SoME2 Matchmaking between experts and content creators
This repo is now archived and is not intended to be used in SoME3 and beyond. Please use the forum channel #project-ideas on discord instead.
This repository is a space for coordinating collaborations between people interested in producing online math explainers, with a focus on the Summer of Math Exposition (SoME). In particular, the aim is to play matchmaker between two kinds of people:
- Professors, teachers, or anyone else with domain expertise and ideas for what would make a great piece of math exposition, but who may not have the time and content production know-how to fully bring the idea to fruition.
- Those interested in content production, whether that means video editing, animation, producing interactive blog posts, or whatever else.
This video offers a nice example of the kind of collaboration which inspired us to organize this kind of match-making, where the mathematician Richard Borcherds has a very lovely lecture about the Leech lattice, which Lyam Boylan helps bring to life through visualizations of the topic. The entire channel Numberphile also exeplifies this kind of collaboration. Keep in mind, though, collaborations don't necessarily have to be videos.
Note that there will be no files in the repository itself. Instead, we will be using github issues to create and maintain discussion threads. Here's how it will work.
How do I start a discussion thread to seek a collaborator?
- Go to Issues and create a new one.
- Choose either "Topic seeking a producer" or "Producer seeking a topic", and fill out the corresponding template including any relevant links or information to help people know what you are looking for.
- Once you have a group together or are otherwise no longer looking for collaborators, please close the issue!
How do I find open collaboration requests?
Go to Issues and find a topic that interests you. Note that there could be several pages of topics to discuss!
How do I follow discussions on github?
The easiest way is to click the "Subscribe" bell on the right of each issue. Depending on your user settings, github should send e-mails to you automatically for participating discussions.
What if I would like people to contact me off of github?
No problem! Please put your preferred method of communication in the github issue for your topic. If you would like to chat on discord, please include your name and associated user tag (which can be found by looking at the bottom left of the discord window).
Do I need to use github?
No! Not at all, if you can organically find people through other methods (discord, e-mail, the ArXiv, etc), then this repository is not necessary at all! This repository is meant to provide a quick list of projects that are looking for collaborators.
Why github?
Honestly, because it has all the tools we need without having to reinvent the wheel. Simply put, we wanted a way for people to create and maintain discussion threads. Though that is definitely possible on discord, slack, reddit, and plenty of other social media platforms, github was designed for various types of technical discussions and should be a good fit for our purposes.
How do I add math / LaTeX to github issues?
Github has mathjax support, so feel free to just use mathjax like normal! It should work in most cases.
If you have further questions, please let me know and I'll add them to the list here!
You mentioned seeking collaborators for a 3blue1brown video?
Yes! In the spirit of throwing my own hat into this ring, I (Grant, that is) thought it would be fun to choose one topic posted to this board from a domain expert, and one content producer of some kind (probably an animator, artist or programmer), and if both are interested in it, I'd coordinate the creation of a 3b1b video between the three of us. I'd happily contribute to the writing, animating, and narrating in whatever way seems most helpful, but a big part of the point would be to showcase the ideas/style of others.
Needless to say, this would not be considered for one of the winners of SoME2, but I'd be happy to compensate any collaborators found this way for their time put into the project.
Licensing
By default, all issues created for this repository will be under the CC-BY license with attribution to those in the discussion thread. This license allows anyone to use your discussion for almost any reason, but they must attribute you if they do so. Note that if you would like to use a different license (preferrably CC), please mention that in your topic discussion!