Task: Establishing the Quantiki website as an international resource for the QI community
The website www.quantiki.org is an open resource dedicated to the QI community and to the promotion of the field to the general public. Based on the same technology as the popular Wikipedia encyclopedia, its content can be provided and edited by anyone. One advantage of such a bottom-up approach is its flexibility and creativity. It does, however, require a sufficiently large community of users.
The Quantiki project was created in May 2005. Within more than the year of development it has successfully attracted a relatively large number of visitors, but the number of user contributions is not yet large enough to ensure a broad cover of the field at a sufficiently good quality. We believe that this shows that currently, this project cannot rely only on volunteers.
Our goal is to establish Quantiki as an international resource for the QI community. Quantiki will become a web vortal which researchers visit regularly to interact, to obtain information, and to promote the field. Our strategy to achieve this goal is based on three points: higher usabiltity through better technology; attractive and high quality initial content and good promotion; and innovative new ideas (as outlined below).
The purpose of the first point is to lower the threshold for changing the website by making the interface more intuitive and by interrelating the different sections of Quantiki. For example, searching for groups on a world map can be connected with the search of open positions or specific research interests. The technical work consists of the following deliverables:
D1. Choice and implementation of a content management system. The system will implement following functionalities:
a. adding, browsing and searching for worldwide events and conferences;
b. adding, browsing and searching for available open positions and jobs;
c. adding, browsing and searching an international list of groups and scientists in the field;
d. adding, browsing and searching for research news;
e. a tool for conference organisers to easily create a conference web page on Quantiki. We think that by offering this service we can attract many people to the site, and it opens many interesting new possibilities (for example, on the conference itself there could be a computer with Quantiki online such that the visitors can directly leave comments).
f. adaptation of the Mediawiki engine to the content management system.
g. an automated content fetching robot to stimulate new content on Quantiki - such a program could add automatically relevant articles and news to the wiki.
D2. Integration of the Quantiki content with other web pages. We plan a close cooperation with qurope.net and possibly with Qwiki, hosted by Caltech.
D3. Maintenance of the system.
D4. Implementation of new features if requested by the community (such as a discussion forum or mailing lists).
The technical work requires a junior expert (say a PhD student in Computer Science of Physics). We expect to find a suitable employee by 1st of January 2007. Deliverable D1 will be finished by March 2007 as a part-time project (1.5 person-months). The time-frame of Deliverable D2 depends on level of cooperation with other partners, with an estimate of 0.5 person-months. D3 and D4 will last till October 2007 with a total of 1.5 person-months.
High quality content and good promotion are the keys to a successfull website. The level of detail of the encyclopaedia on Quantiki should be significantly higher than Wikipedia such that researchers will naturally go to Quantiki to look something up. This work should be done by some PhD student or young Postdoc in the field. Her/his work would also include maintaining contacts with the QI groups and running regular advertisements by Email, on the Internet and by trying to get media attention on Quantiki. The work will be divided into following deliverables:
D5. Creation of an encyclopedia kernel consisting of the hundred most important articles.
D6. Creation and maintenance of the encyclopedia structure.
D7. Contacting groups and researchers in order to acquire information about their research. This subtask will be undertaken in cooperation with qurope.net.
D8. Promoting and evaluating Quantiki,
D9. Answering user questions and responding to their feedback,
D10. Gathering and publishing of research news, conferences and events, open positions.
D11. At the moment Quantiki is more popular amongst theorists. We hope to attract more experimentalists by contacting companies that supply parts, used in QI experiments, to invite them to advertise on Quantiki. We will then - in the spirit of the Wiki philosophy - allow the users to leave comments on the supplied instruments.
D5 and D6 will run until January - October 2007 and require an estimate of 4 person-months. If we obtain a large increase of contributions from the community, we will mainly focus on D6. D7-D11 are continnous and will run until October 2007 with approximately 1.5 person-months.
In additional to the funding mentioned above, we will try to negotiate a matching of this funding by Singapore. This would allow us to perform the following additional deliverables
D12. Grants for young research students to write essays and research projects on specific issues of the field. These essays can become part of the encyclopaedia or of the introductory tutorials. We will make a call for suggestions and select the best ideas. The call will be sent to universities with high quality teaching in Quantum Information and to universities with degrees in Science Communication.
D13. Long-term support and hardware/server needs
We estimate the grants to be of the order of 10 x 1000 Euro. Another 10k Euros is estimated for a long-term support of Quantiki (after the end of WP2) and for additional hardware or server space which may be needed when the load of the website increases.
The above actions should establish the Quantiki website as a central resource for the international community, and attract a critical mass of contributors to ensure a dynamic, volunteer-based webpage in the long term.