I am down with this, but I would suggest that you fill out a fairly organized schedule about how you'll tackle these projects to make sure you make progress on them over the next several months. Arliss assembled a schedule that will be in your roadmap.md this week, so you can hack that accordingly.
If you do 2 week sprints, you've got about 2. 5 months or 10 weeks of regularly circulating sprints for the Prototype phase, I think I'll try to work that into the schedule if you're down for it.
My abbreviated feedback on all ideas is as follows:
I dig it, if you can commit to updating your ideas in this doc as you groom them; Richard's ideas seem like they've been started or have live prototypes which is cool, I think some of Joey's could take several months of work actually (like writing a book, that might take a while) but if you think these are "sprintable" projects, then feel free to jump in.
Creatives for Science
Joey are you still into this? If so:
- how would the app be different from the webpage currently?
- this is a personal critique perhaps, but I feel like every tech project, especially social projects, degrades into a dating app; sometimes, I just want something that connects me to cool events and doesn't involve making "profiles." Maybe that was not your intention anyway, so don't feel obliged to change.
- is there a way you could build it to match artists with science projects based on a controlled vocabulary of scientific interests?
- are their existing synergies or close synonyms in the vocabulary of certain sciences and artistic pursuits? it would be cool to have a quiz that allowed you to madlib your art interests and then generated a few projects of interest in the sciences based on those lexical analogs, or vice-versa. I'd take that quiz to find out if I was meant to be a pigment chemist because I was a painter, or a botanist because I was a landscape architect.
PrismDB
- I know this is a rad object that taught us much about the properties of light, but in the USA right now PRISM is a pretty loaded term dealing with mass-surveillance. So perhaps there's a better name to investigate here.
- I like the idea of some kind of aggregator of scientific curriculum, filterable accross disciplines, might be something to loop Christie into too.
- You might also check out exisiting collections of science materials, like my friend Rose made Science Studio: a collection of science multimedia online, after a successful kickstarter.
- maybe you could help her make that project cooler, I could make introductions
- one of the things I like about Pocket is that it has a mobile app, which caches offline so I can hypothetically read on the train when underground. This isn't a problem for everyone but offline operation is totally something that would be rad.
- could you build an IFTT workflow too, so that people could make equations that ported from these other services when they used the tag #scienceFTW or whatever? That would be rad!
- I think the main problem I see with PRISMDB is automating a lot of these pathways from other apps/services, and not letting the project splinter (prismatically..ha) into a thousand different avenues,sorry if my suggestions are not helpful to that end.
Sketching Web Geography
- Ooh I like this, I guess you're starting with the Glossary of terms yes, and then building more content for the book from your examples.
- I almost thing that this could take you your whole fellowship, but we can see how quickly you progress through chapters and make determinations about how you'll focus.
- Would it be a GitBook, or a published one, both? Where would you host the chapters, the gallery lookbook, and the glossary? How would you like them designed.
slidewinder
- How do you plan to develop the initial corpus of slides, or do you have a bunch already?
- I love the idea of a searchable/filterable catalogue of slides to inspire work or remix, it vaguely remindes me of "remixable" lesson plans in Mozilla WebMaker, maybe take a look at the user experience there to determine what workflow/UI is the best to partner with this?
BioJulia
- Maybe there's something to be said for using Issue trackers or gitrepos to manage community and involve contributors, or there's a skin you could make on those workflows that's more approachable. a better alternative to Meetup.com with fewer features and a scientific focus.
- Tools like RedBubble for example do a nice job of letting designers version materials in the way that coders do, and collaborate with others, maybe there's a tool in making a visual git for bio projects, or hacking the Phabricator code to make diffs/issue tracking (for events and assignments, and community tasks) more visual/accessible.
easyminer
- I love this idea too. It seems like you already have a solid idea of where it's going based on Thursday's call
- some things I'd love to see:
- stats like what I mentioned on our call Thursday, visualized in some way; I guess Joey could do some cool D3 visualizations of the density of scientific papers on particular topics, or publications from particular regions on a map
- this is probably a totally different tool, but I always (as a non-specialist in other scientific fields), wanted a tool to visually compare the arguments in "opposing" scientific papers, or papers written about the same topic...like the "diff" feature you get with Git or XCode but with articles, something that autodetects the "thesis" statment and pulls out a salient summation of the argument, allowing you to load in two papers and compare their [dis]agreements. Maybe you call it
ResearchDiff; an extension to this could be the "deathmatch" feature wherein you load in two papers and a "winning argument is selected based on how "accessible" the thesis is, like if it's "jargon-y," it loses points, or if the sentences are too high in wordcount, or have too many semicolons, fail.