OpenWetWare Registration Information (fwd)
ben lipkowitz
This is stupid. I'm just trying to edit some wiki notes about a
thermocycler project. Don't you people know that a wiki is about
minimizing the barrier to entry?
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 2009 17:37:41 GMT
From: OpenWetWare <nor...@openwetware.org>
To: Fenn <fe...@sdf.lonestar.org>
Cc: OpenWetWare <openwetwar...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Registration Information
Hello Fenn,
Thanks for you interest in OpenWetWare! Unfortunately, we have a new
policy regarding usernames where we ask you to give your full
(publication) names. Please reapply for an account with your full name,
and we'll be happy to process the account quickly.
Apply here:
http://openwetware.org/wiki/join
We instituted this policy to give people a better sense of community and
who is editing pages. Sorry for the delay, and we hope this does not
discourage you. If you have any comments and/or concerns on this policy,
please email us.
Thank You,
OpenWetWare Admin Team
Jason Kelly
require real names, see some of it here:
http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare_talk:Username_policy
The final decision was that a scientific wiki should follow the
conventions of the scientific community, one of which is signing your
work and standing behind it.
In general, open web communities have been only lightly adopted by
scientists (as opposed to say programmers). It's an open question why
that is, but experiments like OWW are going to be needed to sort out
what it's going to take to get scientists sharing stuff online. One
idea was that real names would lead to more comfort and contribution
and although we occasionally get negative feedback, most scientists on
OWW seem to like that there are real names on the site.
I hope that you'll still decide to contribute to the site.
thanks,
jason
J. S. John
Bryan Bishop
> Yes, I ran into this problem also. I for one, would like to keep my profile
> on the web low. Unlike professors who publish their names frequently in
> journals, I would not want to at this moment. I tried to use my first
> initial and last name but that was not possible either.
For some reason a large majority of diybio content is put into
OpenWetWare, but if it's not friendly to amateurs, why are we
continuing to do that? Why don't we host a mediawiki installation on
diybio.org? But then we'd have to import all of the content over from
OpenWetWare, and it would be a mess.
The sysadmin just needs to run:
# apt-get install mediawiki
.. and then read some brief online tutorials.
If OWW is trying to position itself as a website for academics, and if
it's going to make itself clear that it doesn't want amateur
participation, then maybe content will have to go elsewhere. I hope
this isn't the case though. I know that many up in diybio-boston have
some contacts with the OWW folks (or *are* the OWW folks), so surely
this issue is understandable.
Jason Kelly
> it's going to make itself clear that it doesn't want amateur
> participation, then maybe content will have to go elsewhere. I hope
> this isn't the case though. I know that many up in diybio-boston have
> some contacts with the OWW folks (or *are* the OWW folks), so surely
> this issue is understandable.
the site requires nothing more than a proclaimed interest in biology
and your real name. That's a pretty low bar. Access to read the site
has no bar at all (compared to the large majority of scientific
information content which sits behind pay walls). It's not obvious
to me why amateurs = anonymous.
thanks,
jason
>
> >
>
ben lipkowitz
> In general, OWW is very welcoming to amateurs. Getting access to edit
> the site requires nothing more than a proclaimed interest in biology
> and your real name. That's a pretty low bar. Access to read the site
> has no bar at all (compared to the large majority of scientific
> information content which sits behind pay walls). It's not obvious
> to me why amateurs = anonymous.
If I put my real name on a piece of work, especially on a high PageRank
site like openwetware, anything I do there will immediately be thrust into
the spotlight by search engines as a representative example of "my work".
Given such publicity I'd want that work to be as awesome as humanly
possible, so as to impress potential clients, etc. This conflicts with the
pre-supposition that it's just a simple hobby.
William Heath
Meredith L. Patterson
> If I put my real name on a piece of work, especially on a high PageRank
> site like openwetware, anything I do there will immediately be thrust into
> the spotlight by search engines as a representative example of "my work".
> Given such publicity I'd want that work to be as awesome as humanly
> possible, so as to impress potential clients, etc. This conflicts with the
> pre-supposition that it's just a simple hobby.
So, if there's one thing I've learned in the couple of months I've
been participating in the DIYbio community (as opposed to working on
my own), it's "don't be afraid to be wrong in public." Biology is
hard, the learning curve is significant and the sheer amount of
knowledge one has to absorb can be pretty intimidating. Being able to
be wrong in public helps to lower the barrier to entry for other
people -- the intimidation factor goes way down.
OTOH, this can lower the signal-to-noise ratio, and certainly anyone
who wants to make a career out of this (e.g., as a consultant) has a
certain onus on them to present an impressive face to the public.
On the gripping hand, I'm in favour of anonymity/pseudonymity on
general principles, and there have been many great anonymous or
pseudonymous contributions to science and mathematics; Nicolas
Bourbaki is only one example.
Cheers,
--mlp
Jason Morrison
> been participating in the DIYbio community (as opposed to working on
Goodness, yes - I couldn't agree more.
> OTOH, this can lower the signal-to-noise ratio, and certainly anyone
> who wants to make a career out of this (e.g., as a consultant) has a
> certain onus on them to present an impressive face to the public.
I have no problem sharing publicly my early (and very amateur) open
source development. Naivety, big ideas, and few clues? Oh, yeah.
That software company I "formed" at age 12? I'm sure it's in
archive.org somewhere. Getting in *way* over my head in Google Summer
of Code? I wish the PR on that site were higher - it's truly
interesting stuff I worked on, and I hope others continue it.
This has not impeded my employment - just the opposite, in fact. I
care strongly about contributing to free software, and when I work for
a company, I want to work for a company who supports this, and who
supports the self-motivation and direction that passionate amateurs
exhibit. Ditto for when I choose to hire clients (i.e. do
consulting).
Best,
Jason
--
Jason Morrison
jason.p....@gmail.com
http://jayunit.net
(585) 216-5657
ben lipkowitz
> So, if there's one thing I've learned in the couple of months I've
> been participating in the DIYbio community (as opposed to working on
> my own), it's "don't be afraid to be wrong in public."
> On the gripping hand, I'm in favour of anonymity/pseudonymity on
> general principles, and there have been many great anonymous or
> pseudonymous contributions to science and mathematics; Nicolas
> Bourbaki is only one example.
>
> Cheers,
> --mlp
"mlp",
Over the last fifteen years on the internet, I've used a number of
handles, and eventually settled on one, which I've stuck to for the most
part of ten years. It's more my name now than my given name; it's my
chosen name. Now some bigwig wants to force me to conform to his ideal
that "all persons have two names and a middle initial" and further
insinuate that I'm "freaking out" people by practicing standard internet
culture. This is like building an open public science forum on the beach
in Hawaii, and then saying "Wait a minute, you're wearing sandals and
sunglasses, and that would freak out the scientists. This is a
professional forum after all. Come back when you've got a suit and tie."
It's not so much that I'm afraid of being wrong in public, as
that I'm used to a higher level of freedom and immediacy in online
development. When that freedom is taken away (for what appears to be no
good reason) I feel like I've been wronged, just as if I'm told I have to
wear a certain style of clothing or pretend to worship a certain god.
"The thought of the steering committee is that contributing to OpenWetWare
should be something akin to giving a poster, a talk or publishing a paper.
You use your real, full name. We want to encourage people to both take
responsibility and get credit for their work."
This ignores years and years of data about how distributed online
collaboration actually works. Typically you have one user who asks a
question, which gets a quick response. Then someone comes along a decides
to flesh out the response into an exhaustive treatise. Then there are
numerous small edits, corrections, and additions until someone asks
another question and the cycle repeats itself again. Who is the author?
Who should get "credit" and how much?
J. S. John
William Heath
Bill Flanagan
To paraphrase Pogo (an old cartoon created by the great Walt Kelly)
once said,
"We have met the OWW and they is us".
You know the people who are the OWW folks. You've been a key member of
the OWW community for at least a year. I have a huge amount of respect
for your tenacity and accomplishments. You strongly influenced our
thinking last year by discussion the archiving of content and the need
to do it in a way that you personally could hold onto. I welcome any
contributions from you both in terms of scientific data and technical
architecture.
As a consumer of data from OWW, you still are one of the top 5-10
members. I don't think anyone except Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo
download content for OWW as often as you do (I read the log files
every day;; at around 5:30 PM every night I still see the swarms of
read request in the log!) Don't get me wrong. With the cost of
bandwidth and storage, we welcome anyone to do the same.
Here's a suggestion. Both to you in particular and to anyone who has
needs that are legitimately not being fulfilled by OWW. Tell us about
it. Rather than suggesting that 'they/we' are not meeting your needs,
bring your needs to us and see what 'we' can do to accommodate your
needs. The more specific your request are, the more we can do.
Academia isn't our only focus. Improving the efficiency of research by
improving access to information relevant to biology researchers is why
we're here.
We weren't able to provide a forum on OWW for discussing DIY Bio in
the fall despite trying hard to do so. If there are things we can do
that are closer to our sweet-spot than run threaded discussion forums,
we're all willing to see how it can be done. Google does a much better
job running forums than we do; Spam has hurt us a lot on our current
lists.
We're not just a wiki but we hope people think we at least continue to
do a great job at it. We're adding more supports tools for labs to do
their work in a way that allows them to publish a lot of their work
but be selective about publishing all of it until they're ready. If
privacy is an issue, tell us about it.
Use us!
Thanks again.
Bill Flanagan
OpenWetWare.org
MIT
On Apr 15, 9:11 pm, Bryan Bishop <kanz...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 1 512 203 0507