Back in 2005, just after the March Washington lobbying effort by SLAC and Fermilab users, a few of us at SLAC decided to setup a website that could serve as a hub for political action by scientists. It was intended to be a resource more than an organization (unlike SEA, which formed later), a means to raise issues about pending science policy decisions and call for action by scientists on those issues. From the desire to have such a site, scienceaction.org was born.
After the NUFO meeting last week, I came to realize that while scienceaction.org never took off, there is still a latent demand out there for such a resource. Users’ organizations, based at government labs and seeking non-government resources to express their needs to politicians, are in a tough position. They need a site they can use to create letters, call for action, and circulate news about the current status of U.S. science funding policy and activity.
I revamped the site over the weekend, migrating from the old Zope site to a more modern web framework.
I invite all interested parties to contact me about becoming “correspondents” for the site. Your role would then be to post news you find or hear, initiate calls to action from subscribers to the site, and spread the word about the need for all scientists to be citizen scientists.
The software is also going to migrate to the new framework, allowing issue letters to be created and then tracked on calls to action. My goal is to provide a flexible set of tools to establish such letters, get them to the community, and estimate how many people are trying to send these letters.
