Web Committee Welcome Email

This is a copy of the most recent email sent to a new committee member. It should always be updated to reflect the current upcoming and ongoing projects.

Letter Content

Hi Ala!

My name is Mehedi Hassan and I am the chair to the Web Committee for the ISCB Student Council. I am very glad and excited to hear that you would like to volunteer to help us with our projects.

I would love to hear about you. Where do you attend university? How long have you been in your program? Have you attended any ISCB meetings in the past? Have you done web development before? Do you like design work or like back end programming type stuff?

To give you an idea, here is a summary of what the committee does:

• As you would expect the web committee’s primary task is to maintain the web presence of

the student council, this includes all web pages hosted on our web-servers.

• We develop and maintain the the student council's main website (iscbsc.org) and also provide technical

expertise to help our Regional Student Groups' (RSG) web-pages as requested by the RSGs.

• One of our major activity releasing and updating the symposium websites for our flagship event

"the Student Council Symposium" (or "the SCS") as well as regional versions of SCS (ESCS, LASCS, SCS-Africa).

• We also work on building bespoke solutions to aid the activities of other committees (i.e. Careers portal,

newsletter etc).

• The web committee recently deployed an online community board (community.iscbsc.org). We are currently encouraging

all our volunteers and members to join the board and help build a strong community.

How does the committee function?

Most of the committee's communication is made through the BaseCamp project management system. You should receive an account there soon. Once registered, you will be able to see what the web committee is talking about and join the discussion.

We hold our monthly meetings on Skype or Google Hangout. We schedule and announce these meetings on Basecamp. I would like to invite you to our meetings, so please keep eyes on the Basecamp projects for an announcement.

Please try not feel overwhelmed, I felt the same way when I started but we are all very laid back. Take your time getting used to Basecamp and just looking around the website. Let me know if you have any questions, were still looking for feedback on the new website so that's always welcome. Welcome to the team! I hope you enjoy it as much as we all do.

Look forward to hearing from you.

~Mehedi Hassan

Current Projects:

• New ISCB-SC Website. We released a new version of the student council website last year, it was about 2 years in the making, we are currently still working to get it perfect.
• Regional Student Group Websites. Right now each RSG has a page on the old website, we are working on getting each RSG a subdomain, and either a page on the new site, or link to their current website or give them a self contained website for them to post communications. We have almost completed this transition, but there are couple groups left to convert.
• Symposium Submission System. We are trying to unify the submission systems for all the SC symposia, there is a prototype submission system in place that was built by Mehedi @ RSG-UK and we are working to get it fully functional. We are constantly upgrading this system to make it work better for our needs
• Internship Posting System. We would like to have a place to post internships run by the student council in one central location. Right now the application process is all via email. The hope is to adapt the symposium submission system to work as a internship system as well.
• Community Discussion Board. The goal of this is to provide a place for all members of ISCBSC to discuss current trends, upcoming events and keep in touch with others that they may have met at various council events. This is separate from Basecamp, as basecamp is for organizational communication and is not open to the public.