We were delighted by the response to our call for volunteers to attend our project workshop and we’re delighted to announce that our two winners are Katy Maloney and Janet Bain. Katy is a Planet Hunter from Montreal (you can see her in this recent video about online communities. Janet is well known to those from Old Weather where she serves as moderator of the very active forum.
As Jules explained in her post, these workshops are a chance for the strange mix of people behind the scenes of the Zooniverse – developers, educators and scientists – to get together to discuss what works and what doesn’t, and to plan the year ahead. We think it’s very important to have volunteers there – and we hope that Katy and Janet (along with Jules, who we’ve invited back) will keep you all informed and involved in the discussions.
There were a few comments in the discussion under that last post from people – particularly locals – who would clearly have dearly loved to come. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be possible to run the workshop as a public event; both because of the format (which features spontaneously arranged small group discussions) and also to allow everyone to speak freely about often quite difficult issues. What I do find heartening is that we’ve grown a community who want to help us plan and develop for the future, and we need to take that seriously.
I’ll write more over the next couple of weeks and months about what we’re going to do to be more open, but for now for those who really wanted to come we’ll work hard to organise some truly public events. We have a meeting in Oxford on the 22nd June which I hope British Zooites will be able to attend, and we’ll arrange a similar event in Chicago as soon as possible. We’ll also try hard to webcast these events so all can attend.
Chris
Zooniverse 
Congratulations to Katy and Janet! 🙂
And I hope that zooites who are not British will be welcome at the 22 June Oxford meeting 😉
I wonder, how many zooites sent an application? (I didn’t apply.)
Did the Zooniverse Team inform by e-mail those zooites, whose applications weren’t successful? I think, that some of them might be disappointed. As I had said before, I think, that it would have been better to invite your “favourite” zooites without asking all zooites for applications!
In a related topic, which was started by Jean in planethunters Talk,
Meg Schwamb posted following comment :
“I should note, I’m not going this year (I’m not invited this year) so not all of the science team members of the different projects are going.”
http://talk.planethunters.org/chat/discussions/DPH101oxqr
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I don’t understand, why she wasn’t invited? Actually, I can’t imagine a meeting about the future of PH without Meg Schwamb! And she lives in the USA, as far as I know! I wonder, which astronomers (e.g. PH, GZ) were invited? Who decided?
Hi Zutopian. Thanks for the very kind words, but not to worry if there was a meeting about the future of Planet Hunters I’m sure I’d be included. These are more of a Zooniverse wide discussion. I was invited and presented last year about how we’re converting PH clicks to science.It was great to get the chance to meet people from the science teams of current and future Zooniverse projects. It’ only fair for others and other PH team members to have that chance and have their turn.
Cheers,
~Meg
Meg Schwamb read my comment and replied to it in PH Talk.
That’s really great Chris! How can dedicated and enthusiastic zooites best contribute to the development of the Zooniverse team’s plans to be more open?
I have a few suggestions on how to allow zooites who are able to get to Chicago (because they live there, for example) could go the event, without compromising any existing plans or formats:
* as you have done with the Oxford ZooCon, allow only those zooites who register (for free) to attend. This would mean the Workshop would not be a public event, and, having successful experience with ZooCon registration, this would be easy and straight-forward to arrange.
* permit these registered zooites to attend the opening talks, on one or both days, but not the ““un-conference” sessions” (as jules calls them) which follow. This would ensure the spontaneously arranged small group discussions are not disrupted, and that there’d be no barrier to everyone speaking freely about difficult issues.
* if they wished to, permit zooites Terrance Johnson and anne – the zooites who posted comments on jules’ blog post – to join any small group discussions on communications or how to make the Zooniverse more open. Their first hand experience on these topics would surely be most welcome by the Zooniverse team! 🙂