CZ:Nomination page/Editorial Council 2011/Brian P. Long

To return to the main election page when you have finished reading, please click here: CZ:EC Election and Referenda December 2011.

For those who may not know me, I've been a member of CZ since 2007. I served on the Editorial Council in 2008, and was involved with the effort to standardize Romanization then. With Tom Morris, I was also involved in the largely unsuccessful attempt to recruit academics and bloggers for Biology Week. For what it's worth, and whether it makes us top-heavy or not, I think the Charter is a good thing. My sense is that governance now is less ad hoc than it used to be.

Contrary to what I've said in the past, I have few broad programmatic statements this time about how to fix CZ, or what CZ needs to be. I think of CZ as something akin to the slow-growing knowledge projects of the pre-internet age: it simply takes a long time to read, comprehend, and carefully synthesize information, and we should stop wringing our hands that we're nowhere near as large or comprehensive as Wikipedia. We do need to keep working on CZ, and see that it keeps going.

If possible, however, I do believe we should make an effort to inform graduate students, academics, and amateurs of our presence, and that we should make it a priority to retain the experts we have.