OpenWetWare:Community Portal

Welcome to the Community Portal! This is the place to be if you are interested in contributing to OpenWetWare at any level. It tells you how to stay informed about what needs to be done. It lists ways to contribute to OWW and what tools you can use to contribute. It also serves as a location for discussions about OpenWetWare's structure, content and features. We are in the process of thinking through how best to build our community and enable contributions, if you see a way to make this page more useful, please add it to the discussion page. Contents » How do I know where to contribute? » What needs doing? » Discussions

How do I know where to contribute? If you want to contribute to OpenWetWare there are a couple of things you can do right now- Just surf around and you'll find stuff that could be improved. Visit this page and check out the lists of what needs doing. Add this page as one of your watched pages, so you get email alerts of changes to the page. Join the OpenWetWare steering committee. What needs doing? Here are some of things you can do to help make OWW a better place. Add knowledge Add to an existing page. Start a new page on your favorite topic. Remember that many of the pages on OWW started off looking quite crude, so feel free to put up a page that doesn't look as polished as you would like it to. The community will help improve a page if you get it started. Check out the Questions and Answers page to see if you can answer someone's specific question. Improve formatting and linking, correct typos This could be a dynamic list see the extension here of pages matching the category "needs attention". Aggregation and organization of information For example, we'd like to list as many protocols as possible on the Protocols page. There are certainly protocols that are not linked to from the protocols page. If you find such a page and you think the author(s) would be happy to add it to the community protocols, then add the link. The same applies to equipment, materials or other shared resource pages in search of a home. Categories might be the best way to let people to tag pages for inclusion in the shared resource pages. Active Collaborations Contributions from users are actively sought on the following OWW community projects- Protocols<--see the protocols under development section OpenWetWare:New Lab Presentation <-- Basic intro to present usefulness for laboratory use OpenWetWare:FAQ <-- Needs to be split. User FAQ , New User FAQ, Visitor FAQ, Admin FAQ, New Lab FAQ Help:Contents <--Help currently resides in lots of places, these should probably all be centralized/aggregated here on the help page. They should possibly even be merged with the FAQ master page. Getting started <-- give advice to new OpenWetWare labs and users. UPDATE: 2/22/2006 Actively in progress! About us Why join OpenWetWare? <-- give others reasons to join Tips on using OpenWetWare <-- handy tips for users acquainted with the basics Add pages that have been previously requested People often want to see a page get started on a particular subject but don't have a chance to add content to that page at the time. Such pages are currently listed here - Special:Wantedpages. Desirable extensions If there is an extension you would like to see implemented or installed, please list it on the extension page. Improve pages for new users We're trying to make OpenWetWare as painless to use and edit as possible, especially for new users. Ideally, we want concise and useful explanations for new users (and potential users). Help improve these pages for new users. Discussions A listing of discussions relating to OpenWetWare. Logo and Poster Info/Design Layouts Development Roadmap Categories <-- we're still figuring out how to best make use of categories A proposed implementation of tags via categories has been described at OpenWetWare steering committee/Software development ideas. Please add your feedback and ideas there. Ideas for OpenWetWare <-- post general thoughts/ideas on OpenWetWare here Logo and poster discussion <-- contribute to the logo discussion Mailing Lists <-- Coming Soon!