The future of scientific collaboration: Extending the “Bursty Work” concept
February 3, 2008
Historically scientific collaborations fall into two categories, at least in my experience. Long term collaborations, e.g. between a molecular biologist and a biophysicist, or a computational chemist and a synthetic chemist, or even scientists with similar skill sets who decide to pool the resources of their groups, which could sit in different continents. There are also the collaborations that happen due to a meeting at a conference. These could last for one project or turn into the former variety. What is common is a sustained effort. Most serious collaborations last for a while. Nothing wrong with that at all.
Today, we live in a world where the pool and requirements for scientific knowledge are broader and more widely distributed than ever before. To quote Bill Joy “Wherever you work, most of the smart people are somewhere else”. Funding is limited and in many cases a scientific problems needs a variety of skillsets to be brought to the table, often quickly and for a specific purpose
The more I think about it, the more enamored I am by the concept of Bursty Work (I hope Chris Messina doesn’t start charging royalties for every time I use that). Posts by Pedro, Pawel, and just the general idea of internet driven projects, whether via meetings in virtual worlds, networking sites like Biowhateveritsnameis or myExperiment, or what may have you, make me believe that science can really benefit from such projects. Obviously computational scientists, who do not have the restriction of requiring lab space have an advantage here, so I will keep my discussions primarily centered on in silico science, but you can extend this to bench science as well.
Today, with cheap and accessible computing, a variety of open source software tools and web-based collaborative tools, from wikis to blogs to project management software, doing virtual collaborations that could result in a publication or the development of software is not that hard. In a post on the long tail of science, Peter Murray-Rust writes “Large numbers of small units is an important concept”, which is very much along the lines of that thought.
There are a lot of things that need to be done to really enable these kinds of projects. A change in mindset, especially in academic settings. We also need new and novel mechanisms for funding, tech transfer, knowledge transfer and knowledge of how to set up small businesses around small projects. That’s where organizations like Science Commons come in. Not all bursty projects can be academic in nature, but when the project starts you often don’t have a good idea of the potential. Ideally you could come up with tools/frameworks which could form the basis for commercial projects or projects that may be commercialized. Today, monetizing these projects, while not trivial, especially in science where the volume of users is small, is not impossible. Regardless, the bias at this end is on open source projects that could be leveraged as part of larger solutions or address some of the smaller, seemingly trivial problems that drive so many of us batty.
Regardless of whether a project is academic or commercially oriented, the bottom line is that we are facing a new era of web-enabled collaboration. It’s up to the scientific community to embrace these opportunities. Which is one reason I will be following Pawel’s efforts closely.
What do you think we need to enable bursty projects within the scientific community?
Technorati Tags: Bursty Work, Collaboration, Microfunding, Tech Transfer
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