OpenWetWare talk:Steering committee/Goals

Refer-me prgram

• • Johncumbers 23:57, 9 August 2006 (EDT) How difficult would it be to have a refer-me program for OWW. Not to track growth, but as a security measure for the future. You either have to be referred by somebody currently on the site, or you have to be part of a university lab. If we try and implement this early on, then we might avoid vandalism and mis-use at a later date. I foresee this as a problem if we don't do anything about it.
    • Jasonk 00:17, 10 August 2006 (EDT): The ease of reverting changes (combined with having logins) all but eliminates concerns about vandalism, I think. Basically, it's a one shot and your done sort of situation, seems manageable in the long term. The problem with a referal system is that ~50% of new users are just coming in off the web unreferred. Limiting to university labs is an option, but that's more a question about who we want in the community rather than a question of vandalism I think. e.g. Do we want to ban high school students? college students not in labs? people at companies? retired scientists? ex-scientists? etc. We talked about this at the retreat a bit, and seemed to agree on being pretty open about who we allow into the community - this may be something we want to revisit at some point. As a note, there's no requirements to comment on papers submitted to PLoS one, other than a valid email and an "unambiguous identity".
  • Jasonk 14:04, 11 September 2006 (EDT): We talked about this at the last SC meeting and decided a refer-me program might be a good way to recruit users (e.g. viral growth a la gmail), but we were less interested in it as security measure. (correct me if im wrong).