[Air-L] SPIR Back Online / Call for Volunteers: AoIR Technical Advisory Group

[Axel Bruns]

Dear AoIRists,

I'm pleased to say that thanks to the tireless work of our AoIR Technical Advisory Group - Brenda Moon, Alexander Ronzhyn, and Andrew R. Schrock - our AoIR publication Selected Papers in Internet Research (SPIR) is back online, at spir.aoir.org. 

We are very grateful to the TAG team for volunteering their time to rebuild SPIR and bringing it back to life, and I'd like to express AoIR's sincere thanks to Brenda, Alexander and Andrew for their efforts.

The next steps for SPIR will now be to post last year's conference proceedings on the site, and then to do the same with the papers accepted for the Berlin conference this year (you'll have seen Cornelius Puschmann's calls over the past weeks to upload your de-anonymised paper and panel proposals to ConfTool).


Call for Volunteers: AoIR Technical Advisory Group
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To support these next steps, as well as to address future technical challenges as they arise, AoIR is now calling for expressions of interest from additional volunteers to serve on our Technical Advisory Group. From time to time, the Association faces various issues relating to our technical infrastructure - including the AoIR Website, the Selected Papers in Internet Research (SPIR) site, our conference submission and registration platforms, our mailing-list, and the integration between these different systems. Members of the TAG will be asked to help us make better strategic decisions about our technology choices, and to support the Association Coordinator and Exec in addressing any urgent issues - for example to clean up and better protect our sites after the hacking attacks we suffer on occasion.

TAG members should have strong familiarity with technologies such as PHP, MySQL, Open Journal Systems, Wordpress, and/or ConfTool, as well as overall server admin skills. Experience in protecting Web servers from hackers would also be very welcome. AoIR is an almost entirely volunteer-based, non-profit organisation, so unfortunately we can't offer any payment for this work - other than the satisfaction of having made a significant contribution to our community. If you're interested in helping out, please email Axel Bruns (vp at aoir.org) with an expression of interest and some information about your tech skills and expertise.

On behalf of the AoIR Exec, many thanks in advance. Your contribution makes a real difference to the Association.


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Prof. Axel Bruns                 a.bruns at qut.edu.au - @snurb_dot_info
ARC Future Fellow, 2014-18   http://www.amazon.com/author/axel.bruns/
Professor, Media & Communication     http://mappingonlinepublics.net/
QUT Digital Media Research Centre    http://qut.edu.au/research/dmrc/
Creative Industries Faculty, Z6-503, KG            http://snurb.info/
Queensland University of Technology                   +61 7 3138 5548
GPO Box 2434, Brisbane, Qld 4001, Australia        CRICOS No.: 00213J