President's Column
PCS Online 2.0
By Mark Haselkorn
In early 2003, the PCS Administrative Committee (PCS AdCom) began brainstorming on the goals of an electronic community that would serve PCS members in particular and the field of technical communication in general.
Out of this brainstorming came Version 1.0 of the PCS Electronic Community, built on an IEEE web-based proprietary service for establishing virtual communities. For various reasons, Version 1.0 was only partially successful.
Now, PCS has moved to Version 2.0 of our online community, merging the society web site with a Druple-based wiki/discussion area/platform for managing and delivering content. This new vitual community is already highly successful, thanks to the outstanding work of volunteers like Brian Still and Sandy Bartell (leaders of our electronic information committee).
For example, check out podcasts like "Online Education and the Information Economy" at http://ewh.ieee.org/soc/pcs/index.php?q=node/114
and then explore the other features of the new, interactive PCS web site.
IEEE is already exploring the next generation of virtual communitees, having purchased two islands on Second Life (for those of you unfamiliar with Second Life, see the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life). PCS is playing a lead role in exploring how societies can best use next generation virtual communities to provides services to members. Stay tuned for more on this front.
With all this interest in virtual communities, it is perhaps instructive to look back at our original 2003 brainstorm to see if the services envisioned then are still the primary goals of these communities, with only the means changing, or if new technologies mean new goals for our electronic interaction. Here is the five-year-old list. Let me know if you have any thoughts or comments.
Notes from Brainstorm on the PCS Electronic Community
This community will "provide social and intellectual support for people who do TC research."
To accomplish this, we will develop facilities that can do the following:
- Share who's doing what (people as likely to add information as get
it).
- Take part in parallel or collaborative work.
- Develop cross-site, international, industrial-academic
collaborations.
- Share and comment on pre-pub drafts.
- Consult peer-to-peer (particularly to serve isolated groups of TC
professionals, e.g., geographically isolated, graduate students).
- Get information on funding sources.
- Disseminate publications (establish an electronic peer-reviewed
journal?).
- Develop panels and other group efforts for conferences, etc.
- Establish forums for discussion of research-related issues
(including a group that would guide the development of this electronic
community).
- Access TC literature.
- Share lessons learned and best practices (e.g., methodologies, human
subjects).
- Develop questions and topics for research.
- Increase the visibility of TC research (including archiving and
accessibility).
- Vote on research-related awards.
- Provide information and discussion concerning graduate TC programs (particularly Ph.D.).
- Disseminate research-related news.
- Link to related research in other fields.
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Mark Haselkorn is the current President of IEEE-PCS, and works as Professor and Founding Chair, Department of Technical Communication; Director, Pacific Rim Visualization and Analytics Center; Director, Interdisciplinary Program on Humanitarian Relief at the University of Washington.