Seabird personnel directory

[Scott A Hatch]

Hi All (members of Seabirdsnet Google group discussion),

I am unable to post a reply to Humprhies/St. Clair, so am emailing to the group email address.  Clearly there are a few wrinkles to iron out in using Google groups as a forum host.  Anyhow...

I asked Marischal DeArmound about access to the email list that resulted from the 1st World Seabird Conference (consisting of around 1200 people who requested to receive information about the conference).  He sees no problem sending out a mass email message requesting people those people to add their profiles to seabirds.net (or have a skeleton profile created for them).  Other opinions and a decision on this are needed from conference organizers (i.e., the transitional global committee or its successor).  I think that as soon as possible, the personnel directory should be set up on seabirds.net and jumpstarted using strategies such as just described.  The directory should be featured conspicuously on the seabirds.net home page, and should not be contingent on people participating in the metadata collection exercise.

We need to come up with a plan for how seabirds.net will be developed and managed.  As a team coalesces to guide this activity, it will be important for members of that team to have more or less direct access to the site--i.e., enabling them to deploy, edit, and augment content in an expeditious way.  Axiom cannot be expected to implement ideas on demand, quickly, and on a continuing basis (at least not without appropriate compensation).  At the same time, all issues and protocols pertaining to the "gatekeeper" function need to be sorted out.  Decisions on content to be added and how it will be implemented and organized must rest with the seabirds.net development team (at least some of whom, hopefully, will themselves be pretty savvy about website development and management, but who otherwise will consist of interested seabird professionals who can offer, and vet, ideas for content).

I imagine, for example, that one way the site could be managed would be for the development team to maintain their own, offline copy of the site on a machine which they use continually to build and edit the site, posting their revisions as needed to the live, online version.  Thus, the developmental work would be done essentially on a pro bono basis by members of the seabirds.net development team.  Deployment (and recurring updates) would require minimal intervention by the webhost (currently Axiom), and therefore cost should not become a major sticking point at this early stage.

I suggest we keep the discussion going like this for now, then, once there is a permanent world seabird consortium in place, make this topic (strategies and mechanisms for developing and managing seabirds.net) its very first item of business.  The seabirds.net development team should continue to self-organize, with the expectation of being officially chartered by the consortium when the time comes.

Scott
 

[Grant Humphries]

Hi,

I agree that we should be working on getting a seabird personnel
directory up and running sooner than later, but Axiom currently has
monopoly on the site, and as you've read, cannot dedicate any
resources to setting this up anytime in the immediate future.
Currently the compensation they are getting is for working on the data
interoperability for possible databases.

So, how can we go about setting up a directory in the current
seabirds.net? We obviously want this to happen, but it seems to me
that we're currently missing the "how".

Do we think it would be a better idea to build an offline website for
now, and then to pass it on to Axiom to look over?

As for website management, I think a team of 3 - 4 people at most (all
with some technical website expertise), with someone coordinating the
development, would be adequate just for dealing with the technical
side of things. The template website could be posted to the
discussion group, where everyone could comment.

As for management of the website in the end, I propose that a position
be created in the upcoming World Seabird Consortium. Something like
"website coordinator" or "website technician". This person would be
in charge of updating the website based on upcoming announcements,
events, or even just acting as a person who has access to the site
when it is required.
The biggest thing here is to ensure that the person doing this has
adequate training/knowledge of website design (which may be rare among
us seabird biologists).

Cheers
Grant