LongeCity Newsletter
August
2013
Design changes
You may have noticed the new 'navigation feature' on the LongeCity frontpage. There are a few other design changes planned in the coming weeks that will also affect the forum. Last year, we couldn't quite find the right help to realize the design & art features we were pursuing, so we are trying a simpler route for now.
But as always, we would be grateful to hear from coders, artists and designers in the art team forum.
New Columnist: Franco Cortese
LongeCity welcomes Franco Cortese as a regular columnist. In his first piece, Franco takes critical look at the common notion that death and finitude are the yardsticks that give meaning to human striving and life.
Does death give meaning to life?
If you are also interested in blogging at LongeCity or to write for LongeCity, please get in touch.
Private Groups
LongeCity has always been supportive of giving small groups and teams tools to organize their communications and activities. In this context, we are trialing a new 'private groups' function. With this feature Members and those they invite can create, administer and design their own groups and forums.
This could be be used, for example, for
- organizing your local group or chapter
- project-specific forums for example for the recently popular 'group buys'
- organizing an event or meeting
- creating 'elite' subject-specific forums that admits only selected 'experts'
The feature is still very much in trial stage, we are keen to hear feedback and experiences from Members.
Current fundraisers & advertising: site development
In anticipation of the above mentioned developments, we are running a fundraiser for support of further developments of our website. Funds will go towards new features, updates and bug fixes.
To this end we are also trying new adverting options. Users will have found new 'ads' and 'banners' in various new places. These are mainly served by external advertisement providers - please bear with us while we try new relationships and placement options.
Also an experiment is the exposure given to a particular product - currently 23&Me's genetic testing kit. LongeCity gets a small commission for each kit sold via ads ran on our site. Since affordable genetic testing to learn more about your own genetic makeup is very much aligned with LongeCity's philosophy of grass-roots scientific engagement and awareness, we thought it would be a good fit for many of our users.
However, this setup, like the others, is very much in a trial phase and we are interested in your views. Some of it will make way for promoting the 'large' fundraiser for the science project soon to be announced:
LongeCity Science Funding
We are currently reviewing the submissions to our recent call for proposals. The good news: in contrast to 'lean' 2012, we have received a few viable submissions this year so there should definitely be a 'large' fundraiser for science project announce soon!
Meanwhile, young and established scientists are encouraged to consider our small grants scheme and get registered on our database.
Reminders & Updates: Scientific References & Filesharing
LongeCity has so many tools and functionalities that it can be difficult to remember or even to discover them all. And then there are a few rules and conventions that make using the site more enjoyable and useful.
We are planning to highlight some of these aspects in a regular 'reminders' feature.
This month: using scientific references at LongeCity and sharing scientific papers for joint research & study.
Caliban
ABOUT
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You can find past newsletters here.
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