OpenWetWare steering committee/Community development ideas

Please post any ideas you have about OpenWetWare community development here.

Community Portal

 * An improved Community Portal would go a long way towards encouraging the growth of the "back-end" user community. We could use the wikipedia community portal as a model.

Seminar Series

 * Can embed google video on a site (without even a google logo on it or anything) and they will stream for free, so we could host videos there if we wanted.
 * At the last steering committee meeting we brought up looking into the Singapore/MIT alliance rooms that already have the built-in AV equipment.

User pages

 * Not sure if this belongs here, but it would be great if we could get people to put at least a small amount of info on their user pages, particularly those who contribute regularly. I think accountability for/credibility of info on OWW kind of depends on this. Otherwise, we should just allow editing to be anonymous. Not too much info is required for this, just a short bit about who they are.--Kathleen
 * We've been trying to encourage this as much as possible. Every email that goes out to a new user includes a line encouraging them to start editing their user page.  In fact, with many new users, we put a line on their user page for them when we create the account.  However, many of the recent influx of OWW users are BE.109 students, and so I haven't been doing this because they are supposed to put something on their user page as part of their assignment.  Regardless, I agree that this is a good idea.  --RS

Custom Recent Changes
At the sub-group meeting on 2/22/06, we discussed having the ability to track changes for customized groups of pages. One thought is to have all the possible namespace in the drop-down list on the recent changes site. There are a variety of things we could do, here are just a few to begin.


 * 1) Use Existing Functionality. We can track categories by going to a particular category page and tracking related changes.  Thus, the endy lab could have a category of all its pages, and have a link to the related changes page for that category.
 * 2) *Advantages
 * 3) **Pages can have multiple categories
 * 4) **No additional coding (don't have to worry about updates, et cetera)
 * 5) *Disadvantages
 * 6) **Recent changes page is unchanged. Harder to figure out where to go.
 * 7) **Must categorize pages that you want searched. Causes ugly categorization thing at bottom.
 * 8) ***Is there a way to make categories visible only in the code, not on the page?
 * 9) We can use an existing extension, such as this to encode custom recent changes functionality. What this does is makes a particular page a recent changes page for all pages with a specified prefix.  This would, to a first approximation, let us track changes for all the different spaces that material is on.
 * 10) *Advantages
 * 11) **Don't have to label each page with a category
 * 12) *Disadvantages
 * 13) **Each page will have only one possible recent changes
 * 14) **Won't work with redirects (I think).
 * 15) **Could become broken every time we update
 * 16) We could write our own functionality.
 * 17) *Advantages
 * 18) **Could customize whatever we wanted
 * 19) *Disadvantages
 * 20) **Lots of work
 * 21) **Needs maintenance, yet another thing we need to worry about.

Anyways, let me know what you think --Sri Kosuri