[MINC-development] organization of the minc web site

[Vladimir S. FONOV]

Hello Minc Developers,

as you are probably aware, currently we have a little bit of a mish-mash 
of web sites describing available minc-tools. In particular, novice 
users, or readers of the papers (or Louis' grant reviewers). Are having 
hard time finding what we have and how to use it.

Currently we have following:

http://www.mcgill.ca/bic/software - official web site, with obsolete 
information , hard to navigate and almost impossible to update.

http://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/ServicesSoftware/HomePage - previous 
official web site, now partially out-of-date and partially transferred 
to http://www.mcgill.ca/bic/ - there were plans to decommission it, but 
it looks like it's not going to happen.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MINC - semi-official documentation page, a 
few things are up-to-date. But focus is mostly on software developers.


http://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/software/ - old (and out-of date) page that 
is still alive, and shows-up in top-5 hit when I google minc tools.

there are a few other places which show-up with various information.

Recently we had several meetings with people maintaining 
http://www.mcgill.ca/bic/ site with discussions on how to move forward, 
in particular in line of the latest announcement on pushing for Open 
Science ( for those who missed it: 
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/01/montreal-institute-going-open-accel-erate-science 
).

Currently the decision is to move as much information as possible to a 
single website and update all the old locations with links pointing to a 
new location. The particular location and organization of it is still up 
for discussion. But Louis wants it to start functioning pretty soon (i.e 
by the end of February).
Currently, it seems we have several possibilities:


1. Keep maintaining the old wiki ( 
http://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/ServicesSoftware/HomePage ) and put as much 
information as possible there.


2. Migrate to wikibooks https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MINC , and orient 
it more towards minc software users, rather then minc developers


3. Use github - since most of the open-source minc software already 
lives in https://github.com/BIC-MNI/ , and we can have issue tracking 
and wiki integration there. As well as github pages ( 
https://pages.github.com )


4. Use nitrc https://www.nitrc.org/projects/minc or 
https://www.nitrc.org/projects/minc-toolkit  - this one seem to be 
better suited for software releases. But I find the interface to be 
difficult to use.

So, what do you think?

P.S. The same goes for all the date sets that we are currently making 
available , in particular Atlases ( 
http://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/ServicesAtlases/HomePage ), the brainweb ( 
http://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/ServicesBrainWeb/HomePage ), the BITE ( 
http://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/Services/ServicesBITE ) and future projects.

-- 
Best regards,

  Vladimir S. FONOV ~ vladimir.fonov <at> gmail.com