2008 May 16.

MIT Free Culture.

Present: price mako quentin vatsa peabo

Started 17:10.

Minutes taken by price.


Year in review.

price: This is the end of our first year.  So two questions: what did
  we do this year, and what will we do in the future?  One of these is
  easier than the other, obviously.

price: Two film showings: one had the director present for Q&A.
mako: There were 25-30 people there, and a good discussion.
  Better than expected for a few days' notice and in spring break.

price: Conversations with Wendy Seltzer, Nick Montfort, Alec Resnick
  of the book scanner, Elizabeth Finnie Duranceau of the libraries.
mako: We should have Eric von Hippel sometime.
price: Who else should we have?
mako: I'll be on the lookout for people from Wikimedia, EFF, others
  coming through and staying at my house.  An EFF staff technologist
  is in town right now.
price: There's a lot of good people up at Berkman.  We should bring
  some of them down to MIT.
mako: Yeah, they might be interested even just to pitch ideas.
  This group has a stronger record than any other FC group
  in building stuff, even in its short history.
price: If we advertise these, they might even find takers who aren't
  already busy.

quentin: We asked for $350 in travel funding to bring speakers.
  We'll hear back sometime... the website says "end of April".
  We get to start spending whatever we get on July 1.

price: Also ROFLCon.

price: And then there's YouTomb.  It's attracted some media interest,
  which we should probably respond to and turn into actual media
  attention.  Also if you google us you find we're mentioned on
  various blogs.
quentin: We should fix some technical issues to use less resources,
  and push the latest version to the production site.


And the future.

peabo: I'd like to look into all this data that YouTomb has collected.
  What's a good way for me to get at it?
price: Can we separate read from write access?
quentin: No, not really.
peabo: You could take a snapshot.
price: Yeah.  It'd be almost 20G.  Compressed, several gigs.
  We could probably put that in the locker.

price: Probably the main thing for the future of YouTomb is to make it
  easier for other people to get involved and do the things they're
  interested in, that we may not have had time to do.
  So the snapshot is important.  Also a mechanism for even just a few
  people like Wendy to add queries to explore.

price: We should do some work on open access.
mako: Yes.  We have some institutional support if we do.
price: I think the main task is to get faculty and researchers to
  think about it.  They're busy, have other things to think about, but
  when the case is presented to them it generally goes well.

  One thing is that we have already this institutional repository,
  DSpace.  So why does nobody use it?  In part it's that nobody knows
  about it... I can think of a couple of things that could be done to
  make it more visible.  One, we could make a regular list in some
  campus venue of what's been added to DSpace this week, or two weeks.
  Two, a bit more technically, faculty generally have web pages with
  big lists of their publications.  Considerable effort goes into
  maintaining these.  I could imagine some software tool to make it
  easier for them to keep these lists, using eg the DSpace URI for the
  pdf, ps, etc, rather than them keep a copy locally where it'll
  disappear if they leave MIT.
[quentin and mako start looking around DSpace]
quentin: also, it turns out DSpace is horrible to use.  That's part of it.

Ended 18:00.