Historically the YMN grew out of the dismal job market of the late 80s early 90s. It was centered around a moderated email newsletter known as the Concerns. It's goals were
- to keep the mathematical community honest about the job market and its future;
- to provide information about job searches from both the inside and the outside;
- to serve as a support group for those on the job market;
- to provide information on publishing, grant proposals, obtaining industry jobs, and other things which many of us did not get in graduate school; and
- to inform the mathematical community of the interests and concerns of the younger mathematicians.
Times have changed, the job market improved ( although it might be in decline again...) and in recent history contributions and content to the email newsletter have tapered off and the publication of the concerns has become much more sporatic (as well as somewhat sparse in content).
I joined the YMN editoral board about 1.5 years ago in hopes of revitalizing the web presence of the YMN. We have made some signifiant strides in this direction, but there are still many things I would like to do. One task in particular that we began to undertake at the 2003 Jan Joint meetings was starting to advertise and grow our online community.
To date, our attempts along these lines have been only moderately sucessful (although we are pretty much on track according to a great article about the birthing stages of a weblog that I recall reading about a year ago - unfortunatly I haven't been able to re-locate this article).
The apparent drop off of activity and somewhat lack luster performance of our website re-ignited some discussion from former editors of YMN on the editoral listserve.
As we try and grow this online community I feel it is a good idea to take a new look at the original goals of YMN and bring them up to date.
Back at the Jan 2003 board meeting I wanted to address the issue of "updating" our goals (unfortunatly I didn't bring this up until the end of the meeting). This ties in very closely with the following interesting and usefull questions which were raised on the editoral list discussion.
- What is the current vision of YMN?
- What is the current mission?
- What's the current purpose?
Personally, one thing I would really like to see YMN become is something like a slashdot for mathematicians (for those not familiar with slashdot, it is a fairly well know and active "weblog" type news sight for "computer nerds" that provides links, news and other banter about current events of interest to said "computer nerds").
I have been looking around for good "newspaper" type blog centered around mathematics, but to date I haven't really found anything that has the news and types of discussion that I crave (if you have found a good source for math related news and discussions, PLEASE add a comment to this diary entry and give me the link). Thus a fair amount of my vision for the YMN revolves around creating a community to generate and support this type of forum.
Beyond this personal quest, the YMN has historically organized other activities such as hosting panel discussions, town meetings and poster sessions at the Jan Joint Meetings.
These activities seem to have maintained greater popularity and I feel that these activities should be explicitly incorperated into our mission.
Finally, I think that the YMN can serve as a portal link our readers to resources about a multitude of topics ranging from information about the whole job search process, to information about REUs, grants, conferences, etc.
Since we live in the age of information overload, the role the YMN must play is to collect, coalate/ process and present this information in a clean and streamlined manner via our website. I think there is a still a fair amount of work/improving we can do to improve the coherence and presentation of information on our new site.
I would love to see/hear/read sugestions and other feedback along these lines (post your thoughts as comments to this diary entry).
Well, there is lost more I want to say/sugest, but it's way past dinner time and my wife is already starting to eat without me so I better get my but on my bike and pedal home.
Peace,
John Vano
