NCBS Newz Team Meets

The Team
Uttara, P. Chitra, Sathya Srinivasan, Rahjesh, Shikha Sahlawat, Nisha Ramdas, Ishier Raote, Prabhat Tiwari, Vinodh Ilangovan, Anupama Ashok, Manish Sharma, Shovamayee Maharana, Mrinalini Puranik, Suhel Quader, Geoff Hyde

What happened
Geoff gave an overview of the expansion of NCBS's web-based news, covering such ideas as:

(1) Main Mission: to introduce what happens here to a broader audience. Suhel proposed a wider vision, that NCBS could serve as a portal for the coverage of Indian science generally.

(2) Long-term goals: to set up a rich, dynamic news site similar to that of MIT. Lots of suggestions from the audience indicated that ours could be even richer! But much of that will probably await the procurement of dedicated News staff.

There were many great ideas put forward including:

• Getting the videos of the many great talks that have occurred at NCBS online
• Covering the many artistic events at NCBS
• Conference previews and reports
• Vijay's Thoughts of the Month: a Blog
  
• Favourite Science of the Week
• The Student Perspective
• Cartoons
• Using Social Media such as Blogs, Facebook and Twitter
• Opinion Pieces aka Rants
• Spoof Articles
• An alumni database that could feed in stories about exploits of past NCBS'ians
• Reports on exhibitions at NCBS, or any other events that allow for interactions with the general public.
  

(3) Short Terms Goals

• To quickly generate, before Dec 5, a small bank of 5 or more reasonably topical "front-page" stories that could appear at regular intervals on the main NCBS page, starting January 2010. The associated graphic for each story could take over most of the area currently dedicated to the list of news items (most of which would be shifted to another page).
• To prepare a new template for each fully-fleshed out story, and prepare the NCBS main page to accommodate the new content.

Going Forward

The following stories are in progress:

• Preview of Molecular Motors: Prabhat
  
• Migrant Watch Member Watch: Uttara
• Narlikar vs the Institute Model: Vinodh, Manish
• Kaustubh's War on Pollution: Shikha
• Breaking Barriers Preview: Nisha
• India Tackles the Brain Drain: Geoff
• Art Science Fusion: Sarita
  
• Sanjeev Jhayan (NIMHANS) Interview: ?

Email your draft stories and pictures to me and I will start on the editing. If you want I can post the drafts and my suggestions to this blog so that other people can also make comments. I forgot to emphasise in the meeting that each story should have an associated interesting graphic of some kind. This could be something already existing (e.g. from a conference poster/advertisement) or something new. If you need the assistance of a professional photographer, that can be arranged of course.

Please attempt to have something ready in time for the next meeting.

Next Meeting
Same time next week, i.e. Wednesday, Nov 25, 2.30pm, probably same place (S01).