > academic content. Being an experienced user, I often find that wiki's > > give > > too much freedom in the choice of page and section names, formatting > > options, etc. The Home page would give users something to work off of > > rather than having to come up with a system on their own. > > > > The Home page also has a section listing seperate project pages for > > individual projects. The third page automatically created is a sample > > project page that gives a skeleton outline of what kind of info it would > > be > > good to have in describing a project on the wiki. The idea is the same > > here > > - that people can just start to fill this out instead of having to come > > up > > with some system on their own. > > > > I'm not sure about the technical difficulties of creating these pages, > > but > > this is something along the lines of Reshma's recent suggestion of > > filling > > in the User page. The benefits of this system we think are as follows: > > > > * hands on introduction to the wiki for a new users OWN content rather > > than > > a standard tutorial page that they would have to read and then apply to > > a > > page they create > > * having tutorial info on the page gives the user an incentive to start > > editing and personalizing right away (to remove the tutorial info) > > * having a scaffold of pages is much easier for someone to handle than > > having a blank slate - we can emphasize that they can customize at any > > time > > * the scaffold promotes good naming conventions and structuring of > > content > > on the wiki - if everyone did this it could help people find information > > easier because they would be automatically familiar with how other > > people > > structure their content from knowing how they do their own > > * this is more along the lines of what scientists need. Wikipedia works > > well because ALL the articles are in theory collaborated on by everyone, > > and > > a simple User page suffices to identify someone. Scientists work on > > many > > projects and so need a place to put specific information about these > > projects in a place where they have at least semi-ownership to > > acknowledge > > that they are the principle person on the project, even though others > > may > > edit. I think having a project page system like this is more along the > > lines of what people think of now in their non-wiki science and how they > > might use a private wiki if they have one. This makes it an easier > > transition into opening up the data and might facilitate faster content > > migration from the private wikis to the public one. > > * the system is flexible and we can think of a way for people to easily > > hook > > into lab websites and what not, but this allows someone not affiliated > > with > > an OWW lab to get going easily > > > > The mock page could use some work, but I hope you all can give some good > > feedback on the general concept. > > > > Cheers, > > > > Julius and Vincent > > > > ----------------------------------------------------- > > http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Lucks > > ----------------------------------------------------- > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List > > sc at openwetware.org > > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List > > sc at openwetware.org > > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List > sc at openwetware.org > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc > > -- Barry Canton Endy Lab Biological Engineering Division Massachusetts Institute of Technology Tel.:(617) 899 6062 Email1: bcanton at mit.edu Email2: bcanton at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-sc/attachments/20070423/f22ed921/attachment.htm From lucks at fas.harvard.edu Mon Apr 23 11:17:25 2007 From: lucks at fas.harvard.edu (Julius Lucks) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 11:17:25 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] Alternative Welcome System and Home Pages In-Reply-To: <52c0d2160704230748w2d10c4b7w7bb08af299abaf11@mail.gmail.com> References: <5121D462-7AC4-41F3-835F-F4A1778E4995@fas.harvard.edu> <7c085c480704222250m33e86962u8ccca271f0e79321@mail.gmail.com> <47F9C061-8969-4DF3-8FC9-6365459E682C@fas.harvard.edu> <6e9f40380704230714k6602305cn69080dd40a4f3171@mail.gmail.com> <28885505-16B2-44C9-9143-FC7CF7829A1A@fas.harvard.edu> <52c0d2160704230748w2d10c4b7w7bb08af299abaf11@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Hi Barry, I am starting to really see the point of not having 2 pages associated with a user though - makes a lot of sense, especially tying your biography to your work. I also think there are two ways to go about finding content on a site: search and browsing. Some people seem to prefer one or the other, so I think we should try our best to support both. Having some 'recommended' heirarchy of pages will go a long way to structuring the content so that it is browse-able. I think that 80% of people probably would not deviate from it. However, we should emphasize over and over that anyone can edit anything, and that this is only a recommended system, not one that they have to follow. I think if we do a good job of this, then people will be 'encouraged' to edit and contribute to pages. It is all about what we write in the auto-generated pages to get a clear message out to new users. It may be hard to keep the wiki browse-able, and I don't think we should force it, rather just recommend a naming scheme. I think this really helps new users who might be too overwhelmed by the flexibility of being able to create a new page with a new name almost anywhere. I for one have felt this and have not put up content because I couldn't figure out where best to put it. Having a place where you can start and then move later if you want is nicer I think. I should mention that a large part of this auto-generated content is to educate new users on what oww can do - both in terms of wiki technology and content structure (with a plug that you can actually do anything with content). Having a nice get-up-to-speed-quick system is also a great tool to attract new users - after all, we have to encourage them to join so that they can generate content, since they can already read anything without an account. Cheers, Julius ----------------------------------------------------- http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Lucks ----------------------------------------------------- On Apr 23, 2007, at 10:48 AM, Barry Canton wrote: > I'm a big fan of auto-generating content for new users as you guys > propose. > > It seems to make more intuitive sense for every user to have one > main page rather than two different pages for biography and > projects. I think I would always want to list my projects on my > biography page because they are a very current part of my biography. > > Regardless of how user/home pages are implemented, users will still > be likely to name pages outside of the user namespace. I actually > prefer if content isn't mainly in sub-pages from user pages because > it discourages collaboration and comments from the community (I am > less likely to edit a page if I feel it's "owned" by someone). > > I'm not sure that keeping content in some sort of organized > hierarchy in any namespace matters very much given that search is > much more efficient on the wiki than browsing. It may be very hard > to keep the wiki browseable in the future. > > > Barry > > On 4/23/07, Julius Lucks wrote: > Hey Reshma, > > I imagined the home pages to be called whatever the User page is, > but without the User: namespace prefix - my 'homepage' is just > [[Lucks]], and I guess yours would be [[Rshetty]]. > > I like your thought about the [[Special:Mypage]] usage and how that > simplifies things. But how hard would it be to create another > version of [[Special:Mypage]] that would be [[Special:Homepage]] or > something that would just point to your homepage? Would you need to > create another namespace for the homepages? Just playing devil's > advocate here. > > This is totally my opinion, but I like keeping all the scientific > content in the same namespace so that the content on the users's > project pages is in the same place as the lab's scientific content. > > Cheers, > > Julius > > ----------------------------------------------------- > http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Lucks > ----------------------------------------------------- > > > > On Apr 23, 2007, at 10:14 AM, Reshma Shetty wrote: > >> Hey all, >> >> I think I agree with Jason that I don't necessarily see a reason >> for a separate homepage and user page. >> >> Julius, what naming convention did you envision using for naming >> the homepage? i.e. what would my homepage be called? >> >> One motivation for having the pages all linked from the person's >> userpage is that it becomes quite easy to encourage good naming >> conventions... >> >> [[Special:Mypage]] goes to the logged in user's page. >> [[Special:Mypage/Projects]] goes to a page off the logged in >> user's user page. >> >> That way you're not relying on folks typing in a new name for a >> page by hand and thus generally end up with better page names. >> (You just say in the how-to ... edit this page: [[Special:Mypage]]). >> >> With regards to the issue of scientific content in the user >> namespace versus the main namespace ... I am not sure that that >> matters so much. >> >> -Reshma >> >> PS I agree with Julius that scientific content is not easily >> browsable or well-organized on OWW. That's why I played around >> with the page http://openwetware.org/wiki/Escherichia_coli last >> week. All the lists of pages are generated dynamically from the >> dynamic page list extension based on categories. But this is a >> topic for a different thread. >> >> On 4/23/07, Julius Lucks wrote: >> Hey Jason, >> >> Well I guess it is a little subjective, but I would argue for a >> separate 'Homepage' and User page for the following reasons: >> >> * The User page can be used for more personal info like other >> interests/hobbies, etc - some info on getting to know the oww >> member behind the science. >> * The Homepage can be used to focus on the science. >> * The Homepage serves as a portal for individual project pages: >> the naming convention for the project pages would be [[Homepage/ >> project_page]] - i.e ., >> the Homepage name would be the base for all the project pages. >> Having a separate Homepage in the main wiki namespace I think is >> more useful than having them all inside the User: namespace since >> the main name space is where we are having scientific content at >> the moment. (I guess we could make a namespace for all of these >> Homepage and project pages.) Also, having the project page fall >> under a user's Homepage lends some kind of 'ownership' or at least >> 'foundership' to the project content, even though anyone can >> contribute at any time. This can be put to good use in >> advertising to potential new users as a way for them to keep some >> of the attribution for their work, since I imagine many new users >> are afraid of losing attribution. Another way to put it is this >> structure is closer to normal authorship identification of work, >> and will be more familiar and thus less of a jump for new users to >> get used to. (Note that of course one could always look into the >> history logs to see who created a page, but these logs are a >> complication I don't want to have to introduce to a new potential >> user.) >> * If new users can follow the [[Homepage/project_page]] >> convention, then they automatically start to learn good page >> naming habits, which is non-trivial given that you can name pages >> almost anything. >> * This naming convention also promotes self-organization of a lot >> of scientific content on OWW which is something I think we need to >> work on. Just browsing through the site and only navigating >> through clicking on links (and not typing any URLs), it is non- >> trivial to get from the front page of oww to some scientific >> content - at least for me, and I imagine for a new user. Having >> all this info in one place (with this naming convention) allows >> users to go to where they are familiar with the structure to look >> for new content - given that they are used to the structure from >> their own [[Homepage/project_page]] pages. Having all the info >> in this structure makes it really easy for us to scrape content >> and create some navigation pages like: a page that lists all the >> user Home pages, a page that lists all the projects that are >> ongoing, etc. >> * This system is a little bit like the lab Homepage system, but on >> a user level. Labs can then just link their user Homepages to >> start to form the lab pages, and people are familiar with lab >> Homepages which will lessen the learning curve. >> >> Julius >> >> >> ----------------------------------------------------- >> http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Lucks >> ----------------------------------------------------- >> >> >> >> On Apr 23, 2007, at 1:50 AM, Jason Kelly wrote: >> >>> Yeah, I like this idea a lot. Thanks for the good work, guys. >>> Putting up some default info about the person, plus simple >>> instructions on how to edit that info will help to 'break the >>> ice' on >>> editing for sure. >>> >>> I'm a little unclear on whether you'd want to have a separate >>> UserPage >>> and 'Homepage', rather than just seeding the userpage with the >>> things >>> you described in the Homepage. >>> >>> thanks, >>> jason >>> >>> On 4/20/07, Julius Lucks < lucks at fas.harvard.edu> wrote: >>>> Hi All, >>>> >>>> Vincent and I have been thinking a lot about how to get oww >>>> members to >>>> contribute more content so that we can grow the existing oww >>>> community, and >>>> attract new members by pointing to high quality examples of >>>> content on oww. >>>> One of the things that struck us is that there doesn't seem to >>>> be an easy >>>> way for a complete wiki novice to get into editing. The >>>> existing welcome >>>> email is very long and has many links for people to follow and I >>>> think it is >>>> confusing to a novice. Also I have spent some time browsing >>>> around OWW and >>>> it seems hard for someone completely new to the site to find >>>> content by just >>>> surfing around. >>>> >>>> >>>> So Vincent and I want to propose a new welcome system that involves >>>> automatically creating a 'Home page' for new users when their >>>> account is >>>> created. I'll give you all the reasons why we think this is a >>>> good idea, >>>> but to see for yourself, please look at our mock Home page at >>>> >>>> http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Steering_committee/ >>>> Outreach_chairs/mock_Home_page >>>> >>>> or the one I am playing around with for myself at >>>> >>>> http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/Lucks >>>> >>>> The idea is that every user has 3 pages made for them when their >>>> account is >>>> created: the typical User page, a Home page, and a sample >>>> project page (more >>>> about this one below). The User page can be used to show more >>>> personal >>>> information, but the idea behind the Home page is to give people >>>> a hands-on >>>> quick introduction to the wiki-way in terms of their own >>>> academic projects. >>>> The Home page is set up in such a way as to provide both an >>>> introduction, >>>> and an example system for how people might think about posting >>>> their >>>> academic content. Being an experienced user, I often find that >>>> wiki's give >>>> too much freedom in the choice of page and section names, >>>> formatting >>>> options, etc. The Home page would give users something to work >>>> off of >>>> rather than having to come up with a system on their own. >>>> >>>> The Home page also has a section listing seperate project pages for >>>> individual projects. The third page automatically created is a >>>> sample >>>> project page that gives a skeleton outline of what kind of info >>>> it would be >>>> good to have in describing a project on the wiki. The idea is >>>> the same here >>>> - that people can just start to fill this out instead of having >>>> to come up >>>> with some system on their own. >>>> >>>> I'm not sure about the technical difficulties of creating these >>>> pages, but >>>> this is something along the lines of Reshma's recent suggestion >>>> of filling >>>> in the User page. The benefits of this system we think are as >>>> follows: >>>> >>>> * hands on introduction to the wiki for a new users OWN content >>>> rather than >>>> a standard tutorial page that they would have to read and then >>>> apply to a >>>> page they create >>>> * having tutorial info on the page gives the user an incentive >>>> to start >>>> editing and personalizing right away (to remove the tutorial info) >>>> * having a scaffold of pages is much easier for someone to >>>> handle than >>>> having a blank slate - we can emphasize that they can customize >>>> at any time >>>> * the scaffold promotes good naming conventions and structuring >>>> of content >>>> on the wiki - if everyone did this it could help people find >>>> information >>>> easier because they would be automatically familiar with how >>>> other people >>>> structure their content from knowing how they do their own >>>> * this is more along the lines of what scientists need. >>>> Wikipedia works >>>> well because ALL the articles are in theory collaborated on by >>>> everyone, and >>>> a simple User page suffices to identify someone. Scientists >>>> work on many >>>> projects and so need a place to put specific information about >>>> these >>>> projects in a place where they have at least semi-ownership to >>>> acknowledge >>>> that they are the principle person on the project, even though >>>> others may >>>> edit. I think having a project page system like this is more >>>> along the >>>> lines of what people think of now in their non-wiki science and >>>> how they >>>> might use a private wiki if they have one. This makes it an easier >>>> transition into opening up the data and might facilitate faster >>>> content >>>> migration from the private wikis to the public one. >>>> * the system is flexible and we can think of a way for people to >>>> easily hook >>>> into lab websites and what not, but this allows someone not >>>> affiliated with >>>> an OWW lab to get going easily >>>> >>>> The mock page could use some work, but I hope you all can give >>>> some good >>>> feedback on the general concept. >>>> >>>> Cheers, >>>> >>>> Julius and Vincent >>>> >>>> ----------------------------------------------------- >>>> http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Lucks >>>> ----------------------------------------------------- >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List >>>> sc at openwetware.org >>>> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc >>>> >>>> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List >> sc at openwetware.org >> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc >> >> > > > _______________________________________________ > OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List > sc at openwetware.org > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc > > > > > -- > Barry Canton > Endy Lab > Biological Engineering Division > Massachusetts Institute of Technology > > Tel.:(617) 899 6062 > Email1: bcanton at mit.edu > Email2: bcanton at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-sc/attachments/20070423/f60afc21/attachment.htm From jcbraff at MIT.EDU Mon Apr 23 15:11:47 2007 From: jcbraff at MIT.EDU (Jennifer Braff) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 12:11:47 -0700 Subject: [OWW-SC] iGEM Registration on OWW front page In-Reply-To: <878xcjgp2v.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> References: <87ejmbgp60.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <878xcjgp2v.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> Message-ID: <8bdffbdd73eb0d9465a4c0eafdd049ed@mit.edu> Thanks for forwarding this discussion to the news list! Let's get the iGEM announcement up ASAP since the registration deadline is coming right up. Can someone with sys-op editing take care of this (or enable sys-op privileges for my account and I will take care of it)? Perhaps use it to swap out the BioSysBio slot, since that is quite out of date. Maybe at a later time we can do an iGEM group highlight also. I absolutely agree with Reshma and Jason that "News and Highlights" links from the main page should, generally, only be used to highlight OWW content, such as: (1) OWW labs, groups and individuals (2) useful OWW community pages, such as the conference page that Julius set up (3) OWW events/seminars [(4) possibly, occasional outside news or events but only if directly relevant to open science, web 2.0 etc.] Jen On Apr 23, 2007, at 7:09 AM, Austin Che wrote: > > *Really* redirecting to the news team... > >> Redirecting really to the highlights team. Note that the >> news at openwetware list was not active. There was a hardcoded news >> alias on the machine that sent it to root. It should now be a wiki >> list. >> >> >> From: "Reshma Shetty" >> Subject: Re: [OWW-Admin] Fwd: iGEM Registration on OWW front page >> To: "Barry Canton" >> Cc: "Jason Kelly" , "OpenWetWare Admin" >> , news at openwetware.org >> Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 09:56:19 -0400 >> X-Original-To: austin at austinche.name >> X-Spam-Status: No, score=-2.5 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,HTML_50_60, >> HTML_MESSAGE autolearn=ham version=3.1.7-deb >> DKIM-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=relaxed/relaxed; >> d=gmail.com; s=beta; >> >> h=domainkey-signature:received:received:message-id:date:from:sender: >> to:subject:cc:in-reply-to:mime-version:content-type:references:x- >> google-sender-auth; >> >> b=dO3DHNWpAIaJqnbRCCLZbGVgC4PM2DPIb3O6JDgfnOQiW1X3kbW8bTZRxJ+N5urwqFin >> LurpbD5z3Z1GbhMI+DaR190Z3PbWiY4r37l+lickPxiP9GiTjr8LZfCM8BYxajesVjC4Tc >> KCD332cEXnpetwfd432eLhhU/q37uEo5U= >> In-Reply-To: >> <52c0d2160704230635v2659f1by7aa85c72c72fc31e at mail.gmail.com> >> X-Google-Sender-Auth: 959b35a1d7371365 >> >> Redirecting the message to the highlights team as well... >> >> I agree that I believe we have a general policy of no external links >> on the >> main page especially highlights. I think it is fine to link the >> highlight >> to the general iGEM page on OWW. And include a link there to the >> registration page. >> >> -Reshma >> >> On 4/23/07, Barry Canton wrote: >>> >>> I think that's probably the best way to do it. It could replace the >>> BioSysBio highlight which is a little old now. Or it could be >>> described as >>> a "Group Highlight" and replace the "Lab Highlight" - Christophides >>> lab. >>> >>> Barry >>> >>> On 4/23/07, Jason Kelly wrote: >>>> >>>> see randy email below. >>>> >>>> we could do a spotlight to the OWW iGEM page, and then include a >>>> link >>>> from there to the registration page.... that way we maintain the >>>> 'only link to OWW pages in the spotlight' rule (if that's even a >>>> rule). >>>> >>>> sound OK? >>>> >>>> jason >>>> >>>> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- >>>> From: Randy Rettberg >>>> Date: Apr 23, 2007 7:57 AM >>>> Subject: iGEM Registration on OWW front page >>>> To: Jason Kelly >>>> Cc: Mackenzie Cowell >>>> >>>> >>>> Jason, >>>> Can I get an announcement of iGEM registration on the front page of >>>> OWW? >>>> >>>> I don't have edit access to it. >>>> >>>> It needs to say "iGEM 2007 Registration closes April 30 go to >>>> www.igem2007.com to register" >>>> >>>> Thanks, >>>> Randy >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> Oww-admin mailing list >>>> Oww-admin at mit.edu >>>> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-admin >>>> >>> >>> >>> >>> -- >>> Barry Canton >>> Endy Lab >>> Biological Engineering Division >>> Massachusetts Institute of Technology >>> >>> Tel.:(617) 899 6062 >>> Email1: bcanton at mit.edu >>> Email2: bcanton at gmail.com >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Oww-admin mailing list >>> Oww-admin at mit.edu >>> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-admin >>> >>> >> ---------- > > -- > Austin Che (617)253-5899 > -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 4168 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-sc/attachments/20070423/9f8132df/attachment.bin From austin at igem.mit.edu Mon Apr 23 12:54:08 2007 From: austin at igem.mit.edu (Austin Che) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 12:54:08 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] iGEM Registration on OWW front page In-Reply-To: <8bdffbdd73eb0d9465a4c0eafdd049ed@mit.edu> (Jennifer Braff's message of "Mon, 23 Apr 2007 12:11:47 -0700") References: <87ejmbgp60.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <878xcjgp2v.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> <8bdffbdd73eb0d9465a4c0eafdd049ed@mit.edu> Message-ID: <871wibghfz.fsf@nitsua.mit.edu> Anyone can edit it. Only the main page is protected and it just includes a bunch of templates which are not protected. Edit this: http://openwetware.org/wiki/Template:HighlightsNews -- Austin Che (617)253-5899 From ilyas at MIT.EDU Mon Apr 23 14:12:42 2007 From: ilyas at MIT.EDU (Ilya Sytchev) Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 14:12:42 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] Massive Voluntary Collaboration (seminar today) Message-ID: <462CF71A.5030604@mit.edu> This may be of interest to people located in Boston: Mon Apr 23, 4-5:30pm 3 Cambridge Center, MIT Building NE20, Room 336 Conference Room Kevin Crowston, Syracuse University The Internet has facilitated the emergence of a new era of human collaboration. Trends in usage of open source software, web-logs (commonly called blogs), so called wikis (websites that allow contributors to add their own content), and user forums facilitate combinations of online community space, tools for creating information resources, and new modes of coordinated effort among contributors which we call massive voluntary collaboration (MVC). In my talk, I will describe a model to shed light on the developmental arc of participation in MVC. This model integrates four converging perspectives from the social movements, cooperation, voluntarism and Communities of Practice literatures. This model regards MVC as a developmental arc of participation in which contributors engage in activities to share knowledge and learn about specific topics of their choice. This integrated theory brings an important complement to existing models of collaboration and explains distributed voluntary cooperation. http://cci.mit.edu/SeminarsSpring07.html From Servizio at Poste.it Wed Apr 25 02:47:03 2007 From: Servizio at Poste.it (Poste.it) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 02:47:03 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] Caro cliente Poste.it Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-sc/attachments/20070425/fdc7adf0/attachment.htm From lucks at fas.harvard.edu Wed Apr 25 10:03:11 2007 From: lucks at fas.harvard.edu (Julius Lucks) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 10:03:11 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] OWW member survey proposal Message-ID: Hi SC, Vincent and I have been discussing conducting a survey of the current OWW community. I think all of the SC subcommittees could find this useful, and it will be certainly very useful for the outreach effort so we can get an idea of what to focus on when attracting new members. Vincent has started a list of questions to be included in the survey at http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Steering_committee/ Outreach_chairs/OWW_Survey Our idea is for everyone to add their questions, and then Vincent and I can go through them and design the actual survey. Once that is finalized maybe we can pass off the questions to the extensions or analytics chairs to conduct the survey. Please let us know what you think about the idea, and add/edit questions as you see fit. Cheers, Julius and Vincent ----------------------------------------------------- http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:Lucks ----------------------------------------------------- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-sc/attachments/20070425/2628023e/attachment.htm From poste at sympatico.ca Wed Apr 25 10:02:44 2007 From: poste at sympatico.ca (Poste) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 10:02:44 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] Una nuova gamma completa di servizi online adesso disponibile ! Message-ID: <20070425141113.IAXZ1767.tomts22-srv.bellnexxia.net@User> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-sc/attachments/20070425/420ec039/attachment.htm From skosuri at MIT.EDU Wed Apr 25 10:57:24 2007 From: skosuri at MIT.EDU (Sri Kosuri) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 10:57:24 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] OWW mention on front page of PLoS Biology Message-ID: <2b0cb7a10704250757o381862f0s994fa88fb7a738a@mail.gmail.com> Look for the "From the Web" box on the right hand side http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=index-html&issn=1545-7885 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/oww-sc/attachments/20070425/4c6b9d0a/attachment.htm From jasonk at MIT.EDU Thu Apr 26 01:01:40 2007 From: jasonk at MIT.EDU (Jason Kelly) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 01:01:40 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] SC Meeting Weds, April 2, Noon EST Message-ID: <7c085c480704252201m77b22164g3b38cbba4b01dc08@mail.gmail.com> Hi SC, Just a reminder that we have our next SC meeting on April 2nd (1st weds of month) at Noon EST. Will follow up with details for calling in next week. Chairs please fill in your summaries for the month here: http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Steering_committee/Meeting_-_May_2007 Also, please add items to the discussion topics: http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Steering_committee_next_meeting As a reminder here is the action list from last meeting: http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Steering_committee_actions Thanks, jason From jasonk at MIT.EDU Thu Apr 26 10:38:32 2007 From: jasonk at MIT.EDU (Jason Kelly) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 10:38:32 -0400 Subject: [OWW-SC] SC Meeting Weds, MAY 2, Noon EST Message-ID: <7c085c480704260738w56cc72fdid6f7f322c1f0275@mail.gmail.com> May 2nd! :) thanks, jason On 4/26/07, Jason Kelly wrote: > Hi SC, > > Just a reminder that we have our next SC meeting on April 2nd (1st > weds of month) at Noon EST. Will follow up with details for calling > in next week. > > Chairs please fill in your summaries for the month here: > http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Steering_committee/Meeting_-_May_2007 > > Also, please add items to the discussion topics: > http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Steering_committee_next_meeting > > As a reminder here is the action list from last meeting: > http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Steering_committee_actions > > Thanks, > jason >