It’s been an eventful and exciting year for Nature Network. It was the birth year of NN, when we went from our very basic, admittedly not-so-great, Boston-only website, to one that is much better, more inclusive of the global community, and has a lot more of what you would expect from a networking website.
It was the year we saw rapid growth in the number of users from all over the world: India, Brazil, China, Canada, in addition to maintaining a strong core in the US and UK. We started off with lots of grad students and postdocs signing up, but now, we’re starting to see more senior researchers and professors joining the community.
We saw an explosion in the number of groups formed; we now have more than 400, reflecting quite a diversity in the kinds of researchers we have using us and reminding me just how vast and interesting the scientific enterprise is.
We also saw a wide range of discussions blossom in the forums: meaningful career advice being exchanged; discussion of research results and controversial issues ; questions being answered ; collaborations being forged ; and camaraderie being built.
We launched our monthly pub nights in “Boston”:https://network.nature.com/boston/group/GC780E744 and “London”:https://network.nature.com/london/group/nnlevents and those events—bringing local scientists together in a very informal setting over a few drinks—have been hugely successful in cementing community ties and building new ones. We’ll be continuing those in the new year.
On the technical side of things, we got a ton of kinks and bugs worked out…I never appreciated how much work goes into building and maintaining an interactive website and how much can go wrong with them until I started working for NN, so I appreciate your patience.
We also worked hard to add some new features, including the ability to send someone a private message through NN and the ability to opt-in to receiving email alerts from the groups you’ve joined.
But now we’re ready to launch full force into our next phase of development. Expect to see lots more improvements over the coming months:
* a redesigned homepage and network snapshot page
* more ways to find people you have something in common with (shared affiliation, locations, publications, etc)
* more local hubs in addition to London and Boston
* more integration with Nature’s other ‘web 2.0’ websites such as “Nature Precedings”:https://precedings.nature.com and “Connotea”:https://www.connotea.org
* a much better blogging system
* and more
So the best is yet to come. Stay tuned.
Happy holidays everyone and look forward to seeing you on Nature Network in 2008. (I’ll be back in the blogger’s chair January 2.)