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

[Bryan Bishop]

Hey Russell, long time no chat.

On Wednesday 14 May 2008, Russell Hanson wrote:
> I don't know of any situation where this config/build scenario would
> apply to any domain of molecular biology or molecular engineering.

Model repositories can easily fit within this umbrella. I've been 
playing with some molecular physics and molecular dynamics before. 
Technically, programs in debian or gentoo repositories are already 
doing this, so duplicating the effort would be silly. What if instead 
of publishing latex we'd publish in SBML and other notations to 
illustrate models and so on? Lots of fun possibilities, and it requires 
some initial "bootup" work to be done to organize a community of that 
sort before it skyrockets and become easier on all of us.

Another possible way that this could be used in mol-bio would be in 
terms of the tools that are available, on top of the scientific models 
anyway. You could easily argue for proprietary systems, but I don't 
know how far that would fly around here. Straw man, I know, I know.

>  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

Why would you want a barrier to entry?

> 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

That's the current status quo for mol-bio/ChE, so I don't see why we 
wouldn't want to change that. It's not about profit margins.

> 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

I don't think that we want to bother those super-workers anyway. It's 
mostly students and amateurs that would probably contribute at first. 
People from Make, that crowd too.

> of thousands of people out there looking for new "open and wet"

Are you sure about that? I've been noticing explosive growth in wikihow, 
instructables (hi Saul :-), youtube, Wikipedia, howstuffworks, 
howtoons, wikihow, Make Magazine, howtodothings, etc. etc. 

> projects, and there isn't the money available from the 'funding
> agencies' to support or supply those "open and wet" projects.  I

Who says it has to cost much? I don't understand. When you do research, 
don't you work with computational models? When you make a new piece of 
equipment for your lab, don't you use schematics? Would it hurt to 
spend a few minutes uploading that data into a formalized data package 
for others to use?

> 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....  

>From what I've seen about lablife, once you get in to it you start to 
realize that it's all 'diy' anyway, except now you have some support in 
realtime from people actually standing around [though on their own 
projects]. As for the educational barriers, tell me how those exist. I 
went from zero, zip-nadda, to what I know now, through the net and 
maybe to some extent high school, but the extent to which that is true 
can be determined by http://heybryan.org/school/ - everything else is 
because of the web. 

- Bryan
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http://heybryan.org/