Hi Dr. Kunte,
though I am a silent member of butterflyIndia and cannot be of any help in the mater, but Long I was thinking in the same direction. I hope all other nature associated organisations will also do the same. Promila To: [email protected] From: [email protected] Date: Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:52:15 -0500 Subject: [ButterflyIndia] report on the website organizational meets + website hello everyone, we had four organizational meets to discuss the indian butterfly website: 1st in pune on 19 oct. 09, second in b'lore on 29 oct. 09, third in guwahati on 13 nov. 09, and the final in thane on 10 dec. 09. thanks to everyone who attended and exchanged ideas (they are too numerous to name, we had average 15 attendants at each meeting). each meeting went on at least for one and half hours, some longer. as you can imagine, we discussed a whole range of issues pertaining to website team compositions, handling media, copyright, funding and so on. it is difficult to squeeze all of this in one email, so i will try to highlight only the most important, most far-reaching issues/decisions in this email. i will address other issues as they are raised on the group, and when it is time to deal with those issues while developing specific pages on the website. 1. we are forming a group called Indian Foundation for Butterflies. the short form is "I. Found. Butterflies", which many thought would be a name that will stay with professionals and amateurs easily, and will be attractive to lay persons. that's the reason for the website's domain name: <http://ifoundbutterflies.org/>. please bookmark this for future reference. basic, preliminary information on IFoundButterflies is available under the "About Us" tab on this website, at: http://ifoundbutterflies.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=59&Itemid=68 2. we are forming three teams: (a) Butterfly Biology Team, (b) Web Design, Web-GIS and Data Management Team, and (c) Media Management and Technical Support Team. each team will have one or two leaders, and several team members and a few advisors. the team leaderships will rotate among the members depending on their expertise in the fields, how much time the members can invest at any given time, how much they are contributing, and generally what they are bringing to the table. the Butterfly Biology Team will be composed of working butterfly biologists (some professional, some advanced amateurs), who will contribute technical information to various sections of this website, invite articles on specific topics in butterfly biology from their peers/volunteers, peer-review all the information that is submitted to this website, and confirm identifications of the photographs that are due to appear online. in short, this team is responsible for developing the critical text and ensuring reliability of this website. the web design section of the team will, of course, handle the technical aspects of developing and coding the website. the database management section of the team will compile and maintain information about the media (pictures, videos, other illustrations) uploaded on the website, and handle/organize the distributional and seasonal records that the members submit (more about this later). the Media Management and Technical Support Team will receive and process all the media (annotate and format to standard specifications) submitted to the website after the butterfly biology team has confirmed identifications and reliability of the associated information. once the media management team readies the files, they will be publicly available on the website. we already have several members in each of these teams, but we are looking for more members/volunteers in the last two teams. please volunteer! everyone will thank you for this, and you will get prominently credited for your efforts (more about this later). 3. we promise to keep the website-related email traffic on butterflyindia within tolerable limits (only a handful email threads every week or every ten days). i hope that this will prevent people's mail boxes from being flooded with emails that they don't want to see and the website to which they don't want to contribute. however, i hope that most butterflyindia members would contribute to this website. if the website-related email traffic gets too much for most butterflyindia members, we will consider creating a forum specifically to discuss the website. let us know how you feel about all this. we want to make everyone feel that it is our common ambition, our common goal to contribute and develop this website for the butterflies we all love. i will open up some more issues and reveal some more decisions in my response to ashwin's email, soon to follow. regards, -- Krushnamegh Kunte Post-doctoral Research Fellow FAS Center for Systems Biology Harvard University 52 Oxford St Northwest Lab Room 458.40-3 Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Ph: (617) 496-0078 Cell: (512) 577-1370 Fax: (617) 495-2196 Email: [email protected] Other emails: [email protected], [email protected] Personal website: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~kunte/index.htm Indian Foundation for Butterflies: http://ifoundbutterflies.org/ Google profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/krushnamegh _________________________________________________________________ New Windows 7: Find the right PC for you. Learn more. http://windows.microsoft.com/shop -- Enjoy
