Brian Yandell accepted the Web Editor position beginning, officially in June 1999, but unofficialy in January. He established an Editorial Board of roughly a dozen Associate Editors that will work with ASA staff and members to make Amstat Online the nation's leading site for advancing the statistics profession. Information on the current Amstat Online Editorial Board and its activities can be found at www.amstat.org/publications/amstat_online.
The Web site was completely redesigned in house in 2000-1, released on 1 October 2001. There are now Guidelines for Redesign of Amstat Online Pages to assist with the process of continual improvement.
Mike Conlon was the first Editor: "We did some brainstorming about what we thought a site could contain. When they asked for volunteers, everybody stepped back except me. I took the flip charts home and started coding HTML in Florida and put up a mock site that everybody could take a look at. Mike Meyers worked with Tim Gill on hardware and connectivity issues, created the physical site. I had nothing to do with that. We got in a position where the mockup site at Florida could be moved over to Amstat.org. We went online some time in 95. For a couple of years, I took the kind of pioneer approach that many of us have taken to starting things and tried to bring people in as we went, working with the ASA staff. They were great. A lot of hurdles, a lot of reorienting, but we managed to create that kind of positive feedback loop where the website got better. As it got better people, we thought of things to make it better. The ideas and effort moved toward the website. I was very happy to have it handed off to Mike Meyer and Bruce Trumbo, who have done it for the last couple of years."
Linda Javins was brought on as WebMaster in the Winter of 1996-7, taking over the routine maintenance of static Web pages. In April of 98 the UNIX server that was originally set up began to sputter and die. Tim Gill, the Information Systems (IS) Manager, purchased a new server and changed the site over from Linux to Windows/NT. He ported the site over to its present location. The IS team manages the databases and dynamic Web pages, while WebMaster manages the Web site itself.
In December 1997, the Board of Directors' Strategic Plan was published. This 17-page document refers to the Internet or the Web on almost every other paragraph. With this mandate, the Electronic Communications Committee developed a job description for Amstat Online Editor. They viewed the Web site as a publication, as another ASA publication with its own Editor and Editorial Board having oversight of intellectual content.
Brian Yandell was selected as new Editor: "I was asked in November, 1998, to serve as the new Editor. I went out in December to visit, where I met Tim and Linda Javins and Mary Fleming. Lorraine Denby was with me. Basically I decided that this was actually a do-able operation. In February I went to the Council of Sections Governing Board and got some sense about what they were wanting. I was amazed at how much the web came up throughout the whole agenda. I was there for the whole time and it was probably a good thing, as the web just kept coming up. I went to the Board of Directors meeting in April as well to make a short presentation of basically the stuff that you have seen on my website about what my intent was in building the Editorial Board."
The first Amstat Online Editorial Board meeting was held at JSM 1999 in Baltimore. See Amstat Online Meetings for agenda and minutes.