I would like to build a community site. Or, more precisely, I would like to recognize, collect, and collate information from an already existing but rather diffuse community.
The focus of the community will be academic data science, or "data driven discovery". This is spurred largely by the recent selection of the Moore Data Driven Discovery Investigators, as well as the earlier Moore and Sloan Data Science Environments, and more broadly by the recognition that academia is broken when it comes to data science.
So, where to start?
For a variety of reasons -- including the main practical one, that most academics are not terribly social media integrated and we don't want to try to force them to learn new habits -- I am focusing on aggregating blog posts and Twitter.
So, the main question is... how can we most easily collect and broadcast blog posts and articles via a Web site? And how well can we integrate with Twitter?
First steps and initial thoughts
Following Noam Ross's suggestions in the above storify, I put together a WordPress blog that uses the RSS Multi Importer to aggregate RSS feeds as blog posts (hosted on NFSN). I'd like to set this up for the DDD Investigators who have blogs; those who don't can be given accounts if they want to post something. This site also uses a Twitter feed plugin to pull in tweets from the list of DDD Investigators.
The resulting RSS feed from the DDDI can be pulled into a River of News site that aggregates a much larger group of feeds.
The WordPress setup was fairly easy and I'm going to see how stable it is (I assume it will be very stable, but shrug time will tell :). I'm upgrading my own hosting setup and once that's done, I'll try out River4.
Next steps and longer-term thoughts
Ultimately a data-driven-discovery site that has a bit more information would be nice; I could set up a mostly static site, post it on github, authorize a few people to merge, and then solicit pull requests when people want to add their info or feeds.
One thing to make sure we do is track only a portion of feeds for prolific bloggers, so that I, for example, have to tag a post specifically with 'ddd' to make it show up on the group site. This will avoid post overload.
I'd particularly like to get a posting set up that integrates well with how I consume content. In particular, I read a lot of things via my phone and tablet, and the ability to post directly from there -- probably via e-mail? -- would be really handy. Right now I mainly post to Twitter (and largely by RTing) which is too ephemeral, or I post to Facebook, which is a different audience. (Is there a good e-mail-to-RSS feed? Or should I just do this as a WordPress blog with the postie plug-in?)
The same overall setup could potentially work for a Software Carpentry Instructor community site, a Data Carpentry Instructor community site, trainee info sites for SWC/DC trainees, and maybe also a bioinformatics trainee info site. But I'd like to avoid anything that involves a lot of administration.
Things I want to avoid
Public forums.
Private forums that I have to administer or that aren't integrated with my e-mail (which is where I get most notifications, in the end).
Overly centralized solutions; I'm much more comfortable with light moderation ("what feeds do I track?") than anything else.
Thoughts?
--titus
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