Building a Minimal Online Presence

Titus Brown and Ethan White led a half-hour discussion today of the minimal online presence people in academia ought to have. Notes from the call are below; to make a point-form story even pointier, please make yourself findable and shareable.

Things Titus & Ethan think are important for your (minimally sufficient) online presence

• Motivation: tried to track down info on Software Carpentry associated folk for computational science hires. Had a tough time!
• My opinion: within space of one reasonably-phrased google search, someone should be able to casually find
  • Email address, CV in PDF form, research interests, and publication list/citations.
  • Personal research writings (grad/post-doc applications, etc.)
  • Searcher can then pass on to make a case for hiring/interviewing etc.
• This can be done with github and google scholar fairly easily.
  • Don't need to keep everything up to date all the time
  • But should update at every important milestone (e.g., changing position, publishing really important paper)
• A PDF form of CV is important for forwarding around… doesn't need to be completely up to date, google scholar can keep that, but important milestones.
• Presentation about automatically maintaining presence: http://www.slideshare.net/c.titus.brown/2014-beacontoolsforscience
• More generally, for social media: this presentation
• CV should contain
  • training/position history
  • summary of research interests
  • funding and paper information
  • important things to read
  • online links; workshops and training; invitations; professional activities; references
• E.g.:
  • Ethan's CV
  • Titus's CV
  • Greg's summary and CV
• for goodness sake, if you are a software carpentry instructor SAY SO somewhere!
• really easy website builder http://www.staceyapp.com/ or use GitHub sites/pages
• Wordpress.com is also a really easy way to build a nice looking personal website

Questions:

• Should people include links/mentions for code? If so, what/how? CTB: can't hurt! TH: I give a link to my github account
• convention for order of topics in CV might depend on field? CTB: no fixed conventions AFAIK, EPW: put the stuff that matters most first (& what matters most varies based on what you want to do professionally) SH: reverse chron!
• What if a lot of the code you develop is only viewable within your institution? Most of the code on my github is pretty old
• Should we have an area where folks can post links to their "presence"? As an example.
  • We're very happy to include links to personal sites/home pages in the team list
  • Please send to Greg, or send pull requests against the 'site' repo
• For a personal website how long/detailed should your research interests be?
  • Check out http://greatlabwebsites.tumblr.com/
• For non OA articles, do you link to the journal website (doi), to a pre/post-print, or to the published article (illegally, technically)? (Or in which order of preference)
  • CTB: google scholar solves this problem pretty well :). Make sure to the best of your ability that your important papers are available somewhere/somehow. That having been said most professors will have access to most major journals, even if closed access.
  • EPW: I use my institutional repository and put post-prints there and link to them (these then get indexed w/the paper in Google Scholar)
  • SH: I post illegal links too and wait for publisher to complain
• Personal/lab web sites worth looking at:
  • Justin Kitzes (self-hosted, was Wordpress-based, now Pelican)
  • Steven Koenig (CSS is so 2006/7 ;))
  • Katy Huff: 1 2 , 3 (not proud, really, just interested in feedback!!!)
  • Stephen Turner (bootstrap hackjob hosted on gh-pages)
  • Rémi Emonet (not so worth :) )
  • Pauline Barmby
  • Luis Pedro Coelho
  • Julia Gustavsen (still working on it…needs research interests)
  • Ryan Williams
  • Fan Yang (really new…)
  • Anna Schneider (a little out of date, using stacey)
  • Matt Davis (on wordpress.com)
  • Lex Nederbragt (landing page)
  • Daniel Hocking (I like Octopress for GitHub sites but haven't been willing to fully switch: here)
  • Ted Hart