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- David Hon, Goddard Space Flight Center David was at the Goddard presentation, and he got really intrigued with the idea of the Scholars Workbench community group. If I understood correctly, he is a contractor working for another part of Goddard (not the library). He is very interested in applying the concept to the Planetary Misson projects that NASA is starting up. These are multi-year projects that combine research and creative speculation, creating lots of information in collaborative activities. He is going to make a connection to get me together with Bob Hozon, the guy at NASA who is putting together the proposals for these planetary missions.
- Washington, DC area users group* At the Goddard presentation, Mitzi Cole circulated a signup-sheet that asked the question about interest in forming a users group. There was lots of interest and agreement to have a first meeting sometime in August. Andrew and I agreed to attend. I also offered to have a session for interested parties on the next day that was a seminar on content modeling with Fedora. There was strong interest in that.
- Presentation at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center After talking to Goddard folks on the phone last February, they wanted to have me come and do the standard talk with them. I asked them to invite others that they knew were interested in Fedora from the area. We had a group of about 27 (I think) from Goddard, NOAA library, National Library of Medicine and U. of Maryland. We had agreed that I would do the presentation with questions in the first 45m minutes to an hour, then do a seminar/Q&A for programmers. It ended up being a 3 hour combination of the two, because people asked lots of questions and we had lots of conversation. Everyone said that they got lots of what they needed. Andrew Woods went with me. He participated and took notes which he put up under the community events section of this wiki.
- Data Curation solution community We had a call with Sayeed Choudry (Johns Hopkins), Michael Witt (Purdue), Brian (ICPSR) and myself. Talked about how we could get the structure of the wiki set up to start to encourage input. Sayeed is going to talk to some people at the Illinois School of Information to get a grad student to work with us.
May, 2009
- Solution Community Interns Program This is an idea that I got yesterday after talking to everyone. Sayeed's idea of involving a grad student gave me the idea. What if we started an interns program that placed an information school student with each community? They could do more of the leg work, organizing meetings, working on the wiki, creating surveys, etc. It would seem to be a real benefit to them in career networking, if not in other formal ways. I thought I would talk to John Unsworth when I return to see what he thinks. I would think that getting students interested in working with both the data curation effort and the small cultural heritage community would have real appeal. It may also be the way to get the publishing one going. Other obvious candidates are UNC and Simmons in Boston. Ari mentioned that they have had interns from Simmons.
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