These are interesting issues. Some perspective with regards to the
multi-agent system models of land-use and land-cover change (maslucc)
site that we set up several years ago:

http://www.csiss.org/resources/maslucc/

It put together a set of resources that were current at the time,
including software links, citations, a new listserve, and a place
where people could enter information about their ongoing projects.

(Tangent: the MaSpace mailling list has moved to Indiana University,
the new subscription portal is https://listserv.indiana.edu/cgi-bin/
wa-iub.exe?A0=MASPACE-L)

I think that set of resources was quite useful for a number of years,
because the field was quite new, and quite a few scholars wanted
information to get started. There were at that point a relatively
small number of projects in the area. And, of course you couldn't
Google around as successfully then as you can now.

A site like this realistically needs a dedicated person to coordinate
and update it (like a post-doc). I always intend to update the
bibliography with the latest one from the related course I teach, but
it is hard to find the time. To some extent, my course web page now
duplicates some of these resources. Although, I still hear from
people who are taking the site as a starting point for their research.

But in a larger sense, I think the field has now become too large and
too well established for such a web site to keep up. The peer-
reviewed literature has also become a bit of a replacement. The web
site was one of the products of workshop, and at that workshop, we
strategized as to ways to get things started, and one thing that we
did was to identify journals that might be good publication outlets
for these sort of applications. That worked fairly well (hopefully
the editors of those journals think so too!), and now there are
several key journals whose archives you can search to get a sense of
current work in the field.

However, I think there are still important roles that a coordination
website can play. For instance (if someone else has not already done
so while I'm composing this message), the new Open ABM site:

http://www.openabm.org/site/

strives to be a next-generation resource site for agent-based
modeling, that not only provides information on what work is going
on, but also provides an archive for model code and meta-data.

It's possible that the Open ABM site could serve this suggested role.

Dawn

On Jan 14, 2008, at 5:37 AM, Dan Olner wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On websites, one option might be a Drupal-based site. Anyone else
> on this list got experience of Drupal? I have some: it's a great
> platform for group collaboration and also has some wonderful
> bibliographic additions.
>
> http://drupal.org/
>
> An example of biblo features: I've just started using Drupal for my
> blog (sorry for the plug!); see right-hand column. Those refs were
> directly imported from endnote, the site did the rest.
>
> http://www.coveredinbees.org/
>
> Issues: it would be a terrible waste to make an 'empty cupboard'
> site that no-one used. Here at Leeds there's another platform we're
> supposed to be using for joint multi-agent simulation stuff, and we
> haven't yet really made the effort! Thats a potential problem with
> any such collective site: would there be enough people willing to
> spend their precious time contributing?
>
> It seems like such a good idea to have a collective, web 2.0-type
> site for simsoc - but I would be afraid it would end up defunct. If
> it did happen, I'd argue there would actually need to be at least a
> core 'editorial team' that made sure some content went up and that
> the site didn't stagnate. I'd be willing to help.
>
> So - three points:
>
> 1. Website: is this a good idea? Or would it end up an empty cupboard?
>
> 2. If it is a good idea, who wants to do it? I'm arguing for Drupal
> because it's open source, brilliant, great for flexible development
> (if you know a little PHP and spend some time getting to know
> Drupal) and it's what I'm used to developing with. What do others
> think? Anyone else out there a PHP programmer willing to help? I'd
> certainly not be willing to do it alone...
>
> 3. How the hell do we decide democratically if we want such a thing
> to happen...?
>
> By the way, happy new year to you all...
>
> Dan

Dawn Cassandra Parker
Assistant Professor, Department of Computational Social Science,
Kransnow Institute for Advanced Study; Affiliate, Departments of
Environmental Science and Policy, Geography, and Geoinformation and
Earth Systems Science
George Mason University

374 Research 1
4400 University Drive, MS 6B2
Fairfax, VA, USA 22030
+1-703-993-4640 (phone)
+1-703-993-9290 (fax)
dparker3 at gmu dot edu
http://mason.gmu.edu/~dparker3