OpenWetWare:Steering committee
Contacts
The following people are responsible for communication between iCampus and OpenWetWare members.
Overall Coordinator
Sub-Committee Leaders
Finances
Jason Kelly
Timeline Manager
Danielle France
Software Development
Barry Canton
Community Development
Sri Kosuri
Promotional Material/Advertising
Ty Thomson
User Experience/Data Management
Jeff Gritton
Education Coordinator
Reshma Shetty
Advisors
Goals
Software development
In order to facilitate user interactions with OpenWetWare, we would like to establish a UROP position to work on a variety of software tools:
- Tools to simplify data entry into the wiki
- Word - word macro to convert formatting to wiki markup. Improve the html->wiki markup scripts
- Excel - improve the CSV-> wiki markup converter. Add support for chart addition.
- Powerpoint - Auto-image saving and uploading of slides. Transfer of slides to word files and then convert to wiki markup.
- LaTeX - expanded math support. LaTeX->wiki converter.
- Images - expanded image format support, automated uploading of sets of images.
- For further information see this page on existing document converters.
- Tools to map wiki pages onto static websites.
- Further automate the existing script.
- Include CC license information on each dynamically created page.
- Automatically set page width to an appropriate value.
- Login
- Add support for MIT certificates.
- Write script to automatically create login accounts based on a list of email addresses in CSV format.
- Tools to integrate permanent and evolving documents.
- Discussion pages for DSpace documents
- Markup for DOI's (just as there is markup for urls and wiki pages)
Ideally, we hope to coordinate with the MediaWiki open source community on tools that are likely to be of general use to the community (MediaWiki is the open source software that OpenWetWare is based on).
Contacts
- Principle contact: Barry Canton
- Other contributers: Ilya Sytchev, Austin Che, Sri Kosuri, Jason Kelly
Community Development
The success of OpenWetWare depends critically on cultivating and maintaining an active user base. We plan to dedicate funds to enable tutorials, conference visits, advertising, and other mechanisms for recruiting new users to OpenWetWare.
Finally, we want to begin an OpenWetWare seminar series hosted at MIT. This series would discuss perspectives on open practices and communities in science. We feel this would be important for two reasons. First, it would highlight groups and individuals in science actively striving to accomplish some of the same goals as those of OpenWetWare (e.g. PLoS, Science Commons, etc.) Second, it would provide an amazing opportunity before every talk to introduce OpenWetWare to others.
Contacts
- Principle contact: Sri Kosuri
- Other contributers: Jason Kelly, Danielle France, Barry Canton, Reshma Shetty
Promotional Material/Advertising
In order to help promote OpenWetWare, we will need a range of promotional material including business cards, information pamphlets, posters and banners. As I see it, we probably need a graphic artist for two jobs: a logo (for poster, banner, and business cards), and a full page design for the pamphlet cover.
Samantha suggested going with Painted Frog Studio who did the poster and logos for the Synthetic Biology 1.0 conference.
Contacts
- Principle contact: Ty Thomson
- Other contributers: Sriram Kosuri, please add yourself if you're interested in helping
Data management
In the long term, the success of OpenWetWare relies on the assumption that the number of users actively curating the information of OpenWetWare will scale with the amount of content generated. However, there has been little work to examine how collaborative tools can best be used to develop information resources, such as the OpenWetWare protocol collection. We believe the project would benefit dramatically from the active establishment of community standards for organizing content in OpenWetWare. We will establish a UROP position to evaluate and implement templates and other methods for organizing information in OpenWetWare.
Contacts
- Principle contact: Jeff Gritton
- Other contributers: Jason Kelly, Reshma Shetty, Sri Kosuri, Jeff Gritton.
Integration with laboratory classes
To complement its mission to promote an open culture in biological science and engineering, OpenWetWare will be integrated into the curriculum of laboratory classes. As a pilot experiment, MIT's BE.109 Laboratory fundamentals of biological engineering will be relying heavily on OpenWetWare to disseminate course content and to serve as a shared space for students, TA's and instructors to communicate.
Contacts
- Principle contact: Reshma Shetty
- Other contributors: Natalie Kuldell
Specific Benchmarks for May 2006
Community Benchmarks
- 30 academic labs
- 750 users
- 3000 uniques visitors/day
(Each of these is ~3X the number currently on the site)
- Send representatives to 2 conferences (ASCB & ?)
Content Benchmarks
- An automatic method for to convert wiki->static webpage directly hosted on openwetware
- Templates for protocols, equipment, materials, biologicals; Also, better organization scheme to encourage use and standardization of the shared information.
- Integration with the BE.109 curriculum; Active Student Participation
- 1400 content pages (2X current amount)
Budget
- $6000 for a UROP dedicated to software tools development
- $6000 for a UROP dedicated to data management
- $2000 for advertising materials
- OpenWetWare gathering in Boston
- poster and business card printings
- poster mailing
- $5000 for travel funds to conferences
- conference registration
- travel expense
- Additionally, students traveling to conferences to present research will also be able to spread information about OWW without requiring direct support.
- Planned conferences to attend:
- $1000 to hold Boston-area OpenWetWare tutorial sessions
- travel to and from session
- refreshments
- $10000 for sponsorship of monthly meetings hosted by OpenWetWare on "Open Science"
- 10 speaker average of $1000 per speaker for travel/hotel stay (series would start early March)
- Total: $30000
