I'm the founder of The Synaptic Leap We're also using Drupal. Our site has been live since late November. I'm coming out to the SF Bay Area May 30 - June 6. Is anybody maintaining NodalPoint interested in getting together to discuss possible synergies and philosophies?
Email me or reply to the post to discuss.
Cheers!
Comments
Impressed
A great site, I hope that it achieves its goals and concur with the other comments. This kind of endeavour really needs enthusiastic individuals to keep pushing the agenda. As we all know, it's not enough to put up a site and assume that people will follow the Google trail to your door. Hey, you can even set up an internal website geared exclusively to the needs of your group and have noone visit it. That's biologists for you :)
A few points. There are many barriers to online collaborative science and one that shouldn't be underestimated is time commitments. Many postdocs are struggling to make a career and are wary of spending time on projects peripheral to their own, even if they are enthusiastic about the concept. They also have to justify their time to bosses and funding agencies. So you're relying on people who either work in a group that's open to this kind of project or who are willing to contribute their evenings and weekends to it. I know the idea is that many hands make light work, but we all know that any rigorous bioinformatic analysis takes hours or days.
Others have pointed out that we've thrown this idea around before but it hasn't come to anything yet. I think this is partly due to inability to decide if the focus should be tool development or biological discovery. We can all agree on useful software tools that we'd like to see and that kind of collaboration is conceptually quite easy - think CVS and Sourceforge. Dividing biological analysis between group members is somewhat harder, not least because it needs to be a problem in which everyone is interested, of which everyone has some background knowledge (or the will to acquire it).
I think the Synaptic Leap concept as it stands could really work. You have problems of general interest and a hierarchical structure to the types of analysis to be done which lends itself to farming out the tasks (structural modelling, sequence analysis, biomedical statistics and so on).
Synergies
I am just a user but my general feeling is that Nodalpoint could be in much respects a part of Synaptic Leap, like the sub-community of bioinformatics.
I agree with Greg that it will take some volunteers to kick start this collaborative science. We have played around with the idea before but somehow it never took off. Also , like Greg says it requires some organizing center. My (current) opinion is that the collective efforts are only useful if directed by good leadership. One of the problems mentioned before is that the projects themselves have to be thought carefully by someone with knowledge in the area and usually these experts are not too keen on giving away these ideas, etc.
One possible interaction with Nodalpoint could be that whenever there is a request for IT related resources they could be cross-posted in the site for example. Also Nodalpoint members could op to become members of Synaptic Leap with some shared profile system.
I agree, some one who knows
I agree, some one who knows the area needs to think it through. No one who isn't already a malaria expert will become one over night. And likely not for the fun of it. Assuming those knowledgeable people are the proprietors of the Synaptic leap then here is my suggestion:
Put this in the context of a challenged, everyone loves a challenge right ? A bioinformatics challenge, kind of like those text mining, RNA folding, protein folding challenges. Provide an hypothesis, a data set (microarray/proteomics/interaction/structural), a question (find drug targets based on...), a suggested results format etc.
There is certainly the desire in the community to work on projects in our spare time (there is certainly diverse expertise around). Anyone who wants to harness the collective intelligence of nodalpoint just needs to pose the question in just the right way.
BTW Drupal has a distributed authentication system.
First, sorry about missing
First, sorry about missing this in the submission queue. I changed the date so it would be posted at the top (and encoded your email address). Second, Synapic Leap needs a press release (this post is to short to do it justice), I suggest if anyone has not visited the site you should do so immediately. It is very much in the spirit of open source, collaborative science, Science 2.0 or whatever it is being called these days.
I would really like to see collaborative science work. Unfortunately the scientific establishment is just sooo drab that I don't see online collaboration getting popular support. I still find myself explaining the point of wikis and online communication forums to people who have just sanctioned a multi-million dollar spending spree on all the latest gadgets for an *international* proteomics biomarker discovery collaboration.
Collaborative science is going to require a group of passionate volunteers to get it started. Someone will have to play the virtual PI and department head (or head cat herder maybe). The project will need to be compelling, I think malaria has some promise in that respect. It appeals to people's compassion, using their first-world skills to help poor people (patronizing I know, but it works).
Organization will be the key: clearly describe a compelling project, outline stages, goals, sub-projects and then collaboratively discuss and split up the tasks...
As to meeting up, well, the original nodalpoint cabal was formed in Australia (myself, Neil, Chris, Dopey). We were joined by others, strangely not many from the USA (I may be wrong ?). Since then we have dispersed around the globe (after finishing PhDs/Postdocs) and unfortunately none of us landed in the Bay Area (I'm currently in Taiwan), so no go on a meet up.
Nonetheless, I would be interested in arranging an IRC meet up to discuss the same. Interested ?