Reply To: Another p11B Fusion Concept: Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusion

[jamesr]

I definitely think we should stay on expression engine. It is very versatile, and with the add-on modules available I’m sure the site can be given a new lease of life.

A few other things that could be done is updating the member fields: remove AIM, ICQ, Yahoo etc as no one really uses them, and add a twitter username field. Then using some of the other modules available people could easily tweet about articles or other entries.

I thing the rating system & moderation will be enough to maintain the quality of blogs, rather than having everyone need special permission to post. However maybe the admins & senior members could get extra bonus ranking points.

At the end of the day what attracts people to a site is good content. Obviously the news of the ongoing focus fusion experiments is key, but also I think we need some other quality articles written on related topics to bring people in.

There are a number of members with scientific or engineering backgrounds of a level to contribute some good quality reviews. I was thinking of something we used to do at college – a ‘journal club’. Each month people were volunteered to present a review of a recent journal paper they found interesting. These don’t need to be on fusion, a link would be good though. Basically the review article should briefly explain the journal paper in as near laymen terms as possible, without dumbing down, and discuss possible implications or alternative work that is going on. This kind of quality writing, I think, will raise the profile of the site so others can link to us as a source of information rather than the other way round. If we could get 6-8 people to write a good quality article each a month it would be fantastic, and provide the fuel for the other members to discuss and comment on.

Another tier of articles could be brief guides to basic concepts in fusion physics, almost as slightly expanded glossary definitions – these will be a good basis for tags. So terms such as Coulomb barrier, or Lawson criteria have a clear definition to help educate newcomers to the field. I was thinking maybe a wiki format for this but I’m not sure.