Weren’t all-in-one services like Launchpad supposed to save us from this insanity?
Stuart Sierra poses that question in a blog post where he bemoans the fact that the Clojure community is spread out across a number of places. As a result, being an active member of the community, he needs to pay attention to half a dozen, perhaps more, to keep on top of things. He answers his own question
But they never can, because everyone has different tastes when it comes to bug tracking, version control, and mailing lists
That is not a phenomenon just for programming languages, but for various other groups, including scientists, who tend to have very different tastes across a number of areas. Which is why I don’t think a single destination site is going to work for research and collaboration. You just can’t make a bunch of opinionated people converge on one place to get everything done.
So what do you need to do. Well, Stuart’s a smart guy and wishes the right thing. Allow sites to talk to each other. Allow sites to pull data and info from other places rather than trying to reinvent everything. I think we are beginning to move in that direction across the web in general, and that should trickle into the scientific realm. A year or so ago “mashup” was a buzzword and used mostly to cutesy stuff, but the essential part of it, APIs that allow you to pull in information and mash it up with other pieces of information is a long lasting trend and once we can figure out how to do it effectively, we can potentially come up with some very interesting ways to do collaborative, even “social”, science on the web.
All-in-one usually does not work
Stuart Sierra poses that question in a blog post where he bemoans the fact that the Clojure community is spread out across a number of places. As a result, being an active member of the community, he needs to pay attention to half a dozen, perhaps more, to keep on top of things. He answers his own question
That is not a phenomenon just for programming languages, but for various other groups, including scientists, who tend to have very different tastes across a number of areas. Which is why I don’t think a single destination site is going to work for research and collaboration. You just can’t make a bunch of opinionated people converge on one place to get everything done.
So what do you need to do. Well, Stuart’s a smart guy and wishes the right thing. Allow sites to talk to each other. Allow sites to pull data and info from other places rather than trying to reinvent everything. I think we are beginning to move in that direction across the web in general, and that should trickle into the scientific realm. A year or so ago “mashup” was a buzzword and used mostly to cutesy stuff, but the essential part of it, APIs that allow you to pull in information and mash it up with other pieces of information is a long lasting trend and once we can figure out how to do it effectively, we can potentially come up with some very interesting ways to do collaborative, even “social”, science on the web.