IEEE MTT-S and Microwaves101
  • UnknownEditor
    4
    We once had a partnership with MTT-S. Lots of people worked for several years trying to make this work, but it fell apart for a few reasons...

    1. MTT-S paid for someone to redesign and host the site but left us hanging with limited editorial access, quite a few back-end bugs, and considerable downtime.
    2. MTT-S developed a plan to review/verify our encyclopedia pages, but although commitees were formed, only a half-dozen or so pages actually went through the process to get the MTT-S "stamp of approval". You could blame this on MTT-S trying to apply their style to our content, not trying to follow our crazy style.
    3. We had hoped that MTT-S members would share their expertise by contributing material to the site, in any of our subject areas, but MTT-S did not produce any new content.
    4. MTT-S planned to recruit volunteers to monitor and answer the different categories of message board questions (this did not happen).
    5. Some people at MTT-S seemed to feel that the pop-culture references, humor, and "101" nature of Microwaves101 was inappropriate and/or beneath their dignity. Others never did understand what we were trying to do, or why we didn't charge membership or access fees like the IEEExplore model.
    6. There are MTT-S members that don't want ads to appear on any of their content, including our site when it was a partner.

    MTT-S recognizes that M101 attracts college and post-grad students, a demographic they need to do better with in order to grow (or even stay the same size) in the future. Recently they have held subcommittee meetings talking about renewing the partnership with us. They have discussed making their own 101-style site as a way to increase visibility and monetize some of their own content.

    if we did end up partnering with MTT-S again, does anyone have any suggestions for what you would want to see? Would the "approved by MTT-S" stamp make you trust our content morre? Should we dial back the non-sequiturs, humor and politics? Do we link to a bunch of free MTT-S content, or reformat it to fit our questionable taste? Or do we let them take some of our content (as has been suggested) and host it on their site?

    Enquiring minds want to know what YOU think.

    Steve and Brenda
    UnknownEditor Options
  • madengr
    1
    An association with IEEE will likely be stuffy and bureaucratic; you already mentioned committees and stamps of approval. I’d much rather have the politics and content of questionable taste. It also seems all the forum content was lost when IEEE re-wrote the site.

    Looking at EE enrollment over the last 30 years, MTT is definitely not going to grow. Not sure why they’d even try to monetize the content, or charge a subscription. This isn’t exactly a huge industry. If you had a YouTube channel with every IMS attendee subscribing, it’d be 10k subscribers, which is laughable small.
    madengr Options
  • mrmatt
    0
    if we did end up partnering with MTT-S again, does anyone have any suggestions for what you would want to see?
    MW101 is great as-is, I've been visiting it now for at least 1.5 decades (eek!). If it changed, I would mainly want to see more of the type and style of content that's already here. Something like more depth on existing topics, more examples/tutorials/case studies, more downloadable spreadsheets and calculators, or more topics covered.

    Would the "approved by MTT-S" stamp make you trust our content morre?
    Not really... errors can happen in any publication. MW101 is self-correcting over time with reader-submitted corrections. Going through an MTT-S review process just sounds like a way to spend a lot of time accomplishing not very much.

    Should we dial back the non-sequiturs, humor and politics?
    I hope not! I enjoy the informal nature of this website.
    mrmatt Options
  • UnknownEditor
    4
    I totally forgot about the forum (message board) being wiped clean. It never really came back after that, people moved on. Here we are, the proverbial tree falling in the forest.

    Thanks for your thoughts!

    Steve
    UnknownEditor Options
  • Rich
    0
    This website is awesome, dont change. Often with these things the idea is good but people won't want to do the hard work.

    I had a quick look and there may be some copies of the forum. For example,
    https://web.archive.org/web/20060101000000*/microwaves101.com

    This is from 2006
    https://web.archive.org/web/20060323115001/http://www.microwaves101.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=Questions

    Someone more software skilled might be able to extract some of it.
    Rich Options
  • epos
    0
    Agree with the previous posts, dont change! Been reading and enjoying the microwaves101 content for 5 years now, and I love the relaxed format and hands-on approach to the sometimes quite difficult world of microwaves.
    epos Options
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