IMC Workshops
With a large number of meteor observers and scientists together at one place it is most efficient to focus at some technical aspects during a workshop. I had some detailed communications with several people who are interested to help and so far we have the following workshops
planned. The exact timing for these Workshops will be decided in function of the rest of the IMC program. Meanwhile your input, suggestions and ideas are welcome to prepare the workshop. If you have suggestions for other workshops, please mail to
imc2014 at imo.net.
Paul Roggemans (4 July 2014)
Bill Ward volunteered for the task as new Director of the Photographic Commission after many years of inactivity of this commission. The IMC is a perfect occasion to consider the future plans:
- How do IMO members in general view meteor "photography". Do meteor imagers aim to take images with the aim of them being scientifically useful or primarily artistic?
- Irrespective of the goal above, how do members (and interested non members also) prefer to interact with the IMO on the submission and collection of images. This will no doubt be via the website or "social media" but some discussions need to be had with the people who will be re-developing the website of various forms and input solutions to get everything into a reasonably common format.
Today a good website is of great importance for any business, public service or society. With other words a continuous effort is required to maintain a website. This being said it is obvious that IMO is in great need for an up-to-date website. This cannot be a one man job and we therefore call upon volunteers to take up responsability to take care of some specific part of the new IMO Website. Some first ideas what the new IMO website should offer:
- Actual information about meteor events (videos, photos, etc.), much can be found on Facebook but very little or nothing on the IMO website of today. Offering a monitored report tool to publish about meteor events should make the website much more dynamic and eye-catching. This part could be called "Meteor News", some volunteers as moderators are needed for this aspect;
- Aggregator of interesting articles from relevant sites, for this we need someone with great interest and quick access to scientific publications;
- Educational content to promote meteor observing, such as the meteor terminology poster (multilingual), PDF's for download with instructions for observing and reporting, the IMO Meteor Shower Calendar (multilingual) and on-line support for observers. Here we need a coordinator and volunteers to translate;
- Online Reporting forms: The new IMO Fireball Form and an online visual observing report form, both multilingual, both require a coordinator. Results and events would appear in the part "Meteor News";
- Tool for publishing partial results in short articles;
- e-commerce for older publications etc.;
- electronic newsletter instead of mailing list on yahoo;
- Twitter account with actual informations;
- Conference announcements: including next IMC info and registration form as well as history pages of past conferences which more or less cover also the IMO history;
- A part for the e-Membership, for download of e-WGN with a real personalized logon id and password;
- A more complete "Who-is-who?" with member profiles that can be managed by the members themselves, include some photo's and editable via IMO Logon ID and pw, only visible for the IMO members with Logon ID and pw in order to respect privacy legislation;
- e-library with articles about meteors. In first instance this could offer the complete IMO publications: all WGN volumes, IMC-Proceedings, Handbooks, Monographs, Report series, etc. This could be offered as a searchable index which links to the PDF's that are already online with ADS. Eventually this could include the old Bibliographic Catalogue completed with links to the available PDF's in ADS. To avoid copyright constaints this part could be kept under the "Members-only" part accessible by LogonId and pw;
One of the main activities of the IMO is to publish meteor information and in this way promote Meteor Astronomy. As we are all unpaid volunteers
with a limited amount of free time that we can spend, it is a common interest to keep the editing work as efficient as possible and to avoid delays in publications
as much as possible.
For WGN a template in LaTex and instructions are offered online on the IMO website. However authors often struggle with these instructions requiring a lot of time from
the editors to get the article in the right style. May be you are interested to help with WGN as a volunteer to act every now and then as handling editor for some article? Then you should attend this workshop.
For the IMC Proceedings LaTex was recommended but most authors ran into difficulties with the LaTex styles which proved not to be standard at all. For the last 3 IMC
Proceedings 80% of all the papers was delivered as a Word document. Therefore for reasons of efficiency we will edit the Giron Proceedings with Word.
The purpose of this workshop is to consider all LaTex and other editing aspects, which concerns the handling editors of WGN, authors of WGN articles and Proceeding papers. One
main question may be how much longer will we still produce paper publications and to which extend can we favor PDF version online. A substanstial part of the
current IMO membership fee is caused by the printing and mailing costs. Going towards e-Publications may allow a complete different membership policy (cheaper), but
doesn't change the editing constraints: styles and templates, either in LaTex, or in Word, remain necessary for PDF versions.
Suggestions are welcome, please contact Zeljko Andreic, zandreic at rgn.hr.