The AIMS editorial team would like to consult you on an enhanced strategy for the conduction of the AIMS webinars:

Last year, the AIMS team contributed to the 'Open Access Week 2012' with a series of webinars. In these online seminars our associated experts introduced the audience to the meaning of Open Access, to Open Access strategies and use cases. AIMS benefitted from these webinars with a significant rise of visitors and new community members. Due to the success of the Open Access Week, a series of Webinars under the title LinkedOpenData@AIMS was launched in the end of last year.

In order to be able to conduct the Webinars@AIMS on a regular basis and to extend our audience, the AIMS editorial team is planning to set up an organizational framework for preparing and delivering webinars. As a first step it is important to identify topics of interest in the community. We have identified the following possible routes:

1. To collect ideas and topics within the AIMS community by using a predefined list of themes or simply asking for suggestions without any previous identification of topics. This could be done through a poll or blog post published on AIMS.
2. To launch calls for proposals to collect use cases and experiences of any kind giving the opportunity to AIMS community member to deliver a short webinar.
3. To organize webinars on demand. Any AIMS community member could contact us to suggest a topic for a webinar.

What is your opinion? Could you provide us with feedback on this?

Additionally, the webinars can be delivered in English and Spanish thanks to the ongoing collaboration of IAALD, IICA and AIMS. Do we need to include any other language, e.g. French? Is it possible to identify any stakeholder within the community that could support us on this? What about Chinese, Arabic and Russian?

In this context, we are also preparing a repository for Open Education Resources (OER) dedicated to agricultural information management with the collaboration of AgroKnow Technologies. This repository will be accessible from AIMS and will also harvest any OER related to our topics. The objective is to provide an access point for e-learning material in agricultural information management with special emphasis to the Webinars@AIMS.

Thank you for sharing your feedback!