Notice Board

This page is for internal use only. Please put comments, ideas, actionable items and other things that we need to keep track of here. You can also post them to #ideasformcnair on our Slack channel.

Technology Issues

Maps

We need to be able to do maps! Our Guide_to_Small_Business_in_Houston need a map on its main page and other maps on its resources pages asap. We will also need maps for the projects under the Houston Entrepreneurship umbrella, including the Start-Ups of Houston (Map) and another map for accelerators (etc.).

The Interactive Maps - The Whole Process page is missing its graphics, as is Mapping on R. Neither are incomplete.

MathML

We need to be able to render the MathML put on the wiki. It would be nice if MathML also worked on the blog...

Semantic Mediawiki

Please list all of the issues that need addressing with Semantic Mediawiki here.

• We should consider installing Extension:ParserFunctions. See: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:ParserFunctions
• We need to remove "Powered by MediaWiki" and "Powered by Semantic MediaWiki" images at bottom of the page.

Business Ideas

Weekly Roundup

Idea for the weekly roundup: generate a listserv and send the weekly roundup every Monday to listserv members via email. Potentially a format similar to the skimm. Also, possibly creating a listserv for blog posts so that people can read posts in an email format.

Likewise we should look into using RSS feeds.

Fall 2016 Review

Projects

• Accelerator data
  • Everyone contributed to this, but still somewhat unclear on project's purpose
• Blogs!!
  • Weekly Roundups by Meghana and Avesh
  • Wide variety of topics from wide range of other intern contributors
• Christy's twitter crawler
• Ed's academic papers
• Amir, Jake, James, Will academic papers
• Social media
  • Facebook page created! Not much activity other than posting photos. Ramee, Carlin, and Anne are all administrators (might be others as well). FB currently underutilized platform for outreach.
  • Tweeting through Hootsuite. Ramee is a point-person although everyone has in some way contributed whether through the slack #twitter channel or working with Hootsuite directly.

What went well

• Blogs are up, running, and an integral part of the McNair Center now!
• There's a lot of student ownership over projects
• We have a critical mass of interns
  • Who can for the most part write well, and know basic research skills but to reach full potential need to develop data analysis skills such as SQL to deal with big data

Needs improvement

• Organization
  • Clear project management - defined goals, check-ins w Ed, specific milestones or checkpoints throughout the project
• Project ideas with a clearly defined end product
  • Some more short term, some long term
  • Of course, we need to have or develop requisite skills needed in order to develop the product
• More SQL/data research tools/how to use SDC Platinum, etc. Maybe teach one person and they can teach others.
• Publicity
  • maybe publicize our blog posts more on Facebook and Twitter?
  • Write more academic papers/issue briefs so we can gain advertisement from the Baker Institute
• We probably need another Harsh