Academe of fair to middling women

[j4]

Those of you on my flist who are involved in academia: have you used www.academia.edu? Do you think you would be likely to do so?

It's quite hard to evaluate a social networking site for which I'm really not part of what appears to be the intended demographic...

Comments

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

someone who's planning to make all their academics use it.

Well that sounds a very silly idea. As we seem to agree there are better tools for all of its features. Do you need more quotes?

However... I do have an excellent idea for a central academic site that someone should make. Is your dept the type that would do this sort of thing? This actually does fill a gap in what's available, and various people I've discussed it with all agree.

So the idea is to produce a wiki for conferences and jobs. This would be intelligently divided into subjects and sub-subjects, with lots of cross-listing possibilities. If it was sufficiently well set up in the first place and then given a big publicity boost, I think it would work well and run itself - partly because there should be very little effort involved in adding listings to it - most conferences / jobs have a page made already on the relevant departmental server, so it would just require a brief description and a link.

You see, though we have good tools for distributing papers etc, info about conferences comes out via a mess of small mailling lists. You very seldom hear about more tangential conferences that might relate well to your own work, and even within a field (eg alg geom) there are European and American systems that don't talk to each other well.

As for jobs, each country / university has its own system, and navigating your way through them all is thoroughly confusing!

So yes, do you know the people who could make this for us?