What do we want to do?

[Theodore Omtzigt]

We need to figure out what this network means to its members. Please let us know what you would like to see on the network and any ideas how to make the site more valuable.

[Doone]

I think you have to think very long term for a site such as this one. I think you will need to think more in terms of academic years and class interaction. How about getting a few classes to use this site and contribute ideas and problems or have the class populate a Group on the site with information or a project about computational science?

A computation between classes on having the best group or most informative group might get things rolling.

[Theodore Omtzigt]

Competitions indeed are one of the ideas we have been playing with. We need to find sponsors for such activities to make the prizes interesting.

[Theodore Omtzigt]

Found an interesting analysis on the participation rates for different sites. It divides the user participation websites in two categories, media sites and social sites.

On media sites users mostly produce content with the objective to increase their visibility as an individual, brand, or company. These media sites are organized like the media companies they tend to spring from. So they have users with specific roles, such as producers, consumers, editors, moderators, etc. Even when the sites are collaborative, there apparently is a 1% rules which states that about 1% of the users actively contributes versus 9% that comment and the remaining 90% only consume content. These statistics apparently come from big media web properties like Flickr, Youtube, and Wikipedia.

On social sites users produce and receive content through the desire to keep in touch with people they care about. All actors publish content to some extent, but different types of influential people can be identified, such as connectors who have wide social networks, hubs who aggregate information, gatekeepers who organize and coordinate special interest groups, and pulse takers who put out surveys or questionairs. It is not uncommon for these sites to be heavily multimedia based with photos and videos being the dominant data type. For example, Facebook is a huge photo store for its users, much bigger than dedicated photo sharing sites.

Given these descriptions I realize that my initial thought about the site was to create a combination of both a media and a social site. As a grad student I always felt far removed from what the practitioners where concerned with. Newsgroups were our only tie into that community and I learned at least at much from those newsgroups than I did from my course work. Given that we are dealing with a deep technical field with computational science and engineering some roles are needed to organize the information, so producers and editors are essential. The social aspect comes from wanting to build a web property where people come together to solve problems and thus we need gate keepers and hubs and connectors. It is the coming together that probably is going to be somewhat local for university groups that then may branch and connect with connectors or domain experts.

[Doone]

Thanks for the information, you have done your research. I have also seen studies that show that 1/10 of 1 percent of Wikipedia writers produce 50 percent of the words in Wikipedia.

[Anurag]

I agree to the idea that we need editors and content producers. Its pretty typical that all such sites (including big ones as theo's research indicates) only a handful contribute. HPC is encompasses many fields. I guess we can ask for volunteers who have the domain knowledge in different fields to contribute - just a thought.

[Paolo Nenzi]

I agree with the people who advise you to think in the long term. In my experience, with the internet and people here in my everyday work, an amazing source of "aggregation" is the guiding of everyone's energy toward a common goal. This goal can be the realization of a software, of a wiki with info you cannot find elsewhere, etc. Mostly depends on the time you and the people have and the interests we can share.

[Theodore Omtzigt]

Indeed, the editorial force combined with production of purpose driven content organized through a wiki is what is missing here. The problem is that the Ning technology does not exist to build good content in this way. This might mean that we need to change the format from a social site format to an e-collaboration format.

Does anyone know of such a platform?

[Paolo Nenzi]

Ciao Theodore,

While I am doing research on technology, my background is mostly computer science. I am intrigued by the services google is setting up for collaboration. I currently use google docs to produce shared documents with collegues and in one occasion it helped me to check the progresses of two students doing a work on ngspice without the need to see them. What about checking with google ?

Paolo

[Doone]

Google Sites is a new Google collaborative website adventure. If you are strictly interested in a Wiki, you can embed Wiki's such as Wetpaint and the Widget Laboratory program Niki into a Ning site.