PROPOSALS FOR IMECHANICA

Dear Mike:  Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts.  The server is unstable today, and posts of iMechanica are inaccessible.  I'm sorry for the inconvenience.  Harvard IT people have been alerted

I'm writing notes as I read your post.  The notes are too brief at many places.  I apologize.

1. iMechanica serves a different function from Nature, or from any journal for that matter.  There is no reason to maintain a consistent quality of posts in iMechanica.  We don't need to be highbrow or lowbrow.  We can be nobrow.  The user can simply post whatever on her mind that might interest a fellow mechanician, or can choose to be serious about every word.  It is her decision of the moment.  She does not even need be consistent.  (Consistency is a weakness of the mind, as Freeman Dyson remarked.)  In this regard, an iMechanica post is more like a hallway conversation than a journal paper.  I for one have no desire to create another Nature.  Nature is already there.  It's great but leaves most of our needs unserved.  Let's do somthing else.
2. I can certainly point to quite a few ideas posted in iMechanica that look "really serious" to me.
3. Do you mean "established people" when you say "top people"?  Many top young people are indeed active users of iMechanica.  Established people have fewer reasons to do a lot of things.  Many of them do not even come to conferences very often, unless invited to give a special lecture.  This said, I agree that young mechanicians will benefit greatly from the participation of more established mechanicians.  Let us discuss more about this topic and find a viable approach.
4. Response to your point 1).  If a person is looking for "filtered" materials, he already has plenty:  he can read journal articles.
5. Response to your point 2), 3) and 6).  iMechanica search box ranks search results.  The ranking algorithm is less sophisticated than that of Google.  The ranking mechanism can be improved.  More generally, iMechanica use Drupal, an open source project.  We need volunteers to look for and test suitable modules on Drupal.org.  As iMechanica grow, and users like to have more flexibility, we need to find a way to distribute the work to enhance iMechanica.
6. Response to your point 4).  There have been several iMechanica thread on wiki.  Please take a look at them as you refine your ideas.
7. Response to your point 5).  It has been difficult to create a lot of categories.  See a previous discussion on "Everything is Miscellaneous".

I next  add notes to your proposed ideas.

• a)  I'm unconvinced that it is viable to create yet another review system.  Don't we all have too much to do?
• b)  You have raised an excellent point:  How to encourage
  people to comment on new papers.  For a while, members of my group have posted preprints on the same days when papers are submitted to journals (see http://imechanica.org/taxonomy/term/85). 
  Many papers get comments, but some don't.  The comments have been very
  helpful to us in revising the papers.
• c)  iMechanica uses RSS feed to alert users of new content.  Have you tried?
• d) Some users place their CVs in their user profiles.  Here is an example: Wei Hong.
• e) This is an interesting idea. See a long thread of discussion initiated by Eric Mockensturm on using wiki to improve papers.
• f) database for subtopics.  You really like to review papers.   Journal editors should take note.

There are too many ideas to discuss.  It might be more fruitful if we can pick one or two more promising ideas and foucs.

I'm not sure I have much to add here.  Frankly, I'm not sure that a whole lot needs to be done to improve iMechanica on a structural level. 

By its very nature, iMechanica is going to evolve organically.  I would caution against trying to steer that evolution too much.  

By the same token, if people have new ideas for things they'd like to try, they should go for it!  It might be a hit, it might not.  The community will respond accordingly.  

I do agree with Zhigang concerning reviews.  I'm already overwhelmed by them.   I was actually thinking of writing an iMechanica post about how scientists should have public "review queues" that would allow editors to see how many (or how few) papers they're currently reviewing.   

Thanks a lot Mike, Zhigang and John for the discussion. I think that this discussion is timely as we approach to the number of users -6,000. I would like to share my thoughts and experience about iMechanica. I believe that this is a very useful platform for free academic discussion, at least in addition to journal publications and conferences. For instance, if one has an idea for a proposal, just get a post. The comments on the post, I take them very positively, improve the quality of my proposal. I think for papers this is the same. In particular, before submission or during submission, the comments here help a lot. 

I like this free style here and I can see the serious/interesting posts do attract a lot of follow up and useful discussions. Posts of quality and interest drive the some sections. This is good. I can see the moderator system works. I think that "self assemble" mechanisms may be one of the best ways.

Another important point is education reach-out. I got positive feedback from undergraduate and graduate students about iMechanica. They do not have a lot of chances to attend professional conferences, but they are very good at internet and iMechanica is the platform they like very much. I think we need to encourage them to put posts and comments.

I think that iMechanica bridges journal publications and professional conferences.  This is not only the current wave, but also the trend.

It is great that Mike made such an emotional post. This is what we need.

Concerning the specific points that he raised I would tend having the opposite opinion. I like that iMechanica "does not" do everything mentioned in Mike's list

I apologize for my absence from iMechanica - I was transitioning out of grad school into my first job!

While it does feel nice to idle in a vision of "iMechanica trumps Nature", I agree with Prof. Suo that this is not the true strength (or original purpose) of iMechanica. Having said that, Mike's more general point is a well made one: how can we improve this site?

I can see why the lack of comments can be annoying. The way I see it, I personally do not feel like I know enough to comment on most of the topics and I think I speak for most students when I say that. As Prof. Suo suggests, "established" researchers probably don't spend a lot of time (if any) at this site. For this, I have a suggestion:

When we post something we want people to comment on, it would be helpful to distill some background into the post so that the uninitiated (like me!) can learn a little to appreciate more fully what the post/paper is about. One could argue that all I have to do is google and I could get the information I need, but the onus, in my opinion, is on the writer of the post (if she/he wants more participation) to educate the rest of us. A quick paragraph or two would be of great educational value and also be more likely to stimulate discussion and questions from students who want to learn more.

It may be just me, but I still like to think of iMechanica first and foremost as an educational vehicle. Promotion of personal ideas, publications etc. is great too, but in my opinion, it must be preceded by an educational aspect to it.

Mike, all in all, it is good that we are having this discussion, and we should have it again. Thanks for bringing it up.

Hi All;

First of all, I am very much pleased to see that the idea of improving iMechanica is still fresh and ongoing topic and we have this type of discussion running. I have been following the comments here on this topic since it has started but I didnt comment as I found it a bit different with what I thought iMechanica should be doing. We should all feel free to express our ideas but also we have to consider the advantages and disadvantages of our new thoughts if we wanted to make them practical.

Mike, you have raised few points which are interesting like "how we can get more established mechanicians involved"? Me and Dhruv (congratulation for the new job!) has thought about the similar point but for students and we have had an interesting discussion about how we could make it happen. I think having more established mechanicians here would benefit students as well. Please let us all know your proposals of how to do this.

I am afraid that I dont find your other points relevant to what I have in my mind as an improvements. I suppose sometimes you talk about change of the functionality of the iMechanica. This is an online and very up to date scienec which is travelling here and ofcourse it is a unique model of itself and I dont see the point that we should "steal some other ideas" as you have mentioned in your post. If your proposal has based on something else rather than what might happen in future, please comment which I would be happy to learn about. I want to emphasize and get to the point that we have to be very much conscious and careful of changes within the structure of iMechanca, I am not saying that the current structure is the most perfect but it needs little to improve. Still I think there are ways to try your new idea but here we have to take a good pace! It might be too quick to jump into future, I personally stand against it. As I said we have to discuss about increasing established scientists here.

We have lack of interest or replies, maybe good comments (not always). I see that you have pointed out this and I think we can take it from here and discuss with you about how to improve this. I have had some ideas about the students low confidence in writing comments which discussed before but Dhruv has a good suggestion for start as I just read it. Lets keep our discussion going which will lead to some specific ideas.

On the matter of having mechanics in wiki, I do agree with Prof Suo's concerns. I am not sure if it is needed there but why not start with wikipedia and have noted mechanicians posts there. I am happy to help if you would like to discuss this further. At the end thank you all for brining this interesting discussion up, let's keep it going.   

Mike, your post provokes an interesting discussion. Some of the issues you raised were indeed tossed around in the initial days of iMechanica. At this point, in broad agreement with John and Zhigang, I am skeptical of adding new notions such as review-editor system you mention. Time is a big problem. I had intended to respond to your post the day it had come out and here I am responding a week later!

I believe that the most important need of iMechanica is get more people involved in writing posts and comments. I am not worried about readership. I think plenty of mechanicians visit iMechanica but significantly fewer make posts or write comments. New suggestions to increase such participation is vital for the growth and relevance of iMechanica.

The other aspect, that would be worthwhile to improve, is participation of senior mechanicians. I suspect that increased participation from senior folks may automatically vitalize further participation from emerging mechanicians as well. I personally have had little luck in this matter.

The way imechanica has come in the last year and half is quite impressive and in my opinion most of the success has to do with the "open source" feel that it has. It is indeed important that we spread the "gospel" to other mechanicians. However we should also take care lest we appear to be trying too hard and end up looking like a corporate entity.

In the last month only, I have seen people from Ireland, Canada, The Netherlands, Australia, The United Kindom and ofcourse the US posting vacancies or graduate assistantships here. That shows that people believe mechanicians "hang out" here. I think we should concentrate on improving the friendliness of the website and in the mean time put links to imechanica in our own websites. I have noticed some people here have already done so.  Word of mouth is also another means.

That way imechanica grows with out the moderators adding additional committments to already busy schedules and with out the need for aggressive salesmanship. Individuals/companies we wish are represented here better come here and stay if they feel they have a stake in it (networking, business interests, satisfaction out of sharing etc) and not because they are obliged to.

Dear Mike:  You can use Google to search in iMechanica.  You can also set up a Google Alert to send an email to you whenever your search turns up a new result.  Here is how.