The number of registered users of iMechanica exceeded 3000 today, three months after iMechanica welcomed its 2000th user. The number of posts has exceeded 1700, and the number of comments, 3800. The growth of iMechanica has been stable and amazing, leading to a natural question: why do people register at iMechanica? iMechanica is open: evevryone can read everything without registration. You can post anything of interest to mechanicians once you register for a free account.
As the interactions among iMechanicians increases, the past three months has seen many new strokes in iMechanica, all initiated by the users. Here are some examples:
- After a long thread of discussion initiated by Pradeep Sharma, a procedure of electing new Editors of the Journal Club has emerged. Michelle Oyen has joined Pradeep as a new Editor.
- About 50 iMechanicians got together during McMat 2007, and the discussions were further extended in iMechanica, covering themes such as senior mechanicians and iMechanica, and the strategy for iMechanica's future success.
- Following a suggestion made by Demitris Kouris at the get together, Biswajit Banerjee took the inititive to compile an index of online lecture notes of interest to mechanician. The index appears under "Quick guide" on the right side of iMechanica
- As iMechanica is re-uniting an online community of mechanics, John E. Dolbow initiated the discussion on building community standards.
- To address the growing needs on open source software, a new iMechanics channel "Software" has been added and an "Open source software" link is now available at the right side bar, as suggested by Mogadalai Gururajan.
- A fruitful dicusssion on open source publishing, initiated by Eric Mockensturm, has been another recent highlight of iMechanica.
- Several graduate students have initiated a discussion on "The Silent Majority".
Let's expect more new activities to be initiated by our users. Let the collective wisdom from our community shape the future of iMechanica.
We thank Lesley Lam and Joy Sircar, of Information Technology at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, for sustained technical support.
Student discussion thread...
Teng,
Thanks for bringing attention to the "silent majority". I just wanted to point out that in addition to the link you provided, we have started a new thread that focuses on the role of students at iMechanica.
Thanks,
Dhruv
student's response
Teng,
I guess that you have used iMechanica for teaching. I am also planning to do so. How did student response to that class.
Henry.