Attending

Ragu Balakrishnan, Rwitti Roy, Dave Carmichael, Brian Brinegar, Ryan Sandbach, Martin Sickafoose, Hilary Nelson, George Chiu, Osman El-Atwani, Bill Crossley, Prakash Dikshit, Muharrem Mane, Ankit Tyagi

Notes

• Grad students need to find professors to work with, and without a community (eg atomic force microscopy at Purdue) it's really hard to locate them all.
• Top-down lists are likely to be stale, because it's hard to keep them updated.
• The hope is to let faculty start a small group with a couple of people in a field, and then have it grow by pulling in others who work in similar areas.
• Faculty are not likely to be very active in building the content - they're likely to delegate the work to their students.
• Maybe we should market this directly to the grad students, and skip the faculty.
• Add a wiki feature.
• Can we do anything to make it easier to use Google Scholar? Could we give them a way to save keywords and searches that are successful?
• If users post their publications, do we need to restrict access to those to Purdue people?
• Would publications, RFPs, facilities, etc. be posted to personal profiles and pushed to their groups, perhaps with them selecting which groups for each item?
• Groups might select keywords for their group which could be used to somehow pull up related info that contains those keywords.
• Some documents might be public, others would need to be restricted to Purdue, or to the specific group.
• Documents like publications would probably be associated with the author, and shared with their groups, with the owner choosing which groups and with what restrictions.
• Could personal profile pages have links to (or pull in info from) Banner?
• Have a way to add arbitrary links.
• Need to see who's in the community, what they're working on (papers, problems, etc.), opportunities (RFPs, seminars, conferences, possible projects), a place for discussions.
• Let users email announcements to group and it will be posted to the group's web site, and emailed to people who've requested it. Offer opt-out and daily digest options.
• Start with the most high-value features, make them dead simple, make it something you can get value from in 5 minutes per day.
• Community pages can have a small "news feed" section that informs of the latest changes (new doc uploaded, new member etc.)