OpenWetWare:Ideas

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World readable/writable

Are we convinced that the current approach is appropriate in the long term? If world writable works for wikipedia, then why not for us? I'm not convinced the administrative burden is that significant seeing as so many people seem to keep good track of what is changing. I also suspect making wiki-wide changes may become more difficult if the wiki grows at the current rate as the inertia of convincing everybody that a change has merit increases. --Barry Canton

Calendar

From Jim Hu: For the calendar, you might think about using phpicalendar to generate an RSS feed that gets parsed into the calendar page. That way the content can be controlled from a desktop mac using ical or a pc running mozilla calendar. More importantly, this means that those users can also subscribe to the calendar.

Wikicities

In the newest Tech. Review, I stumbled upon wikicities. They have connections with Wikipedia. It looks to be a relatively new site (2004?) but they basically host a collection of wikis on specific topics. Some kind of community openwetware like site on there seems like it would be a good idea. We would not need to be responsible for the system administration headaches and I'm sure there are other benefits of having a centralized location for the wiki. We should definitely keep lab/group specific stuff here. I'm not sure what the use of this could be, but I see lots of benefit of allowing the world to edit some things like protocols. They currently have almost nothing under their biology category. --Austin 17:01, 29 Jul 2005 (EDT)

Adding new groups to OWW

I would like to build an OWW-based wiki for a student group in which I am involved, Students for Global Sustainability. I think there are many benefits of using OWW for this purpose, including:

1. Many OWW researchers are interested in building bugs that will help solve world problems (energy, pollution control, material production, etc.) and SfGS is also interested in the same problems. Discourse amongst the two groups would prove mutually beneficial.
2. Biologists are underrepresented in the sustainability community at MIT, and the community would be strengthened by their inclusion.
3. SfGS provides a different interface with the poltical/conservationalist scene than OWW researchers typically encounter. Such exposure could be good for career development, enhanced world view, etc.

I have set up a prototype page called Students for Global Sustainability Wiki. Please let me know how you feel about welcoming in the SfGS community to OWW.

--Samantha Sutton

I think this is a fine idea. For the most part there is little downside to bringing more MIT people into the wiki, as long as they are respectful of naming conventions, etc. For instance, even if a group creates a new wiki front page that is largely self-contained (i.e. it doesn't link to anything else in OWW) it doesn't really hurt the rest of the wiki at all. It just means we have more people using OWW which means they are more likely to encourage their labs to use it / copy edit stuff they see on our pages, etc. For a particular group there might not be huge upside, but i don't see much downside at all.

-Jasonk 08:22, 24 Jul 2005 (EDT)