Scan the Mission and Vision pages first. If anything inspires you, get involved! The success of this open community depends entirely on sharing, contributing and synthesizing ideas. Here are some suggestions for getting involved:
Subscribe
Subscribe to the weekly email update! We have an email registration list via MailChimp. You can opt in and opt out anytime. Your email is secure. We will not use it except to send a weekly summary of What’s New at the website and upcoming events. These updates will be synced with our LinkedIn group and @ImmersiveAnalyt Twitter stream (sorry, 16 char limit!).
Discuss
If anything inspires comments or questions, let it fly on our LinkedIn group blog (subject to LinkedIn’s anti-spam policy). IA Editors will monitor this stream and comment.
Blog
If you have deeper opinions or insights related to IA issues and directions, please share it. To start, submit a DOC/DOCX file to the IA Editors for review. Limit it to one or two pages of text, plus figures. If it is professionally solid (even if critical), we will post it under your name. If you are willing to commit to a monthly blog on IA, we might be knighted with Author rights to this site so that you can post directly. If you have previously posted/published articles or blogs that is relevant, we would like to reference to that material or even re-posted with attribution.
Build
Here is where the fun is! Let’s build lots of data worlds and share them. As a community, we need to learn by building! Hence, we need an infrastructure via GitHub where this can be easy and open. Not afraid of a little coding? Then, let’s get our hands dirty with creating “Hello DataWorld” repositories in GitHub using Unity3D, JavaScript (WebGL via three.js), and the like. If anyone has skills in establishing an efficient development environment, please contact us.
Proof of Concept
We are actively seeking support for a project that focuses on an actual business use case that can illustrate and publish a practical solution, issues involved, and best practices. The data must be non-sensitive, non-confidential, and openly available. However, the business problem must be real and nontrivial. Saving the world from climate change or economic collapse would be acceptable. If you have ideas, please contact us.
Research & Education
Several of us come from academic backgrounds and appreciate the potential synergism. There are many possible options. If you are involved with a university research institute with a related educational program, please contact us. We will get something going.
Website Evolution
We can not believe how much work it is to create a community website. We wish this torture on no one! What you see is a mere outline of the infrastructure required to support dozens (hundreds?) of contributors to the IA community. Forum discussions, membership management, SEO tuning, project listing, LIKE flags, GitHub integration, wiki documentation, site statistics are a few of the required enhancements over the coming year. We don’t want to contract all of this out (even if we had the funding) since most should be done by membership. If you have web skills (along with IA interests), please contact us.
Sponsor
Despite all the generous volunteer help, operating this open community involves tangible expenses, such as web hosting, web design, and the like. At the moment, it comes from few personal pockets. We do not want to pollute this site with ads, and we do not want to charge member fees to access content, and we do not want weekly GoFundMe campaigns, and we do not want to sell your name to questionable folks in another country, and… etc etc. How can this community be financially viable? Have ideas, please contact us.
If we are serious about the long term, we need to plan for creating a non-profit professional society and incurring the legal requirements required. Individual financial contributions, membership fees, corporate sponsorship, and research grants will be necessary. Have ideas, please contact us.
Corporations who are motivated to pursue IA for internal use or commercial purposes can support this work in various ways. First, extend your recognition that this is an important effort to the industry via social media. Second, contribute specialized skills to build open-source modules, like Unity3D C# coding. Third, fund specific IA research projects at universities. And finally, support financially the maintenance and growth of the ImmersiveAnalytics.com community. If interested, see Sponsors page and contact us.
Lead
Finally… A group of Editors will lead the IA community through its initial stages. We are seeking 5-7 professionals whose careers strongly relate to our Vision. The responsibilities are: endure regular coordination web-meetings, write a blog monthly, guide our blog stream, monitor LinkedIn group, revise the core Vision/Mission pages, plan organization and infrastructure, and secure sponsorship for continual growth. If interested, please contact us.