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What should the next cities/regions on Nature Network be?
Corie Lok
Wednesday, 05 December 2007 17:00 UTC
We’ll be launching new local/regional hubs on Nature Network next year. What cities/regions/countries should be represented?
Updated 06 December 2007 13:38 UTC
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I think “cities” isn’t a productive description. Both Boston and London are agglomerates of people in which a lot of knowledge-institutes cooperate. They happen to be cities as well. Some of such agglomerates, however, are not cities, but regions.
For instance,
(1) the “Benelux” could be described as such an agglomerate, as could
(2) Bavaria, or even
(3) the whole of Switzerland. -
Thanks for your feedback, Bart. You make a good point. I’ll edit the question above to include ‘regions or countries.’
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Ah, there is hope – I am confident that Philomath, Oregon will never be a hub, but there is some hope for the “Pacific Northwest USA” hub (thanks to Seattle and Portland).
Otherwise, I’m back to the isolated lab in the damp forest. But the rabbits and quail outside the window are nice, and traffic isn’t bad (except for the log trucks). Pardon me while I take a bucket to the well, the Milli-Q is empty … ;)
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I would love it if Australasia/Oceania was added! Scientists from Australia and New Zealand do some great work – especially taking into account our small populations – so it’d be nice to include us and other countries in the area (eg. Papua New Guinea) as a new region on this site.
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Rather than selecting cities, then building the network, physical locales could be highlighted using tag clouds. This would better reflect the most active areas.
The site homepage could highlight the most active physical sites (say, the top 6) with a link to view the entire cloud.
For this to work, a standard template for each location would need to be developed pulling dynamic feeds from members of that location (which you seem to have… it would just need to be created automatically from key locations). Then the other locales are already created, but the top six get a tab on the homepage.
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I second Oceania – even if it is a bit 1984. It would encompass more than Australia/NZ, but less than “Asia Pacific”; technically, the latter is our region but I’d say we are distinct from SE Asia and Japan.
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Australia
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Zürich of course… It would be a step into the German speaking scientific community and at the same time reaching out for Germany and Austria. Obviously there are historical notions as well.
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I agree with Quyen Arana.
Hubs should be self-defining by the number of members/level activity in a particular geographic region. Arbitrarily fixing which regions should be hubs and which not, may potentially result in certain popular regions not having a hub.
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We actually are launching full-fledged hubs based on activity from the local areas. The hubs with the most members and activity on Nature Network will be the top candidates to get their own full-blown hubs.
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