The Interactive Online Network of Inorganic Chemists did in fact have its start in a seedy airport hotel in Atlanta, just before the Spring 2006 ACS meeting. But that was not its original name—it was going to be the Intellectual Online Network… hang on. Let me take a few steps back and get you all caught up.
In Spring of 2005, I earned tenure and began my first sabbatical. Call it burn-out, or call it “now what” syndrome, but I felt like I needed more in my professional life. I missed the ability in grad school or my post doc years to literally be able to stick my head out into the hallway to ask a question and reasonably expect a response. I was lonely, professionally, as the only inorganic chemist in a 120 square mile area. I was tired of sticking my head out into the hall and seeing… well… this:
Don’t get me wrong, I have great colleagues. I have people who can help me with instrumentation, synthesis, teaching entropy, but no one I could ask about frontier orbitals, HOMO-LUMO gap, counting to eighteen (using EITHER method) or the importance (or lack thereof) of solid state compounds, appropriate models in bioinorganic chemistry, or whether we should teach Tanabe-Sugano diagrams.
So, while on sabbatical, I was looking for something more. And so was the Mellon Foundation. They had a series of inter-institutional grants for faculty to interact with other faculty. The only requirement was that *multiple institutions needed to be involved*. This seemed perfect, and in September of 2005 I sent out an email inviting about a half-dozen faculty at institutions around the US to join the “Inorganic Chemistry Curricular Initiative,” or “IC2I” for short. (It turns out that one of the original members of the group had made that compound in grad school, but more importantly for you all, it introduced me to using element symbols and element symbols only in my acronyms, such as IONiC, ViPEr, BITeS, or even PUBLiSH ClUB (or is it PuBLiSH?)).
Five faculty from five different institutions met at that seedy Atlanta Airport hotel and began talking. We even brought in a consultant, Kenny Morrell, from Rhodes College, who introduced us to the Sunoikosis project (now hosted by Harvard). We met three times in 2005-2006, and at those meetings we decided that we could leverage our mutual interest in teaching, inorganic chemistry, pedagogy, and our mutual difficulties (professional isolation, inability to teach ALL of the periodic table) and develop something bigger. We wrote a follow-up Mellon proposal, which was funded, we accreted several more faculty and a technology consultant (Ethan) to the leadership team. Ethan was instrumental in helping us learn about technology tools, and guiding us; our initial plan was to make an online repository—his response: “NAH, you don’t want to make a repository…”. Eventually we wrote an NSF-CCLI proposal to found the Intellectual Online Network of Inorganic Chemists… which was almost immediately changed to be Interactive … and then develop our first deliverable: the Virtual Inorganic Pedagogical Electronic Resource, where you are probably reading this blog post.
This is my informal version of events; several additional formal publications (scroll down) describe what we did, how we started, and what we believe in (links). But IONiC and VIPER really was my baby, and I am so happy to see its products encoiling others. The leadership team, in approximate chronological order, of me, Hilary, Nancy, Maggie, Joanne, Lori, Barb, Betsy, Sheila and Chip, work hard to keep the site running. And we don’t do it alone. We have had help from designers (logomotives), programmers (Mathew and Margaux from GJD), tech visionaries (Ethan…), librarians (Jez), assessmentators (Jeff) and of course, financial support from the Mellon Foundation, AALAC, NSF, NITLE, and others.
I am so looking forward to the next 9 years. Who knows where we’ll be!