Marspedia Editorial Subcommittee

This was our 2nd meeting and was convened as a teleconference using the Zoom.US service on November 2, 2017 at 11am Eastern / 8am Pacific.

Attendees

Susan Martin, James Burk, Bruce Mackenzie, Kerri Miller

Agenda

How to handle Nicole's article submissions
Talk about Needed Articles and Topic List
Talk about Teachers' Page

Minutes

Nicole's article submissions

James Burk reports that Nicole has given written permission to use her content, accompanied with the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license or something similar. We talked briefly about her content and what it includes; it is 5 good articles with references (not footnoted but included at the end.)

Without objection, James will post to the wiki and tag with the CC BY-SA 3.0 license. We also agreed to follow up with Nicole to see if she would be interested in writing versions for K-12 audiences (these are clearly scientific/adult audience).

We also talked about the need to align Marspedia content to common core standards, and that if we are aiming content to different audiences that we have appropriate index pages for those audiences.

For reference, here is an article from Wikipedia: Common Core Standards

Talk about Needed Articles and Topic List

We reviewed the Needed Articles page and James' Topic List. There was consensus that the Topic List was a good start to this, and will be a good tool to use to ensure we have coverage for all needed articles.

We talked about the need to have an article for newbies on how to write articles without plagiarizing and how to reference articles correctly. Susan mentioned an article she uses from the Purdue OWL site. We should have our own copy or link to this somewhere.

James mentioned that Mars Foundation has done a lot of great work on Mars settlement concepts, and asked Bruce is there any material that we could upload to the wiki. Bruce said there are a few whitepapers that could be turned into articles and agreed to share. He has other material in Powerpoint that he'd be willing to share but it needs voiceover explanations. Kerri also mentioned her willingness to help with this effort, and Bruce and Kerri agreed to connect.

James posted the list of Contributor Categories that Bruce provided just prior to the meeting. Use we could use this list of contributors/readers and make it a funnel for audiences and how they can help, and what articles are needed. We mentioned for 1a, this could also be Conributors summarizing their own work done elsewhere.

Kerri had the idea of doing a regular Call for Articles / Papers / Materials. We could focus on one major topic area per quarter. We could also find scientific forums to call for papers. The key would be finding the most helpful forums to issue those calls (such as academia.edu, chemical engineering on linkedIN for ISRU, gardening/hydroponics.) "We want an article of X length, would you be willing to revise a paper or write a new one?" We will review prior to publication. Bruce mentioned we could ask people to both input own work directly, or give permission for others to summarize their work.

Bruce also had the idea of doing a call for interesting websites, which our editors could summarize.

We talked about the need to revise the Importing from Wikipedia article and how we could do bulk updates from Wikipedia, but not necessarily surface a lot of that content. We want to feature our original content more, but also have coverage for ancillary topics.

Book Club

Bruce had an idea for a Marspedia Book Club: when a new book comes out, read the book together and have weekly discussion meetings. Susan mentioned integrating the lending of eBooks into this process.

Teachers' Page

We talked about the need to create a Teacher's landing page with calls to action, and agreed that Nicole was the best person to start/lead this effort, depending on her time available. James will follow up with her.

Final Topics

There was some discussion of the Logo which we'll refer to the Council.

We discussed the need to find a better alternative than When2Meet. Susan mentioned Survey Monkey.

Action Items for Next Week

James: Follow up with Nicole on writing versions of her articles for K-12 and the Teacher's Page.
Everybody: Review the Topic List and add needed articles to the Needed Articles page, based on what is in the Topic List.
Bruce: dig up & send whitepapers with Mars settlement concepts.
Bruce & Kerri: work together on transforming existing Powerpoints into content that can be used.
Referred to Technical Subcommittee: Revise the Wikipedia Import article so we can start doing this process to build out the content.
Referred to Technical Subcommittee: Create tag templates for different audiences (?) or come up with a way to tag content clearly for which audience it's for.