About

This website is a repository for technical information of interest to members of the Rieseberg lab. It is to be used to record and share useful information about resources and methods with your colleagues.

RLR has a blog format. Users publish posts on the Home page and find posts of interest by browsing and searching. Most posts have links to other material and/or downloadable documents.

There are two categories of registered RLR users. Current members of the Rieseberg lab, mostly at UBC, and peripheral, or recent, members of the lab. Current lab members can see all content and can post, comment on and edit content. Peripheral/ex members of the lab can see most content and can comment on posts and contribute and edit their own posts. See below for more on RLR users.

If you are not a registered user of RLR you are welcome to browse the blog. You will not be able to comment or contribute content. If you are local to UBC, connected to the lab in some way or simply have something of interest to contribute and you want to become a registered RLR user contact Dan Ebert at ebert@biodivirsity.ubc.ca.

For instructions about contributing content and admin see the How to contribute page.

Content

Q. What should you be sharing here?

A1. Anything technical that you think someone else in the lab might want to know or use.

A2. Anything relating to resources (plants, seeds, facilities, equipment, computers, laboratory protocols, horticultural protocols, people).

If you have learned something useful about how to do something that another member of the lab may one day also want to do you should share that information here. Really, you should – make the world a better place.

Anything you contribute here should be categorised and tagged. If you don’t see a category or tags that fit your content make new ones.

Intellectual Property

Hopefully we won’t run into problems but there are some things we can do to try to avoid issues of ownership.

Principle 1: If you use something from RLR that was created by somebody else you owe them something. It might just be a thank you, mostly that will do it, but sometimes it might be an acknowledgment in a publication or it may extend all the way up to co-authorship – or at least a discussion about what you want to do with your lab-mate’s contribution. You need to assess whether the item posted on RLR represents a substantial amount of work by the author(s) and, if it does, you need to talk to them. If you do not know enough about the item of interest to assess how much work went into it then ask the author(s). At the very least, if you access expertise or data via a post on RLR, you owe RLR a post about some of your data or something in your area of expertise.

Principle 2: If you post something on RLR that represents a substantial amount of your own work please make that clear in your post. Please help users be considerate of your contribution by making it obvious. Always put your name on posts. Highlight items that represent your own data or work. Tell users, in your post, that you want to talk about how your work is used if that is the case.

Principle 3: You don’t own everything you touch and if you have benefited from the work of others in the lab you should be giving back – even things you do “own”. The bottom line is that everyone benefits from the work of others in the lab so everyone should be sharing. RLR is a tool to facilitate this sharing and help make the lab greater than the sum of its parts. Please share, post.

Users

As of November 2011 I (Dan E.) and Loren are Administrators of RLR. Other current members of the Rieseberg lab are Editors. Editors can do almost everything that an Administrator can – basically the two important things that an Editor can’t do is add and change users and change the basic theme (appearance) of RLR. Administrators and Editors can see all content posted at RLR.

Peripheral/ex members of the lab who are registered users are RLR Authors. Authors can see almost all content posted at RLR (there is a small amount of content intended for current members of the lab that is visible only to them). Authors can comment on posts and contribute and edit their own posts.

For a simple graphical representation of the roles of Administrators, Editors and Authors take a look at this.

Note that Loren can change any RLR user’s account to Administrator. If I (Dan E.) have moved on, or if you want admin privileges for whatever reason, ask him to bump you up. Better still, ask me while I’m here.

Please be careful about what you edit and change on RLR. As an Editor or an Administrator you have a lot of power to delete and change pages, posts, comments and RLR in general. Arbitrary changes will make RLR less usable for your colleagues.

That said, any constructive changes are most welcome.

Security/Privacy

Most of the content posted to RLR is public in that anybody with the URL can see it. A small amount of content is posted “privately”. This content is visible only to registered RLR users who are Admins or Editors = current members of the Rieseberg lab.

WordPress (the software that runs RLR) has a very simple privacy functionality. Posts can be published “publicly” or “privately”- see the Visibility setting in the Publish pane of the post editor. Posts published with the visibility setting set to “Public” will be visible to anybody who has the RLR URL. Posts published with the visibility setting set to “Private” will be visible only to registered Admins and Editors of RLR after they have logged in with their user name and password. Privately published posts are titled “Private: post title”.

This website is, as of October 2011, constructed using WordPress and is hosted by the UBC Zoology Computing Unit at my own (Dan E.) personal ZCU space. This will probably change in the future.

Daniel Ebert.

One thought on “About

  1. I will write posts about IP and privacy so look for those on the Home page if you want to make comments about those subjects.

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