Week 7 - Science Links

So we've come up with a name for the website. It'll be "Science Links". Nick came up with the name because it works with our new direction the website will take, which is to link, or connect, the community through science and to explain to people the basics of science and how it applies to our every day world.

We've tried to find somebody to help us develop the website but most of the web designers I know are busy with other projects at the moment. This is no problem though as i've found a piece of software which takes the tedious task of scripting html manually, and allows me to create websites as if I was using InDesign; it's called Adobe Muse.



So far the collaboration has been smooth. It's a combination of what nick has already begun doing at the beginning of semester with his concepts of what the website needs to be and his communication with scientists. My side of the collaboration is trying to figure out what the website needs to looks like, what media we should include on the website and how we will communicate the website to people.

I've begun making the website in with rough outlines and structure to see what we're working with.



We've gone with a space theme, because it relates to much of the topics and reasoning behind science advocation. Space is the final frontier, and our scientific knowledge helps inform the exploration of space, and how we interact with it. Furthermore space exploration and the technology that is developed for it, has always trickled down back into consumer technology so there is an inherent relationship between the two topics.

Week 6 - Collaboration Turns

So we've done a bit of research to find out what websites are online that relate to the science community and we've altered the idea of what we'd like to achieve a bit.
We've figured out that there are already many scientific websites for different portions of the community existing online, however they're on different websites, and each has it's own unique purpose or intention.

The problem we see with this is that there is no connection between any of these creating forced barriers between the different communities. We also figured that the point of our website should be primarily in Australia as:
1) it's local for us and a much easier target market to understand
2) there isn't enough of a rockstar-like image given to the scientists we have in Australia - in USA they have people like Michio Kaku and Neil degrasse Tyson who are science advocates and communicators who sell these ideas to people and inspire people to be more interested in science. We decided we need this kind of thing in Australia so it's more relatable to people who we target

Nick is collaborating with some people he knows doing PhD's at USyd, while also writing emails to Neil degrasse Tyson, amongst others to not only see what their opinions on the matter are, but to get some advice about how to go about this.

I'm collaborating with a friend of mine who is a Psychology graduate and has experience in marketing industry for help with the way we will market this product to the people. The other persons I'm collaborating with is a PhD candidate friend of mine at UNSW on matters of science, the scientific community and more specifically why there isn't that same rockstar-like vision for our Scientists in Australia.

We need to now decide how this website will function and what it's purpose is, seeing as there are already many scientific communities online. We will also need to figure out how to make this website more enjoyable to the non-scientific community so that they will engage in the information we provide them with.

Week 5 - Collaboration Begins

So myself(Michael Diedricks) and Nick Wachman decided to do our Nexus collaboration projects together. We both gave our collaboration proposals the other week and his project, which was something to advocate for science, seemed appealing to me as well as I'd considered something similar before. My project was simply too big an undertaking for this short period of time and nobody seemed too interested in working on it with me so the collaboration aspect didn't quite work.

So we've begun so far by trying to figure out what we want to do. Our common intention is to create a website that acts as a network for people to learn about science in a new way that isn't so boring and dry. We want to make the topic and the way we engage with it more interesting so more people can get into it.

That's all for now so we'll see where things go.