Attending

Ragu Balakrishnan, Dave Carmichael, Brian Brinegar, Martin Sickafoose, Blake Powers, Hilary Nelson, Sherry Harbin, Seza Orcun, George Chiu, Rwitti Roy, Inez Hua

Notes

Here's what I managed to capture from the meeting. I'm sorry if I omitted or distorted any important points -- I don't have any training as a stenographer, and I just do the best I can.  -Hilary

• Web sites to facilitate communication within and between signature areas.
• 3 parts to effort: look and feel, implementation, requirements.
• Seza: their proposal involved a challenge to students to solicit solutions to problems. They would provide the data and requirements. Web site wouldn need a mechanism for them to register for the competition. They would also need a way for them to post their solutions, and a mailing list. He also envisions a series of coffee/chat sessions for discussion.
• They hope that as students become involved, it will encourage more faculty to contribute challenges and participate.
• Ragu: we could use this to build a library of solutions that people could use. Eventually it could grow beyond Purdue.
• For any community site, the intent is that anyone who is interested should be able to join.
• Sherry: it would be good to have bio sketches, research interests, etc. available on faculty to make it easier to find people to partner with for grants, collect the information necessary for an application, etc.
• Rwitti: the engineering intranet could be the central place where all this information could live. If we can establish in people's minds that the intranet is the first place to go, it will reduce confusion and make it easier for people to find it.
• George: in order for people to use this, it has to provide real value. Content has to be fresh and current. Easy mailing lists would be valuable. Bio sketches that could be gotten in a one-click manner would be ideal.
• George: he spends 50+ hours per year updating and pulling together his CV.
• A comprehensive faculty bio/CV database would have wide-ranging benefits. It would need to be able to output bios in multiple formats to provide the necessary benefit for faculty.
• Seza: a calendar or message boards would be good features.
• Inez: a lot of this sounds like what Discovery Park has on their web site. Would they be willing to share?
• Inez: a facilities listing so that researchers can find equipment that may not exist in their area, but probably can be found somewhere on campus.
• George: keeping that list current would be critical. How does it get updated?
• Seza: maybe it could be part of the user profile. Send reminders to update the list every six months or so.
• Rwitti: part of why the SAM databse failed was the difficulty of allowing someone else to update your data.
• George & Seza: on surveys, they often need IRP (?) consent forms.
• Hilary: with existing Form objects, that couldn't be done (no way to get from one form to another while maintaining the user's identity). It is possible to put the disclaimer at the top of the form, with a required checkbox that says "Yes I agree".
• Facility/equipment lists: it should be possible to search for people who are familiar with equipment, so you don't have to look through a whole lot of profiles.
• Rwitti: should we only be looking at Signature Areas for this facilities list?
• Inez: That's the low-hanging fruit.
• There could be facilities and resources outside of engineering, too, so we should try to leave open the possibility of including those as well.

Requirements summary

• User-maintained mail lists
• Calendars
• Posting RFPs
• Webinars
• Blogs
• Facility lists
• Application forms