OpenWetWare:Steering committee/Meeting - April 2007

SC Reports

Brief reports on the month's activity should be written by each chair 2 days before the SC meeting. At the meeting each chair will bring up any open issues that require discussion, but won't need to recount everything described below.

Outreach

We have been discussing how best to structure the outreach effort. On an organizational level, we have agreed that it is best to have people based in each area to be able to put a face to recruitment. The structure will consist of local outreach chairs in major academic areas. The responsibility of these people are to recruit and organize volunteers to head up the outreach on a school-by-school basis (and maybe eventually on a department-by-department basis to be organized by the school-level people).

The responsibilities of the local people will be to put up recruitment materials (flyers, emails, etc.), and try to give some department, or lab group presentations. Ideally we will have a set of standard materials for the local people to present - maybe a presentation, standard fliers, etc.

We need to do two main things from here - try to find regional outreach chairs, and start to prepare these materials. As a first step to prepare the materials, we are starting to collect some basic information on OWW:

• the existing oww community - the labs, regions and countries represented
  • this will also help us recognize where we need to concentrate our efforts
• combine existing resources together: Getting Started, Why Join? and OWW Presentations, Highlights
• Some basic OWW facts - number of users, hits, etc.
• list of pages that we can do a wiki tour with (similar to NCBI coffee breaks)

Please see the Outreach page for more specific details. Once these materials are gathered, we can get started putting them together into a nice compelling introduction to OWW in terms of what features it has, and what it can provide.