Thinking about BioBarCamp, listening to Chris Messina talking about DiSo, Barcamp and open projects in general and all consumed by the cloud and web services. Over the past year, we’ve built a fairly cool group of bio and data geeks distributed all over the world. We have different skills, different backgrounds and different knowledge bases. Question is, are there enough of us to achieve the kind of bursty success that has driven efforts like OpenID, OAuth, DiSo, WordPress, etc in the tech/web world? Can we come up with simple tools and protocols that have the same impact on bioinformatics, cheminformatics, molecular modeling and perhaps life science discovery in general?
It is Friday evening, and I am allowed to dream!!!
Technorati Tags: Collaboration, Bursty Work, Life Sciences, Bioinformatics, Cheminformatics
5 Comments
I've been trying to compose a response to this post since first reading it.
Like you, I think this informal “biogeek” network that has formed is a wonderful thing. I get more pleasure and intellectual stimulation from my daily web interactions than I have from any of the universities at which I've ever worked.
I guess the issue is: can we, as a community, generate something that others perceive as having value? Which means: tools or better still, discoveries/original research findings.
Looking around, I suspect that we are too diverse to collaborate as a whole on a single project, although there are already signs of smaller-scale collaborations between people with shared interests. Perhaps what we need is some sort of umbrella organisation that encompasses and celebrates the creativity of individuals.
Here's an idea. A social website – perhaps invitation only, or with approved registration. Quite possibly built using App Engine – or else, just using a wiki. The idea is to connect people not by the usual criteria: location, publications, qualifications – but by their ideas. Basically, you sign up and submit information that describes “what floats your boat”. For example, you could point to a blog post describing a small project of which you are especially proud. Pedro's “impact factors from Connotea” for example, or Andrew's Sentinel project. Another great source of information would be talks that you have given: embedded via Slideshare, for example.
Think of it as the TED of biogeeks
The other key component, of course, is having worthy problems to solve. We need to define the key questions in bioscience that we think are (1) unanswered, or require more answers and (2) answerable using our collective skill set. Again, something that users could define as part of their profile: “what in your opinion are the key questions in bioscience research today?”
On a more practical level: think of it as a portal to things that people have created. Software for example: we've discussed code/project repositories recently and it's clear that everyone has their own favourite, from self-hosted Git to Google Code. From a portal, users could simply provide links to their own work. With search, or course.
Yes, “a portal to creative works in bioscience” – I like that.
It should also aggregate – or at least, point to the appropriate places in existing aggregators. All of those interesting FriendFeed discussions, for example.
And now I really am rambling and will have to ponder this further with mindmaps, Google notebook and so on.
This is in response to the “biogeek” global collaboratory idea, combined with a response to your previous bursty work post.
So back in April, I took a weekend off from science related stuff and participated in a 48 hour hour solo game development competition ( Ludum Dare, http://www.ludumdare.com/ ). Essentially, anyone who wants to participate registers, the theme is announced and everyone makes a video game from scratch in 48 hours. It's extremely bursty, and a lot of fun. While there are no 'teams', everyone keeps in touch during the compo, helping each other out with technical issues, demoing beta-versions of each others games and posting updates on their journal etc.
The whole thing is tied together using existing applications; WordPress with a voting plugin, a wiki, an IRC channel for chat … and everyone hosts their final game entries where ever they want. So what has this got to do with biogeeks collaborating on scientific problems ? Well, maybe you can see where I'm going … at the time it struck me that a similar thing could be achieved for some “biogeek” projects …
I think a good way to get the ball rolling would actually be to encourage a bursty weekend on a particular project (maybe the Elsevier Grand Challenge ? … looks like things are moving faster than I can finish my comment
). By using existing applications, tweaked a little to our needs, I think something could be strung together … looks like the biogang wiki is already a good focal point ( or dare I say, a “nodalpoint” ). FriendFeed seems to be the other center. A purpose built portal would always be nicer in the long term, but I think in the short term, to “just get going right now”, I think the loosely-coupled Ludum Dare style collaboration should work well enough.
Andrew,
You hit the nail on the head. My dream is to essentially create a distributed version of six hour startup, although less formal. I don't think there are enough of us co-located to do it in one place, and anyways, why keep it limited geographically. We have the tools and resources and interest to do something useful here, and like you suggest the Elsevier Challenge could be a good start. The DiSo project is my other inspiration and is along the lines of what you're talking about as well. It is up to us to prove to the community that this is possible.
I have somewhat selfish reasons to be interested as well. Inasmuch as juggling work with geekness permits, I want to start programming again and actually building things I care about, at least for fun. Such a forum is the kind of kick in the behind that could actually do the trick.
This is in response to the “biogeek” global collaboratory idea, combined with a response to your previous bursty work post.
So back in April, I took a weekend off from science related stuff and participated in a 48 hour hour solo game development competition ( Ludum Dare, http://www.ludumdare.com/ ). Essentially, anyone who wants to participate registers, the theme is announced and everyone makes a video game from scratch in 48 hours. It's extremely bursty, and a lot of fun. While there are no 'teams', everyone keeps in touch during the compo, helping each other out with technical issues, demoing beta-versions of each others games and posting updates on their journal etc.
The whole thing is tied together using existing applications; WordPress with a voting plugin, a wiki, an IRC channel for chat … and everyone hosts their final game entries where ever they want. So what has this got to do with biogeeks collaborating on scientific problems ? Well, maybe you can see where I'm going … at the time it struck me that a similar thing could be achieved for some “biogeek” projects …
I think a good way to get the ball rolling would actually be to encourage a bursty weekend on a particular project (maybe the Elsevier Grand Challenge ? … looks like things are moving faster than I can finish my comment
). By using existing applications, tweaked a little to our needs, I think something could be strung together … looks like the biogang wiki is already a good focal point ( or dare I say, a “nodalpoint” ). FriendFeed seems to be the other center. A purpose built portal would always be nicer in the long term, but I think in the short term, to “just get going right now”, I think the loosely-coupled Ludum Dare style collaboration should work well enough.
Andrew,
You hit the nail on the head. My dream is to essentially create a distributed version of six hour startup, although less formal. I don't think there are enough of us co-located to do it in one place, and anyways, why keep it limited geographically. We have the tools and resources and interest to do something useful here, and like you suggest the Elsevier Challenge could be a good start. The DiSo project is my other inspiration and is along the lines of what you're talking about as well. It is up to us to prove to the community that this is possible.
I have somewhat selfish reasons to be interested as well. Inasmuch as juggling work with geekness permits, I want to start programming again and actually building things I care about, at least for fun. Such a forum is the kind of kick in the behind that could actually do the trick.
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