[OWW-Discuss] Tapping into open source / open access and doingslightly more

[Russell Hanson]

Yo Bryan, 

I don't know of any situation where this config/build scenario would apply to any domain of molecular biology or molecular engineering.  One of my conclusions after trying to teach molecular biophysics, etc. to people well versed in Linux, etc.  was that both the level of education needed and the money to buy the chemicals and equipment used in the lab have an "appropriately" high barrier.  Obviously people have had high-powered PCs in their homes since they were kids and you can pick up another for a few hundred bucks: not the case for molecular biology/chemical engineering.  The people who are in the position to contribute the most in terms of research projects are precisely the people who already have so much going on they don't contribute to open-source software type projects.  There are not tens of thousands of people out there looking for new "open and wet" projects, and there isn't the money available from the 'funding agencies' to support or supply those "open and wet" projects.  I think the money and educational barriers trump the sociological engineering reasons for this.  However, this is different from the self-fab and reprap-type stuff....  

peace, 
Russell 

-----Original Message-----
From: Bryan Bishop <kanzure at gmail.com>

Date: Wed, 14 May 2008 21:22:58 
To:discuss at openwetware.org
Subject: Re: [OWW-Discuss] Tapping into open source / open access and doing
	slightly more


On Wednesday 14 May 2008, "John Cumbers" <johncumbers at gmail.com> wrote:
>  I don't really understand what you are proposing and if you posted
> an executive summary then it might prompt more of a discussion.

It's a software architecture that lets us do what debian did for 
software -- aggregating tens of thousands of programmers -- but with 
other projects, on OWW it's science. Instead of a dry wiki, you have a 
wiki that is built on a file repository, with data files provided by 
whoever submits content, which can be immediately used in other 
projects. And then you get easy "apt-get install <centrifuge>" 
commands, or "apt-get install <uncoli>" etc. I am actually not too good 
at predicting what projects will show up on the map, but those are 
valid guesses.

- Bryan
________________________________________
http://heybryan.org/

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