How to build a theory group site?

I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from the work of many people.

Very specifically, initial content and organization strongly influenced by:

  • Round 0: Leo Stein’s Personal Page
    • I learned:
      • How easy it is to serve personal static sites off of GitHub. Source for the DTP Group site is here.
      • The minimal mistakes Jekyll theme is pretty convenient and configurable.
  • Round 1: C. Titus Brown’s DIB Lab page. Especially:
    • Code of Conduct – everyone should feel safe to get things done.
    • Work Guidelines – coordinating expectations are great. A little iffy on the idea of mandatory weekly summaries, but I’m going to give it a shot:
      • Future PI’s, for better or for worse, definitely need to get used to reporting on how they’re spending their time. My last 3 years at Stanford I was co-leader on a grant with Renata Kallosh and we had periodic quarterly reports. It absolutely helped to regularly jot down what had been happening.
      • As I start being really responsible for jr folks’ careers I’m more sensitive to the balance of keeping up with how they’re doing without breathing down their necks. Definitely aware that a lot of meeting time can be spent on status updates instead of, you know, paradigm-shattering science.
      • The act of periodically reflecting on what’s been going on and where you want to go is just a healthy habit.
    • Welcome to New Members. Having new members “pull” requests to update the group page. At least I’ll know that new folks can a) fork a repository b) submit a pull request.
    • Clear open-science advocacy in Philosophy/Mission. For theoretical physics this is generically much more of a default – so much so that it seems to largely go unsaid. We want people to use our calculations, data, theories, and techniques. Anything that makes this easier is an obvious win. We tend not to be as vocal about it as other communities, and there’s not quite the same activist zeal – possibly because there’s very little institutionalized pressure to resist against. Awesome to engage with some of the spectacular platforms/strategies/approaches that bio/astro/experimentalists have been building and are mainstreaming.
  • Round 2: Ethan White’s Lab page. Especially:

    -JJMC, 22 June 2017

(see also JJ’s personal site’s credits.)