Grants talk:TPS/Daniel Mietchen/58th Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society

Comments

I just wanted to pop in here and register my support for this proposal. The BPS has been a great supporter of Wikipedia for years and they are super enthusiastic about contributing to the Wikimedia movement. This is a very productive project to fund, in my opinion. Keilana|^{Parlez ici} 07:12, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Having Daniel Mietchen speak at the Biophysical Society Wiki-Edit session at the San Francisco meeting this February would be a very big boost for our WikiProject Biophysics, for the Society, and for our goal of building contributions to Wikipedia and to open media from professional scientists. Although coming from Berlin is a long trip, he would be the ideal person for this. Our focus this year is on uploading open-license images to Commons to improve the coverage and especially the understandability of biophysics-related articles, and Daniel is an expert in that aspect. With a background in biophysics, he will benefit from the meeting himself and can also drum up interest in more of our >6000 attendees outside of the actual session (I'm quite taken with his strategy for poster sessions and plan to try something similar myself). He will also be much appreciated by the 30% of our members who are from outside the US (including 2 of our 6 wiki-contest winners from last year), and international participation is important to WikiProject Biophysics as well as to the Biophysical Society as a whole. Our small group is working to create a self-sustaining, critical mass of interacting editors, and both Daniel's expert advice and the example of his commitment would do a lot to spark enthusiasm and draw in new participants.

The Biophysical Society Council, the Education and Early Careers committees, and the Society office are strongly supportive of the WikiProject and this session: they are providing the room, internet, publicity, project buttons, a dinner for the speakers and the contest winners and judges, a complementary full-meeting registration for Daniel, and a contribution toward his lodging expenses. I am very much looking forward to the session and to meeting Daniel in person. Jane Richardson, Biophysical Society President 2012-13 Dcrjsr (talk) 11:40, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Request approved

Hello, Daniel: This request is funded, the budget requested is reasonable considering your record of participation in this type of activity, that you are leading a session and participating actively during the congress. We'll be in touch soon to arrange the details of your reimbursement. I wonder if it could be useful for you to have a list of Wikimedians willing to be a "local science contact" in their country, like this you may be able to give a contact name to the scientist you will met. Cheers, --Charles Andrès (WMCH) 18:14, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

I think a list of contact Wikimedians would be useful, but in the context of conferences, I'd rather group them primarily by topic. Lists by country are useful too, e.g. to organize local events or to coordinate local collaborations with institutions. -- Daniel Mietchen (talk) 02:15, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

I guess what we really want here is to start thinking about a user group for science. That would have a page on Meta or so, with all the bells and whistles (per country, topic etc.) the community finds helpful, and instead of pointing conference participants to individual people (whose availability for this sort of thing may change over time), we'd have a single contact point that is more likely to generate responses to contacts. -- Daniel Mietchen (talk) 00:58, 16 December 2013 (UTC)