Garage Bio Magazine

280 views
Skip to first unread message

Andrew Hessel

unread,
Jul 2, 2009, 2:31:42 PM7/2/09
to diy...@googlegroups.com
A few of us have been tossing around the idea of founding Garage Bio Magazine -- a magazine dedicated to the Garage (or kitchen, basement, closet), DIY, open source, alternative, amateur or otherwise unconventional biologist.

Topics to be explored would include the history of DIY biology, security and safety issues, profiles of leaders and workspaces, technologies and tools, entrepreneurship, training resources, forecasting, legal and social issues, and more.  The goal is to become a forum for the social, technological, and economic issues generated by the distributed use and improvement of biological technologies.

There's a healthy amount of interest in moving forward, so we've secured a web domain and mocked up a few cover templates to help visualize the idea (see below, thanks Chris!). 

While it's probably too early to do a newstand print magazine, a digital/pod (print on demand) offering, like h+ magazine, is within reach.   Having a publication platform will facilitate meeting key people, learning more about companies or laboratory groups, attending conferences, and more.  I believe it could help grow the DIYbio community, and grow in step to become a widely recongnized brand and sustainable enterprise.

To get this rolling what we need to build are management and editorial teams.  I'm interested in learning the industry side of things.  We'll need a great editor-in-chief and senior editorial team, and people that are great at getting business stuff done.  If you'd like to be involved on the exec team please contact me off list about what your experience is, what role you'd like to have, and what amount of time you could devote to this project.

Also, does anyone out there have experience with advertising sales?  Getting ads onto the pages will be crucial to supporting the effort if we want to make a quality product.

Cheers,

Andrew Hessel
Founder, Garage Bio Magazine

PS - Please forward this along to anyone or other groups that might be interested.

Garage Bio Magazine.png


J. S. John

unread,
Jul 2, 2009, 2:50:10 PM7/2/09
to diy...@googlegroups.com
Hi. Aren't you the guy anlso working on a book about DIYbio? Seems like a good idea. May I suggest that during the year or so it takes to set up, make it free to read online. Later, charge a few bucks to whoever wants to download it but free to read online. This way you can take advantage of people who want to read from their Kindle, etc.

Here's where the business model came from:
http://www.nextautos.com/Winding-Road-Magazine/

Bryan Bishop

unread,
Jul 2, 2009, 2:57:38 PM7/2/09
to diy...@googlegroups.com, kan...@gmail.com
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 1:31 PM, Andrew Hessel<ahe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> A few of us have been tossing around the idea of founding Garage Bio
> Magazine -- a magazine dedicated to the Garage (or kitchen, basement,
> closet), DIY, open source, alternative, amateur or otherwise unconventional
> biologist.

Maybe this would be a good opportunity to review the ToolBook project.

http://groups.google.com/group/diybio/msg/c8d20b68b61be80c

http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_frm/thread/4205d64009a98fce/38a473ba8e98660b?lnk=gst&q=toolbook#38a473ba8e98660b

http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_frm/thread/816e294a292f33e6/90d40e49e99807a0?lnk=gst&q=toolbook#90d40e49e99807a0

http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_frm/thread/57c91e1db7b877c8/f456aebde5952d03?lnk=gst&q=toolbook#f456aebde5952d03

http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_frm/thread/f9bae0c01ed55a8b/2d66e8d242c6721d?lnk=gst&q=toolbook#2d66e8d242c6721d

We could really kick some major ass over Make Magazine, but not by
repeating our community's mistakes.

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507

Meredith L. Patterson

unread,
Jul 2, 2009, 3:42:02 PM7/2/09
to diy...@googlegroups.com
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 8:57 PM, Bryan Bishop<kan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 1:31 PM, Andrew Hessel<ahe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> A few of us have been tossing around the idea of founding Garage Bio
>> Magazine -- a magazine dedicated to the Garage (or kitchen, basement,
>> closet), DIY, open source, alternative, amateur or otherwise unconventional
>> biologist.
>
> Maybe this would be a good opportunity to review the ToolBook project.
[snip]

> We could really kick some major ass over Make Magazine, but not by
> repeating our community's mistakes.

Not to piss in your Cheerios or anything here, Bryan, but it's worth
unpacking and examining some of the assumptions that the links you
provided seem to be making.

In particular, Eric Hunting seems to have a major hate-on for the
one-off, weekend-builder style of making stuff. Why? I don't see a
good argument for why Make Magazine-style "recipes" are as inherently,
objectively bad as he seems to think they are.

One key thing to remember about human psychology is that people like
to learn by example. As a real-life example, Noisebridge has a regular
Monday night circuit hacking workshop. People come by with electronics
projects they're working on and get help from other attendees; they
also come just to learn basic techniques, which is why Mitch Altman
keeps a stock on hand of kits he's designed. A person who's never held
a soldering iron in their life can show up on Monday night, buy a kit
for $5 at-cost, have someone show them the basics of soldering a part,
learn to do it themselves, and an hour later walk away with a
brand-new skill and a neat little gadget. It might not be all that
useful of a gadget -- does anyone actually *need* an RGB LED that
cycles through colour intensities and resets itself when you wave a
hand over it? -- but it's a cool little physical reminder of the fact
that now that person can do something they never knew how to do
before.

People also like discrete weekend projects -- things that they can
expect to complete from start to finish in a fairly well defined
period of time and not have half-finished messes lying all over the
place (she said, looking at her apartment). Recipes lend themselves
well to this.

Yet at the same time, the recipes that Hunting condemns are both
learning procedures and experimental procedures. If I decide to build
something based on an Instructable or an article in Make, I'm in no
way obligated to mindlessly follow the steps one after another; I can
take a detour or make modifications in any way I like. The recipe
gives me some reassurance that I'm not just jumping off a cliff, and
thus *encourages* me to spread my wings to the extent that I feel
comfortable doing so. And, of course, different people will feel
comfortable taking detours at different levels of skill. The girl who
came to Circuit Hacking Mondays this past week and built a Trippy RGB
Waves kit emailed the mailing list to ask for advice on what kit to
build next -- she wants some more hands-on experience before she tries
to modify an existing design (in hardware or in software) or forge
ahead with a design of her own, and *that's totally okay*.

Add to this the fact that existing search engines are doing a pretty
decent job of indexing the archives of Make, Instructables, eHow,
academic journals, and so on, and you end up with a situation where
the internet is rapidly becoming a searchable repository of HOWTOs for
things that might not be *exactly* what a person wants to do, but
which can probably be kitbashed together (perhaps with help from
subject matter experts, who have gained their expertise through
hands-on work and the fact that they love what they're doing) into a
plan for making whatever it is the person wants to make.

But perhaps I'm being needlessly reactionary. I confess I have a
difficult time piecing together, from the links you sent, exactly what
ToolBook is supposed to *be*, despite the fact that one of the posts
is supposed to be a business model for it. Bryan, how about an
elevator pitch? Hunting mentions that it's hard to get funding for
something like ToolBook; pretend I'm a VC and you have fifteen seconds
to get me excited about ToolBook. What would you tell me?

An elevator pitch like "Garage Bio Magazine is a magazine dedicated to


the Garage (or kitchen, basement, closet), DIY, open source,

alternative, amateur or otherwise unconventional biologist" is a
start. Better would be "Garage Bio Magazine is a magazine that
features articles about biology research and engineering projects that
people can safely conduct in home or community labs, along with
details of how to build useful tools at low cost and adapt existing
low-cost equipment for home use." That describes who the audience is,
what the magazine aims to provide to the audience, and -- most
importantly for anything that has a business model underlying it --
where the revenue will come from (in this case, advertisers who want
to sell their products to biohackers).

Again with the elevator pitches: what's wrong with Make Magazine, and
how would ToolBook fix it? Fifteen seconds or less.

Cheers,
--mlp

Bryan Bishop

unread,
Jul 2, 2009, 4:18:49 PM7/2/09
to diy...@googlegroups.com, kan...@gmail.com
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 2:42 PM, Meredith L. Patterson
<clon...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 8:57 PM, Bryan Bishop <kan...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 1:31 PM, Andrew Hessel <ahe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> A few of us have been tossing around the idea of founding Garage Bio
>>> Magazine -- a magazine dedicated to the Garage (or kitchen, basement,
>>> closet), DIY, open source, alternative, amateur or otherwise unconventional
>>> biologist.
>>
>> Maybe this would be a good opportunity to review the ToolBook project.
> [snip]
>> We could really kick some major ass over Make Magazine, but not by
>> repeating our community's mistakes.
>
> Not to piss in your Cheerios or anything here, Bryan, but it's worth

I'm just happy you're replying.

> unpacking and examining some of the assumptions that the links you
> provided seem to be making.

Okay.

> In particular, Eric Hunting seems to have a major hate-on for the
> one-off, weekend-builder style of making stuff. Why? I don't see a

Can you substantiate that? I am the one who has that hate, but I don't
think Eric does.

> good argument for why Make Magazine-style "recipes" are as inherently,
> objectively bad as he seems to think they are.

I don't think he's the one who thinks they are so terrible. But since
*I* do, they are as inherently bad because we can do better, so we
should support our own progress as much as we can. Transmitting
engineering data by taking fuzzy lossy photographs is just silly .. we
can do better.

> One key thing to remember about human psychology is that people like
> to learn by example. As a real-life example, Noisebridge has a regular

Yep, remember the plans for the 3D visualizations for "by example" of
running through various recipes? There was a thread "way back when".

> Monday night circuit hacking workshop. People come by with electronics
> projects they're working on and get help from other attendees; they
> also come just to learn basic techniques, which is why Mitch Altman
> keeps a stock on hand of kits he's designed. A person who's never held
> a soldering iron in their life can show up on Monday night, buy a kit
> for $5 at-cost, have someone show them the basics of soldering a part,
> learn to do it themselves, and an hour later walk away with a
> brand-new skill and a neat little gadget. It might not be all that
> useful of a gadget -- does anyone actually *need* an RGB LED that
> cycles through colour intensities and resets itself when you wave a
> hand over it? -- but it's a cool little physical reminder of the fact
> that now that person can do something they never knew how to do
> before.

Does he have a standard kit packaging system or something? I'd like to
try using it.

> People also like discrete weekend projects -- things that they can
> expect to complete from start to finish in a fairly well defined
> period of time and not have half-finished messes lying all over the
> place (she said, looking at her apartment). Recipes lend themselves
> well to this.

I don't see how any of that conflicts with anything ever.

> Yet at the same time, the recipes that Hunting condemns are both
> learning procedures and experimental procedures. If I decide to build
> something based on an Instructable or an article in Make, I'm in no
> way obligated to mindlessly follow the steps one after another; I can
> take a detour or make modifications in any way I like. The recipe
> gives me some reassurance that I'm not just jumping off a cliff, and
> thus *encourages* me to spread my wings to the extent that I feel
> comfortable doing so. And, of course, different people will feel

Eric is not the type of person to encode malicious tactics to clip
your wings. I don't know why you would think that a recipe would clip
your wings. I am very confused right now.

> Add to this the fact that existing search engines are doing a pretty
> decent job of indexing the archives of Make, Instructables, eHow,
> academic journals, and so on, and you end up with a situation where

What?! That's total nonsense. The search engines are terrible at
archiving this information because it's terribly represented. Go ask
somebody who has to search the patent database.. big blocks of text
are no way to convey CAD models, for instance. The same with recipes.
That's why most recipes and protocols for wetlabs are clearly
formatted (but I think the representation can be even better, as we've
discussed before too). And as for academic journals, the work that is
talked about in the papers are hardly ever the actual work that was
done. For instance, in the software journals, the paper is rarely the
code .. so anybody that reads the paper a year from now and goes
"wow!" has to go reverse engineer the hell out of it, even though the
code could have been published in the first place. This is analogous
across the literature, not just in the software sector, of course.

> the internet is rapidly becoming a searchable repository of HOWTOs for

That's true to some extent, but what's wrong with making it better?

> But perhaps I'm being needlessly reactionary. I confess I have a
> difficult time piecing together, from the links you sent, exactly what
> ToolBook is supposed to *be*, despite the fact that one of the posts

Oh. You should have mentioned that earlier :-).

> is supposed to be a business model for it. Bryan, how about an
> elevator pitch? Hunting mentions that it's hard to get funding for
> something like ToolBook; pretend I'm a VC and you have fifteen seconds
> to get me excited about ToolBook. What would you tell me?

It's a plan to do better than O'Reilly. To be honest, I found it weird
that Eric was immediately proposing a business model (who does that
before writing any code or doing any engineering?), since this is
something that could be done without a business anyway- and honestly,
I think it should be done anyway (I mean regardless of whether or not
there is a business). It's essentially the skdb project except
supposedly legible to people who don't happen to be the developers.

> An elevator pitch like "Garage Bio Magazine is a magazine dedicated to
> the Garage (or kitchen, basement, closet), DIY, open source,
> alternative, amateur or otherwise unconventional biologist" is a
> start. Better would be "Garage Bio Magazine is a magazine that
> features articles about biology research and engineering projects that
> people can safely conduct in home or community labs, along with
> details of how to build useful tools at low cost and adapt existing
> low-cost equipment for home use." That describes who the audience is,
> what the magazine aims to provide to the audience, and -- most
> importantly for anything that has a business model underlying it --
> where the revenue will come from (in this case, advertisers who want
> to sell their products to biohackers).
>
> Again with the elevator pitches: what's wrong with Make Magazine, and
> how would ToolBook fix it? Fifteen seconds or less.

Meredith, maybe you could help me out. We both know that the data
representation in Make Magazine [and instructables, and thingiverse,
ponoko, shapeways, liquidware, etc. etc.] can do better. But the
problem is that nobody who doesn't know what the hell a data
representation is, is going to bother to think that something needs to
be done about it.

JonathanCline

unread,
Jul 3, 2009, 12:20:03 AM7/3/09
to DIYbio, jcl...@ieee.org
On Jul 2, 3:18 pm, Bryan Bishop <kanz...@gmail.com> wrote:
> the data
> representation in Make Magazine [and instructables, and thingiverse,
> ponoko, shapeways, liquidware, etc. etc.] can do better.

Maybe it's a problem not worthy of solving at this time. In the 80's
all the computer advertisements prodded consumers to "buy a computer!
keep it in the kitchen for tracking all your recipes and grocery
lists! So convenient!" Fast forward to 2009. Name one person
today who uses a computer to track either recipes or grocery / fridge
inventory or has a server in their kitchen for even web browsing (even
recipe tracking on the iPhone isn't a fave). Massive VC money has
been spent by people to develop great ideas like this, especially
during dot com (fridge computers, tablet "appliance" computers,
grocery store web-buy services wow was that a huge failure and lost
millions of $$). They seemingly never asked: "Do people even want
this?", to which the answer would have been: "No". To find recipes,
go to a web search engine, not some abstract data representation
database with wifi and robotic arms and inventory control (although
there are some niches out there like the old RecipeMaster software,
minus robotic arms). It is not a question of "doing better" it is a
question of "what is the problem which people need solving right
now?" Academia is great at investigating and prototyping solutions to
problems that don't exist or might exist at some time in 25 years.
Joe The Plumber DIY Guy wants to make a simple cake and then eat it.
You can't "make install chocolate cake" now or next year and I will
bet that most will not want to in the next 10 years (except for 10
people in the world who build a cake-making robot for the challenge of
doing so). Same with MAKE and their cutesy articles: they publish
what people are willing to do and capable of doing today (100 ways to
make LED's blink) and data representation does not help this.

If you think MAKE or O'Reilly is doing a poor job, and you can do
better, then put together a set of articles and see if they want to
publish it, then go your own way anyway to publish it yourself,
laughing at them when you become a best seller (or learn a valuable
lesson during the process).


With regards to magazines, "biotech hobbyist magazine", released in
2004, had a single issue [1]. Maybe related, or not, is the
"Biotech hobbyist's Personal Biocomputer" also from 2004, which I
uploaded to the files section [2].

[1] http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/biotechhobbyist
[2] http://groups.google.com/group/diybio/files


In random other DIY, the following 2004 paper describes a Microchip
PIC16F877 thermocycler using the AD594 chip with mechanical drawings
of the heating block, using inductive coils for heating instead of
Peltier junctions. Interesting content for a garage bio magazine. If
OpenWetWare had existed then and had an svn repository back in 2004,
perhaps these authors might have checked in their source code (either
C or assembly).

A power-efficient thermocycler based on induction heating for DNA
amplification by polymerase chain reaction (2004)
http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/2753/1/Thermocycler_based.pdf




## Jonathan Cline
## jcl...@ieee.org
## Mobile: +1-805-617-0223
########################

Andrew Hessel

unread,
Jul 3, 2009, 4:15:33 AM7/3/09
to diy...@googlegroups.com
Thanks for the quick feedback, folks.

Again, if you're interested in being a part of the organizing team, please let me know.  I'll follow up with you personally and then arrange for a group skype meeting later in the month.

Jason noted that the mockup covers I'd inserted inline into the mail didn't attach properly.  I'll attach them the conventional way.  Thanks again to Chris Adamson of Edmonton for his design brainstorming.

Cheers,
Andrew

gbm_earthcover.jpg
gbm_sheepcover.jpg

Meredith L. Patterson

unread,
Jul 3, 2009, 4:19:54 AM7/3/09
to diy...@googlegroups.com
On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 10:15 AM, Andrew Hessel<ahe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Jason noted that the mockup covers I'd inserted inline into the mail didn't
> attach properly.  I'll attach them the conventional way.  Thanks again to
> Chris Adamson of Edmonton for his design brainstorming.

Great logo, great layout. It'd definitely catch my attention in a store.

Silly suggestion -- what would it look like with four bars under
"GarageBio", rather than three? (For A, C, T, G, naturally.)

Cheers,
--mlp

Parijata Mackey

unread,
Jul 3, 2009, 4:35:20 AM7/3/09
to diy...@googlegroups.com
On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 1:19 AM, Meredith L. Patterson <clon...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 10:15 AM, Andrew Hessel<ahe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Jason noted that the mockup covers I'd inserted inline into the mail didn't
> attach properly.  I'll attach them the conventional way.  Thanks again to
> Chris Adamson of Edmonton for his design brainstorming.

Great logo, great layout. It'd definitely catch my attention in a store.

It's fantastic! I'm in love with it!!

Silly suggestion -- what would it look like with four bars under
"GarageBio", rather than three? (For A, C, T, G, naturally.)

Incidentally, I'm also in love with this suggestion ;-)


Cheers,
--mlp





--
Parijata Mackey
University of Chicago
pari...@gmail.com
www.parijata.com

--

"Have patience with all yet unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and foreign scripts. Do not now seek the answers. They cannot yet be given because you could not yet live them -- and the point is to live everything. At the present, you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day."

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Bryan Bishop

unread,
Jul 3, 2009, 5:03:17 AM7/3/09
to diy...@googlegroups.com, kan...@gmail.com
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 11:20 PM, JonathanCline wrote:
> On Jul 2, 3:18 pm, Bryan Bishop wrote:
>> the data
>> representation in Make Magazine [and instructables, and thingiverse,
>> ponoko, shapeways, liquidware, etc. etc.] can do better.

Thanks for the reply Jonathan, as always.

> Maybe it's a problem not worthy of solving at this time.  In the 80's
> all the computer advertisements prodded consumers to "buy a computer!
> keep it in the kitchen for tracking all your recipes and grocery
> lists!  So convenient!"    Fast forward to 2009.  Name one person
> today who uses a computer to track either recipes or grocery / fridge

Me.

> inventory or has a server in their kitchen for even web browsing (even

Me.

> recipe tracking on the iPhone isn't a fave).  Massive VC money has
> been spent by people to develop great ideas like this, especially

Really? This doesn't take any money whatsoever.

> during dot com (fridge computers, tablet "appliance" computers,
> grocery store web-buy services wow was that a huge failure and lost

There are still grocery store web-buy services.

> millions of $$).   They seemingly never asked: "Do people even want

Maybe they shouldn't have invested millions in the first place.

> this?", to which the answer would have been:  "No".  To find recipes,
> go to a web search engine, not some abstract data representation
> database with wifi and robotic arms and inventory control (although
> there are some niches out there like the old RecipeMaster software,
> minus robotic arms).  It is not a question of "doing better" it is a
> question of "what is the problem which people need solving right
> now?"  Academia is great at investigating and prototyping solutions to

I think that you don't understand that I' am not interested in whether
or not people agree that it is a problem worthy of solving .. only
that they understand what it is that I am doing, so in the off chance
that there are developers (whether named Jonathan or named Meredith or
Jordan) who happen to understand what's going on, they might be
interested in contributing. Whether or not people agree with it is
completely out of the question ... I am already fairly certain that
these tools are going to be the same tools that Pink Army is finding
useful, the tools that my lab is finding useful, etc. Naturally, a
magazine can benefit from these tools as well, as a technology
distribution service. I realize now however after re-reading Andrew's
email that it might not be focused on technology distribution.

> problems that don't exist or might exist at some time in 25 years.
> Joe The Plumber DIY Guy wants to make a simple cake and then eat it.
> You can't "make install chocolate cake" now or next year and I will

Why not?

> bet that most will not want to in the next 10 years (except for 10
> people in the world who build a cake-making robot for the challenge of
> doing so).   Same with MAKE and their cutesy articles: they publish

I don't think that you need a cake making robot to do that. Spitting
out the recipe might be sufficient, I think.

> what people are willing to do and capable of doing today (100 ways to
> make LED's blink) and data representation does not help this.

The images that they publish is data. The format is a representation.

> If you think MAKE or O'Reilly is doing a poor job, and you can do
> better, then put together a set of articles and see if they want to
> publish it, then go your own way anyway to publish it yourself,
> laughing at them when you become a best seller (or learn a valuable
> lesson during the process).

*or* I can post to diybio letting you guys know about these better
tools in the work and get you to help out in their development, so
that we don't reinvent the wheel, repeat mistakes, etc.

> In random other DIY, the following 2004 paper describes a Microchip
> PIC16F877 thermocycler using the AD594 chip with mechanical drawings
> of the heating block, using inductive coils for heating instead of
> Peltier junctions.  Interesting content for a garage bio magazine.  If
> OpenWetWare had existed then and had an svn repository back in 2004,
> perhaps these authors might have checked in their source code (either
> C or assembly).

OpenWetWare doesn't seem to be listening to our requests any more. :-(
Nathan set up a new server, but it's a shame that Nathan had to do
that.

> A power-efficient thermocycler based on induction heating for DNA
> amplification by polymerase chain reaction (2004)
> http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/2753/1/Thermocycler_based.pdf

Thanks for the link. :-) Since it's too early in the morning for me to
think straight, I'll have to get to that later.

Andrew Hessel

unread,
Jul 3, 2009, 11:25:01 AM7/3/09
to diy...@googlegroups.com, Chris Adamson
Thanks!  Great suggestion.
--
Andrew Hessel
780.868.3169
ahe...@gmail.com

tyso...@gmail.com

unread,
Jul 12, 2009, 9:24:03 PM7/12/09
to DIYbio
I love this idea. I want to help this magazine in anyway I can. Just
let me know ok.

Mackenzie Cowell

unread,
Jul 13, 2009, 6:05:51 PM7/13/09
to diy...@googlegroups.com
Hi All,

Over the last few days I've been thinking a lot about collaboration and publication models for amateur scientists & engineers.  How do we collaborate with each other?  How are we sharing the techniques, tricks, solutions, progress, and results of our particular projects, and how do we team up with one another to tackle shared goals?

On a daily basis, a typical scientist records raw data in a lab notebook somewhere, sometimes online.  Over time the scientist is able to analyze the data to tell a story about their progress, usually verbally at a conference, perhaps with a poster, and occasionally with a blog post (more and more often).  After a year or two, the scientist may be able to publish a formal article describing their progress in a peer-reviewed journal.  The conference talks, poster, and eventual article are what other scientists use to inform their own research and are what lead to collaborations between groups.  Additionally, researchers in the same lab often collaborate with one another.

Right now, the main mode of disseminating progress on diybio projects is the diybio google group and a variety of blogs that different amateurs have set up.  This is ok, but I'm never sure if I'm actually staying up to date with the variety of projects out there or if new projects have been initiated but never described to the list.  I think anything that could help index progress on actual diybio projects would be incredibly useful, and a particular boon to newcomers, who often have no idea what is actually being accomplished by the community or how to begin collaborating with existing projects.

So I'm excited about us building a publication that stimulates members of the community to contribute coherent tips, techniques, and progress on their projects.  I don't think the mailing list is doing a good enough job at stimulating well-formed contributions.  I do think mash-up of openwetware, MAKE magazine, and a peer-reviewed journal full of contributions from the community would catalyze further progress and collaboration.

I think it is critical that the publication we develop be searchable by google and readable online.  I think we should consider turning the diybio.org website into this publication.  I think we should approach the publishers of MAKE magazine about publishing some kind of periodic, edited hard-copy form of the publication, but I don't think there should be a 1-to-1 correspondance between the printed publication and the online publication platform.

I'm excited.

Mac

On Sun, Jul 12, 2009 at 6:24 PM, tyso...@gmail.com <tyso...@gmail.com> wrote:

I love this idea. I want to help this magazine in anyway I can. Just
let me know ok.





--
p: 231.313.9062
e: m...@diybio.org
tw: @macowell

Bryan Bishop

unread,
Jul 13, 2009, 6:19:54 PM7/13/09
to diy...@googlegroups.com, kan...@gmail.com
On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 5:05 PM, Mackenzie Cowell wrote:
> Hi All,

Hey Mac. Grit your teeth, because I know you're going to be mad at me.

> Over the last few days I've been thinking a lot about collaboration and
> publication models for amateur scientists & engineers.  How do we

Have you been thinking about software publication models too? That's
what open source is based off of, after all, and it works very well.
Has few remaining bugs. Lots of tutorials out there. Anybody can just
search around and read up on how to do it, or install the software
themselves to figure it out.

Maybe one good example is the GNU electronics design automation
project, since it's both programmers and electronics, which are
hardware projects, and since diybio is interested in hardware
projects, maybe it would be a good idea to see what people have
already thought of in terms of collaboration instead of reinventing
the wheel?

> collaborate with each other?

svn, git, irc, yaml, CAD files, package distribution indices

> How are we sharing the techniques, tricks,
> solutions, progress, and results of our particular projects, and how do we

Most people aren't.

> team up with one another to tackle shared goals?

By not reinventing the wheel unless absolutely necessary after
reviewing existing solutions.

> On a daily basis, a typical scientist records raw data in a lab notebook
> somewhere, sometimes online.  Over time the scientist is able to analyze the
> data to tell a story about their progress, usually verbally at a conference,
> perhaps with a poster, and occasionally with a blog post (more and more
> often).  After a year or two, the scientist may be able to publish a formal
> article describing their progress in a peer-reviewed journal.  The

But like we were talking about a few months ago here-- a paper isn't
necessarily the most optimal format for communicating information. For
instance, today I got the source code to a master thesis' project from
one of the labs that I am presently working in. There was this huge
200+ page masters thesis, and at least three or four papers written
about this "technique". It would take at least a weekend or longer to
boil down through the bullshit.

The source code on the other hand? It consisted entirely of six
conditionals (if-then statements). Yeah. Papers are not optimal.

> Right now, the main mode of disseminating progress on diybio projects is the
> diybio google group and a variety of blogs that different amateurs have set
> up.  This is ok, but I'm never sure if I'm actually staying up to date with

Well, I guess if you ignore the members' repositories, yeah, then it's
"just a bunch of posts".

http://github.com/kanzure/skdb

> the variety of projects out there or if new projects have been initiated but

Were you ever up to date? Was I ever up to date?

> never described to the list.  I think anything that could help index
> progress on actual diybio projects would be incredibly useful, and a

That's how debian does it. This is exactly what a package management
system is for, and skdb is already becoming increasingly implemented.

> particular boon to newcomers, who often have no idea what is actually being
> accomplished by the community or how to begin collaborating with existing
> projects.

Well, collaboration involves reading a lot of tutorials, starting with
the FAQ. There are many tutorials on the 'net that try to introduce
people to how to do open source collaboration.

> So I'm excited about us building a publication that stimulates members of
> the community to contribute coherent tips, techniques, and progress on their

What about ToolBook? Did you read over those emails? What were your
thoughts on that?

> projects.  I don't think the mailing list is doing a good enough job at
> stimulating well-formed contributions.  I do think mash-up of openwetware,

I think that "well-formed" should be computationally defined. What about you?

> MAKE magazine, and a peer-reviewed journal full of contributions from the

peer-reviewed?

> community would catalyze further progress and collaboration.

Do you think adopting open source software wouldn't do the same thing?
Why do you think that relying on old magazine models is the way to
catalyze further progress? Just wondering. I don't mean to sound
harsh, but magazines *are* an old model (and yeah they are still
somewhat useful when that's the best they can come up with).

> I think it is critical that the publication we develop be searchable by
> google and readable online.  I think we should consider turning the

Yep, sure.

> diybio.org website into this publication.  I think we should approach the

What about turning diybio into a ToolBook hub?

> publishers of MAKE magazine about publishing some kind of periodic, edited
> hard-copy form of the publication, but I don't think there should be a
> 1-to-1 correspondance between the printed publication and the online
> publication platform.

IMHO, we can do better than MAKE.

Mackenzie Cowell

unread,
Jul 13, 2009, 6:26:35 PM7/13/09
to diy...@googlegroups.com, kan...@gmail.com
I will spend time answering Bryan's comments if anyone besides him seriously wants me  to put in the time to do so.  If so, simply +1. 

Meredith L. Patterson

unread,
Jul 13, 2009, 7:43:12 PM7/13/09
to diy...@googlegroups.com
+1, because if there's going to be a fight, then fucking have it
already and quit carping at each other. Man up, both of you, and speak
your minds for once.

Yes, I am entirely serious.

--mlp

Marnia Johnston

unread,
Jul 13, 2009, 7:56:58 PM7/13/09
to diy...@googlegroups.com
+1
-Marnia Johnston

Christopher Kelty

unread,
Jul 13, 2009, 11:38:34 PM7/13/09
to diy...@googlegroups.com
+1

but a question to Mac:  are you serious when you say "collaboration and publication models for amateur scientists & engineers"?

because I know Bryan is.

I wonder, with this debate, whether there are really two competing goals for DIY bio: 1) to do bioscience and engineering as well as or better than university and corporate science or 2) to allow people outside of universities and corporations access to and the capacity to learn and tinker with biological concepts and tools. It's  subtle distinction and   they may not be mutually exclusive, but there is definitely a different set of priniciples involved with doing one or the other.

ck

Joseph Jackson

unread,
Jul 14, 2009, 12:36:14 AM7/14/09
to DIYbio
+1

Remember we're on the same side here. There is nothing that says you
can't make a shiny flashy nifty magazine distribution to appeal to one
audience while Bryan does the hard core technical infrastructure
building to serve another set. The beauty of peer production is that
anyone can try to demonstrate the validity of their approach.
Ultimately, the magazine format alone will not cut it for codifying
the enormous amounts of information already out there, not to mention
what's to come.

There are a LOT of people working on the problem of what the future of
scientific collaboration and publication will look like. Bryan, I'm
happy to set up intros for you to talk to John Wilbanks, Cameron
Neylon, Barend Mons of the newly launched Concept Web Alliance (a
semantic web for life sciences consortium) and others who could
respond to your concerns and frustrations and tell you what kind of
tools they're working on. At the same, the magazine would at least be
a start toward greater awareness of DIYbio.

Joseph Jackson

unread,
Jul 14, 2009, 12:39:14 AM7/14/09
to DIYbio

Mackenzie Cowell

unread,
Jul 15, 2009, 3:16:08 AM7/15/09
to diy...@googlegroups.com, kan...@gmail.com
On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 3:19 PM, Bryan Bishop <kan...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 5:05 PM, Mackenzie Cowell wrote:
> > Hi All,
>
> Hey Mac. Grit your teeth, because I know you're going to be mad at me.
>
> > Over the last few days I've been thinking a lot about collaboration and
> > publication models for amateur scientists & engineers.  How do we
>
> Have you been thinking about software publication models too? That's
> what open source is based off of, after all, and it works very well.
> Has few remaining bugs. Lots of tutorials out there. Anybody can just
> search around and read up on how to do it, or install the software
> themselves to figure it out.

I'm readying Steven Levy's Hacker book to try and understand how the
3+ generations of hackers he described coalesced, collaborated, and
shared their work.

> Maybe one good example is the GNU electronics design automation
> project, since it's both programmers and electronics, which are
> hardware projects, and since diybio is interested in hardware
> projects, maybe it would be a good idea to see what people have
> already thought of in terms of collaboration instead of reinventing
> the wheel?

Sounds interesting. I suggest you be in charge of the DIYbio software
repository and of establishing the culture for software project
collaboration, since you are so interested in it. We can raise money
to pay for hosting costs if that's what you need.

>
> > collaborate with each other?
>
> svn, git, irc, yaml, CAD files, package distribution indices

Your ballpark.

>
> > How are we sharing the techniques, tricks,
> > solutions, progress, and results of our particular projects, and how do we
>
> Most people aren't.

That's the problem. More than anything we need to demonstrate a clear
way to do so and to incentivize it.

>
> > team up with one another to tackle shared goals?
>
> By not reinventing the wheel unless absolutely necessary after
> reviewing existing solutions.
>
> > On a daily basis, a typical scientist records raw data in a lab notebook
> > somewhere, sometimes online.  Over time the scientist is able to analyze the
> > data to tell a story about their progress, usually verbally at a conference,
> > perhaps with a poster, and occasionally with a blog post (more and more
> > often).  After a year or two, the scientist may be able to publish a formal
> > article describing their progress in a peer-reviewed journal.  The
>
> But like we were talking about a few months ago here-- a paper isn't
> necessarily the most optimal format for communicating information. For
> instance, today I got the source code to a master thesis' project from
> one of the labs that I am presently working in. There was this huge
> 200+ page masters thesis, and at least three or four papers written
> about this "technique". It would take at least a weekend or longer to
> boil down through the bullshit.
>
> The source code on the other hand? It consisted entirely of six
> conditionals (if-then statements). Yeah. Papers are not optimal.

Might be true for verbose computer science theses. Fortunately, as
non-institutional scientists, we are free of a lot of the pressures
that force researchers to conform to publishing norms, since we don't
*have* to compete for grant money with them (but we could). Hence we
have more of an opportunity to explore new publishing modes.

>
> > Right now, the main mode of disseminating progress on diybio projects is the
> > diybio google group and a variety of blogs that different amateurs have set
> > up.  This is ok, but I'm never sure if I'm actually staying up to date with
>
> Well, I guess if you ignore the members' repositories, yeah, then it's
> "just a bunch of posts".

I don't know anything about the member's repositories. Would you say
that most people are ignoring them like me or are they using them?
>
> http://github.com/kanzure/skdb
>
> > the variety of projects out there or if new projects have been initiated but
>
> Were you ever up to date? Was I ever up to date?
>
> > never described to the list.  I think anything that could help index
> > progress on actual diybio projects would be incredibly useful, and a
>
> That's how debian does it. This is exactly what a package management
> system is for, and skdb is already becoming increasingly implemented.
>
> > particular boon to newcomers, who often have no idea what is actually being
> > accomplished by the community or how to begin collaborating with existing
> > projects.
>
> Well, collaboration involves reading a lot of tutorials, starting with
> the FAQ. There are many tutorials on the 'net that try to introduce
> people to how to do open source collaboration.

Please direct me to the best 3.

>
> > So I'm excited about us building a publication that stimulates members of
> > the community to contribute coherent tips, techniques, and progress on their
>
> What about ToolBook? Did you read over those emails? What were your
> thoughts on that?

I don't recall the details. My general sense was that it was a neat
concept, but mostly vaporware that 99% of the community wouldn't use
anytime soon.

>
> > projects.  I don't think the mailing list is doing a good enough job at
> > stimulating well-formed contributions.  I do think mash-up of openwetware,
>
> I think that "well-formed" should be computationally defined. What about you?

I'm not sure what you're getting at. I do think many of your posts
(like linkdumps and cross-posts from other lists) are not constructive
because they require too much reinterpretation from the reader.

>
> > MAKE magazine, and a peer-reviewed journal full of contributions from the
>
> peer-reviewed?

I think some combination of the three would be an interesting hybrid
to pursue. We have an opportunity to drastically re-imagine peer
review.

>
> > community would catalyze further progress and collaboration.
>
> Do you think adopting open source software wouldn't do the same thing?
> Why do you think that relying on old magazine models is the way to
> catalyze further progress? Just wondering. I don't mean to sound
> harsh, but magazines *are* an old model (and yeah they are still
> somewhat useful when that's the best they can come up with).

I never said anything about old magazine models. I'm trying to
express my excitement over the possibility of us inventing a new
model. I guess what you wrote is really intended for Andrew - I'll
let him respond to you (why didn't you post that to his original
message?).

>
> > I think it is critical that the publication we develop be searchable by
> > google and readable online.  I think we should consider turning the
>
> Yep, sure.
>
> > diybio.org website into this publication.  I think we should approach the
>
> What about turning diybio into a ToolBook hub?

Sure, let's set up toolbook.diybio.org; what do I need to get for you
to enable you to do that?

>
> > publishers of MAKE magazine about publishing some kind of periodic, edited
> > hard-copy form of the publication, but I don't think there should be a
> > 1-to-1 correspondance between the printed publication and the online
> > publication platform.
>
> IMHO, we can do better than MAKE.

Your optimism is intoxicating.

Bryan, I'm not mad at you at all and I'm not sure why you expected I
would be. I'm also surprised that the other posters to this thread
expected a "fight". I personally don't have anything to contribute
right now to your software projects, and I'm trying not to be a
barrier to you accomplishing them. So tell me how to get out of the
way and I will.

Also, I'm currently travelling (until Aug 12) and don't have a
computer, so there may be a bit of lag in my replies.

I want to stress again that I am only tangentially interested in a
purely traditional magazine. I'm more interested in helping bring
real diybio progress to the fore through publication beyond our basic
google group. My sense right now is that a badass,
consistently-updated blog featuring updates from people actually
making progress on diybio projects would directly address this need.
The goal is immediate and could dovetail nicely with Andrew's magazine
project. It's also basic enough that it could develop into something
else entirely, merging with OWW or your skdb or toolbook or whatever.
In the longer term, I hope the non-institutional community explores
and demonstrates new, better, more innovative publishing frameworks
for all kinds of research. As you point out, computer hackers have
been doing this basically from the beginning. Let's do the same for
biology.

Mac

>
> - Bryan
> http://heybryan.org/
> 1 512 203 0507
>
> >



Bryan Bishop

unread,
Jul 15, 2009, 9:58:17 AM7/15/09
to Mackenzie Cowell, kan...@gmail.com, diy...@googlegroups.com
On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 2:16 AM, Mackenzie Cowell wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 3:19 PM, Bryan Bishop wrote:
>> On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 5:05 PM, Mackenzie Cowell wrote:
>> > Hi All,
>>
>> Hey Mac. Grit your teeth, because I know you're going to be mad at me.
>>
>> > Over the last few days I've been thinking a lot about collaboration and
>> > publication models for amateur scientists & engineers.  How do we
>>
>> Have you been thinking about software publication models too? That's
>> what open source is based off of, after all, and it works very well.
>> Has few remaining bugs. Lots of tutorials out there. Anybody can just
>> search around and read up on how to do it, or install the software
>> themselves to figure it out.
>
> I'm readying Steven Levy's Hacker book to try and understand how the
> 3+ generations of hackers he described coalesced, collaborated, and
> shared their work.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/729

I haven't read it yet, but I certainly should. Looking over the
Wikipedia article, it looks like the last chapter mentions GNU, but
that's really where lots of fun and exciting things that you need to
know about started happening, especially when it comes to diybio.
Maybe it would be better if you watch Revolution OS? It's about an
hour and thirty minutes and picks up where Levy's book seems to leave
off.

Revolution OS
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7707585592627775409

The video does *not* describe "the how"- like how to go about
submitting patches, or why patches are better than just yelling at
people, etc. It provides a broad overview however of where the Free
Software Foundation came from, and about the Open Source Initiative,
Cygnus, all sorts of other legends as well.

>> Maybe one good example is the GNU electronics design automation
>> project, since it's both programmers and electronics, which are
>> hardware projects, and since diybio is interested in hardware
>> projects, maybe it would be a good idea to see what people have
>> already thought of in terms of collaboration instead of reinventing
>> the wheel?
>
> Sounds interesting.  I suggest you be in charge of the DIYbio software
> repository and of establishing the culture for software project
> collaboration, since you are so interested in it.  We can raise money
> to pay for hosting costs if that's what you need.

What I need is for you to understand the projects and what I am doing
.. so that we don't have to repeat each other's mistakes. I am not
here to establish culture (the culture is already established). It
isn't just 'software', remember- the idea is to unite hardware and
software so that the software makes it easier to make the hardware,
and the hardware makes it easier to diy (or making the hardware is
diy). I don't think that hosting costs are the issue, but I can't say
no to free money. A while back I was talking about how we could have a
core group of package maintainers that would package the hardware
projects into a format that would make them more easily usable-- a
sort of "technology distribution" for the amateur scientist. The
package maintainers are the guys and gals who have to know the
hardcore specifics, but (by analogy) not everyone in the redhat
communities has to know how to package up software, nor should they-
that's what the packages exist for in the first place.. but this is
hard to describe. I highly recommend running a live CD of ubuntu or
knoppix or something sometime.

I was describing this to my 13 year-old sister the other day. She
bought a new computer, and she had Vista on it and was complaining
about it, so I taught her how to download ubuntu, how to burn it to a
CD, how to turn off her computer (this was the tough part!), how to
put in the CD and boot up the computer into ubuntu. When she's done,
she takes out the CD and reboots the computer and it's back to the
world of Vista. But in the mean time .. it's all free software, all
the time. It's a nice sandbox environment for sinking your teeth into
the world of free software and various software tools for diybio
(especially biopython and HeeksCAD among others). (Ok, HeeksCAD works
on Windows too, but I can't (won't?) provide support for that
particular approach.)

It's lightyears easier to play around with svn, git, etc., when you
just have to do one thing before you're able to play with it. On
Windows I recall all sorts of complicated steps involving cygwin. In
one of the labs I work in, I had everyone on Windows deploy
TortoiseSVN, which is this weird Windows Explorer plugin. I dislike
it. I think the Mac OS X folks might be able to run the programs
natively without hassle, but I am unsure.

Should everyone have to do this to get involved? Hell freakin' no.
There should be a beautiful fancy web interface that lets people get
involved in projects, there should be tutorials and documentation,
there should be a way to make all of this easier. But these web
interfaces have to go on top of "the backend", what's "under the
hood". In a car, you have a fancy console with a steering wheel and a
variety of buttons, but it's hiding what's under the hood and how the
machine operates. To test an engine, you have to build the engine.
Then you can let people drive the engine around. :-)

>> > collaborate with each other?
>>
>> svn, git, irc, yaml, CAD files, package distribution indices
>
> Your ballpark.

Maybe, but it doesn't matter if nobody understands why people have
been using tools like these forever. For instance, Meredith is going
to be setting up a repository for the svg files for inkscape
microfluidic designs (soon), so clearly it's not entirely my ballpark
.. I think everyone who has been drawing designs in inkscape should be
posting to an official diybio repository. Inkscape is different from
other drawing apps for a variety of reasons (in particular, SVG is a
better format than distributing around bitmasks (BMPs) since it's
somewhat more human readable).

Anyway, community standards matter.

>> > How are we sharing the techniques, tricks,
>> > solutions, progress, and results of our particular projects, and how do we
>>
>> Most people aren't.
>
> That's the problem.  More than anything we need to demonstrate a clear
> way to do so and to incentivize it.

Sure, I agree, but some of the parts of the puzzle aren't there yet.
Posting giant blobs of text and instructables is taking a step
backwards .. I think we need more discussion among the package
maintainers.

>> > team up with one another to tackle shared goals?
>>
>> By not reinventing the wheel unless absolutely necessary after
>> reviewing existing solutions.

I was serious.

>> > On a daily basis, a typical scientist records raw data in a lab notebook
>> > somewhere, sometimes online.  Over time the scientist is able to analyze the
>> > data to tell a story about their progress, usually verbally at a conference,
>> > perhaps with a poster, and occasionally with a blog post (more and more
>> > often).  After a year or two, the scientist may be able to publish a formal
>> > article describing their progress in a peer-reviewed journal.  The
>>
>> But like we were talking about a few months ago here-- a paper isn't
>> necessarily the most optimal format for communicating information. For
>> instance, today I got the source code to a master thesis' project from
>> one of the labs that I am presently working in. There was this huge
>> 200+ page masters thesis, and at least three or four papers written
>> about this "technique". It would take at least a weekend or longer to
>> boil down through the bullshit.
>>
>> The source code on the other hand? It consisted entirely of six
>> conditionals (if-then statements). Yeah. Papers are not optimal.
>
> Might be true for verbose computer science theses.  Fortunately, as

Also true for all sorts of other areas of the literature. Btw, that
was a mechanical engineer's thesis. :-(

> non-institutional scientists,  we are free of a lot of the pressures
> that force researchers to conform to publishing norms, since we don't

Yes, let's take advantage of this.

> *have* to compete for grant money with them (but we could).  Hence we
> have more of an opportunity to explore new publishing modes.

That's right. So, in the case of package distribution systems, all of
the "software" and "hardware" and all of the "work" that was put into
it is made so that it just *works*, and consequently there may not be
any publication about the software (except the documentation). So
instead of just publishing a paper and having it lost to the sands of
time, there's now this functional unit that you can play with and
download. This seems much more helpful to the amateur. The
conventional tools and practices of open source projects tend to
naturally unfold into that sort of system.

>> > Right now, the main mode of disseminating progress on diybio projects is the
>> > diybio google group and a variety of blogs that different amateurs have set
>> > up.  This is ok, but I'm never sure if I'm actually staying up to date with
>>
>> Well, I guess if you ignore the members' repositories, yeah, then it's
>> "just a bunch of posts".
>
> I don't know anything about the member's repositories.  Would you say
> that most people are ignoring them like me or are they using them?

They are using them. I've been trying to get you to use these tools
more and see why they are useful, and I'm failing- but it's really
annoying since these tools *work*, and it's only my inability to
explain it all to you that is holding the community back. But taking
initiative with playing around with the tools on your own would be a
good interesting step .. for instance, anybody wanting to play around
with version control systems should set up a sandbox on their hard
drive and play around with one, and see how much it helps.

>> > never described to the list.  I think anything that could help index
>> > progress on actual diybio projects would be incredibly useful, and a
>>
>> That's how debian does it. This is exactly what a package management
>> system is for, and skdb is already becoming increasingly implemented.
>>
>> > particular boon to newcomers, who often have no idea what is actually being
>> > accomplished by the community or how to begin collaborating with existing
>> > projects.
>>
>> Well, collaboration involves reading a lot of tutorials, starting with
>> the FAQ. There are many tutorials on the 'net that try to introduce
>> people to how to do open source collaboration.
>
> Please direct me to the best 3.

diff, patch and friends
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/1237

apt
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AptGet/Howto

git tutorial: an easy start in 10 commands
http://blog.xkoder.com/2008/08/13/git-tutorial-starting-with-git-using-just-10-commands/

contributing to open source projects howto
http://www.kegel.com/academy/opensource.html

A really good but long document is "Software Carpentry" and it
somewhat applies to diybio in the sense of the convergence of software
and hardware:
http://www.swc.scipy.org/

- version control
http://www.swc.scipy.org/lec/version.html

"You Can Skip This Lecture If...

* You know what a repository is
* You know how to commit changes
* You know how to merge conflicts
* You know how to roll back a set of changes
* You know what a branch is"
(it has a good diagram on the page)

The following two are less important than that last one:

- automated builds
http://www.swc.scipy.org/lec/build.html

- unit tests (I've recently become addicted to writing these)
http://www.swc.scipy.org/lec/unit.html

Anyway, I gave more than three links so that if you open up one and
hate it completely, you have another choice, for anyone who is too
picky with their tutorials.

And if you (or anyone) reads something in anything I ever post that
makes you go "wtf", even in the links, then just ask- really. There's
probably something that either explains it better, or shows how it was
wrong, or something. You're probably not the first person to scratch
your head about GNU.

>> > So I'm excited about us building a publication that stimulates members of
>> > the community to contribute coherent tips, techniques, and progress on their
>>
>> What about ToolBook? Did you read over those emails? What were your
>> thoughts on that?
>
> I don't recall the details.  My general sense was that it was a neat
> concept, but mostly vaporware that 99% of the community wouldn't use
> anytime soon.

It was about a way to use all of this fancy backend infrastructure
engine stuff that I have been working on, and how to present it to
users in the form of manuals, books, media projects, etc. It's
actually more like Eric Hunting being coherent about all of these
combined initiatives, kind of a "big picture overview", and a possible
way to let us all collaborate and make progress.

>> > projects.  I don't think the mailing list is doing a good enough job at
>> > stimulating well-formed contributions.  I do think mash-up of openwetware,
>>
>> I think that "well-formed" should be computationally defined. What about you?
>
> I'm not sure what you're getting at.  I do think many of your posts
> (like linkdumps and cross-posts from other lists) are not constructive
> because they require too much reinterpretation from the reader.

For instance, an example of a computationally defined format for
contributions and distribution would include:

* the protocol format that we were talking about
* dot deb, dot rpm, yum stuff, skdb stuff
* CAD files (IGES? STEP?)
* man pages (or something better)

>> > community would catalyze further progress and collaboration.
>>
>> Do you think adopting open source software wouldn't do the same thing?
>> Why do you think that relying on old magazine models is the way to
>> catalyze further progress? Just wondering. I don't mean to sound
>> harsh, but magazines *are* an old model (and yeah they are still
>> somewhat useful when that's the best they can come up with).
>
> I never said anything about old magazine models.  I'm trying to
> express my excitement over the possibility of us inventing a new
> model.  I guess what you wrote is really intended for Andrew - I'll
> let him respond to you (why didn't you post that to his original
> message?).

I thought I did. Oh well. I'll fix this maybe.

>> > diybio.org website into this publication.  I think we should approach the
>>
>> What about turning diybio into a ToolBook hub?
>
> Sure, let's set up toolbook.diybio.org; what do I need to get for you
> to enable you to do that?

I think Jason Morrison and I need to work on the diybio infrastructure
for development purposes. I guess what I would most need from you is
to track him down and set up a time for me to either call him or write
ridiculously long emails to.

>> > publishers of MAKE magazine about publishing some kind of periodic, edited
>> > hard-copy form of the publication, but I don't think there should be a
>> > 1-to-1 correspondance between the printed publication and the online
>> > publication platform.
>>
>> IMHO, we can do better than MAKE.
>
> Your optimism is intoxicating.
>
> Bryan, I'm not mad at you at all and I'm not sure why you expected I

Previous experience.. you've been kind of edgy around me, and everyone
says you hate me.

> would be.  I'm also surprised that the other posters to this thread
> expected a "fight".  I personally don't have anything to contribute

Probably because of your response to me- it sounded like you were
about to call forth bloody war.

> expected a "fight". I personally don't have anything to contribute
> right now to your software projects, and I'm trying not to be a

Btw, they are more than just software projects. And I think you do
have something to contribute- you're supposedly an organizer here
among the diybio community, so let's get organizing, right?

> barrier to you accomplishing them.  So tell me how to get out of the
> way and I will.

I thought you liked being the organizer.

> I want to stress again that I am only tangentially interested in a
> purely traditional magazine.  I'm more interested in helping bring
> real diybio progress to the fore through publication beyond our basic

There are some real deal busters on the near horizon with these
systems that we're describing and been working on. Everyone that I
talk with who already knows hacker tools get very excited when I tell
them about a hardware distribution system for diybio etc., it's really
amazing. But not everyone knows about these hacker tools, and that's
because it's not easy .. not yet, anyway.

> google group.  My sense right now is that a badass,
> consistently-updated blog featuring updates from people actually
> making progress on diybio projects would directly address this need.
> The goal is immediate and could dovetail nicely with Andrew's magazine
> project.  It's also basic enough that it could develop into something
> else entirely, merging with OWW or your skdb or toolbook or whatever.
> In the longer term, I hope the non-institutional community explores
> and demonstrates new, better, more innovative publishing frameworks
> for all kinds of research.  As you point out, computer hackers have
> been doing this basically from the beginning.  Let's do the same for
> biology.

Hackers have been doing it by adopting each other's tools and
improving upon them. So yeah, let's do that for (amateur) biology and
DIY "mad science" in general. :-)

Meredith L. Patterson

unread,
Jul 15, 2009, 10:18:45 AM7/15/09
to diy...@googlegroups.com
On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 3:58 PM, Bryan Bishop<kan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Posting giant blobs of text and instructables is taking a step
> backwards .. I think we need more discussion among the package
> maintainers.

See, and I think it's more important that for this procedural stuff,
people start just getting out there and *doing* it. It's important for
Marnia to be looking over what Jonathan's done and thinking about
interesting ways to combine microfluidic structures and sketching
stuff up on Inkscape. It's also important that she check those
Inkscape drawings into a repository so that everyone can look at them,
and if they so desire, fork and merge from other repos. Maybe common
structures will evolve over time. certain types of organisation will
turn out to be evolutionarily advantageous somehow :D

I did some serious playing around with github (forked your repo for
pydjangitwiki) last night, and kind of got into the zen of git .... it
actually seems to me like it would be a good first version control
system for people who have no previous experience of version control
systems, and haven't been corrupted by the clawing horror that is svn.
(Where branches mean basically NOTHING.)

My friend Kragen Sitaker (http://www.pobox.com/~kragen) linked me to
this neat little story called "The Git Parable" that basically
explains the principles of how it's used, through metaphor:

http://tom.preston-werner.com/2009/05/19/the-git-parable.html

I enjoyed it; I think it would be a useful read for many, though
admittedly it is a little long. The writing was charming.

Ahem, but, yeah. Telling people "ok we have to sit down and talk for a
while before we get started because everyone needs to understand why
they should do it my way" is discouraging. The trick to getting people
to go along with you is *showing* them why cooperating with you is
advantageous for them. What do most people consider advantageous right
now? Doing is preferential to talking. So let's do. I'm confident that
people will learn the right tools if the right tools are made
available to them, I'll tackle that bit like I said.

Seriously leaning toward github though - but I'm sure there's some
other web interface to a git repo ;)

Cheers,
--mlp

Bryan Bishop

unread,
Jul 15, 2009, 10:25:55 AM7/15/09
to diy...@googlegroups.com, kan...@gmail.com
On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 9:18 AM, Meredith L. Patterson wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 3:58 PM, Bryan Bishop wrote:
>> Posting giant blobs of text and instructables is taking a step
>> backwards .. I think we need more discussion among the package
>> maintainers.
>
> See, and I think it's more important that for this procedural stuff,
> people start just getting out there and *doing* it. It's important for
> Marnia to be looking over what Jonathan's done and thinking about
> interesting ways to combine microfluidic structures and sketching
> stuff up on Inkscape. It's also important that she check those
> Inkscape drawings into a repository so that everyone can look at them,
> and if they so desire, fork and merge from other repos. Maybe common
> structures will evolve over time. certain types of organisation will
> turn out to be evolutionarily advantageous somehow :D

No arguments there. Why aren't more people using inkscape, for
instance? That is a very newbie-friendly app.

> I did some serious playing around with github (forked your repo for
> pydjangitwiki) last night, and kind of got into the zen of git .... it
> actually seems to me like it would be a good first version control
> system for people who have no previous experience of version control
> systems, and haven't been corrupted by the clawing horror that is svn.
> (Where branches mean basically NOTHING.)

I'm glad to hear you say that. It's been my experience that most
people consider git to be hell, or at least it used to be- it's
apparently become better over the past two years or something.

> My friend Kragen Sitaker (http://www.pobox.com/~kragen) linked me to
> this neat little story called "The Git Parable" that basically
> explains the principles of how it's used, through metaphor:
>
> http://tom.preston-werner.com/2009/05/19/the-git-parable.html
>
> I enjoyed it; I think it would be a useful read for many, though
> admittedly it is a little long. The writing was charming.

Heh, neat.

> Ahem, but, yeah. Telling people "ok we have to sit down and talk for a
> while before we get started because everyone needs to understand why
> they should do it my way" is discouraging. The trick to getting people
> to go along with you is *showing* them why cooperating with you is
> advantageous for them. What do most people consider advantageous right
> now? Doing is preferential to talking. So let's do. I'm confident that
> people will learn the right tools if the right tools are made
> available to them, I'll tackle that bit like I said.

Aha, but you forget that I am out here in the middle of nowhere. I
cannot stand over everyone's shoulder to guide them- they have to be
able to set up the screensharing software, they have to be able to do
some of this on their own. It's good that we have some locals who are
able to demonstrate the software, however. Go Meredith!

> Seriously leaning toward github though - but I'm sure there's some
> other web interface to a git repo ;)

There's gitweb.cgi, and there's some trick to getting it working, but
I'm not too fond of it. ikiwiki is hell to set up, there's almost
always some sort of permissions issue that I run into when setting it
up- it's a wiki with a git backend. So, you cloned pydjangitwiki-
neat. So, for everyone else, pydjangitwiki is a wiki written in
python/django with a git backend. Django is a web application
framework "for perfectionists with deadlines". It's a way to quickly
write different models and django can handle everything from showing
the pages in some fancy HTML web interface, to importing anything on
the python package index (pypi.python.org) allowing the inclusion of
various capabilities.

Anywho, the idea is that this might be a good interface to a git repo
because people who don't know git can use the wiki to edit the files,
and people who do know git, can just do what they do best without the
wiki getting in their way.

There's one written in ruby that works (mostly) called git-wiki (only
the 'diff' views don't work yet). I decided to go off and forge my own
pydjangitwiki because I am more capable of maintaining that software
right now, rather than ruby, which I have limited experience with.

http://github.com/kanzure/pydjangitwiki

Meredith L. Patterson

unread,
Jul 15, 2009, 10:35:12 AM7/15/09
to diy...@googlegroups.com
On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Bryan Bishop<kan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> So, for everyone else, pydjangitwiki is a wiki written in
> python/django with a git backend. Django is a web application
> framework "for perfectionists with deadlines". It's a way to quickly
> write different models and django can handle everything from showing
> the pages in some fancy HTML web interface, to importing anything on
> the python package index (pypi.python.org) allowing the inclusion of
> various capabilities.

Just to point out to everyone else -- this means that it is
reeeeeeally easy to write stable, scalable bioinformatics applications
on the web, *quickly*, using the biopython module. I have done this
professionally. It paid my rent for most of 2008.

Python is also extra-specially easy to learn. It is fussy about
whitespace, but if you can get around the fact that the number of
spaces a line is indented Mean Something (some people get *really
upset* about this, it's so weird!), then you're likely to pick it up
quickly.

I've learned some neat time-saving tricks with biopython and generally
know my way around the library, so if anyone starts some work with
biopython and runs into a question they're having trouble with, well,
you know my email address.

I'm working with this to develop some cool data visualization stuff
for Tito (well, ok, I think it's cool) using data that Norman has been
curating on OWW; I hope to have something to show off soon. (Bryan, we
need to talk offlist about build-related stuff)

Cheers,
--mlp

William Heath

unread,
Jul 15, 2009, 1:34:03 PM7/15/09
to diy...@googlegroups.com
Meredith can you share some of what you did on these biopython projects I am very curious!

-Tim

Mackenzie Cowell

unread,
Jul 15, 2009, 7:22:47 PM7/15/09
to diy...@googlegroups.com
I will spend some time today reading up on toolbook, the software
carpentry article, and the convergence of software and hardware.  I
agree with you about the importance digital repositories of physical
things will play in the next publishing paradigm.  I thought the
following statement was particularly useful in understanding your
position:

>
> So, in the case of package distribution systems, all of
> the "software" and "hardware" and all of the "work" that was put into
> it is made so that it just *works*, and consequently there may not be
> any publication about the software (except the documentation). So
> instead of just publishing a paper and having it lost to the sands of
> time, there's now this functional unit that you can play with and
> download.
>

Let's elaborate on this more, particularly thinking how the
peer-reviewed scientific publishing system might morph into a
framework in which the core unit was not the paper but instead a
digital copy of a tool. I can imagine future hardware *engineers*
publishing digital construction instructions to a repository which
interested parties could then instantiate and test on their matter
compilers. But what about scientists? How does the framework help
researchers describe new discoveries about the world and test those
discoveries? I guess that the methods section of papers might become
a set of assembly instructions that would automate the set-up and
execution of the experiment. But a scientist would still be
interested in sharing more than just the methods section with his
peers.

>
>> See, and I think it's more important that for this procedural stuff,
>> people start just getting out there and *doing* it. It's important for
>> Marnia to be looking over what Jonathan's done and thinking about
>> interesting ways to combine microfluidic structures and sketching
>> stuff up on Inkscape. It's also important that she check those
>> Inkscape drawings into a repository so that everyone can look at them,
>> and if they so desire, fork and merge from other repos. Maybe common
>> structures will evolve over time. certain types of organisation will
>> turn out to be evolutionarily advantageous somehow :D
>
>No arguments there. Why aren't more people using inkscape, for
>instance? That is a very newbie-friendly app.

I agree with Meredith. More action, less talk. Let's start using
github immediately for all our git repository needs (or someone can
set up an "official" diybio git repository somewhere else if there is
some good reason not to use github). After a couple of months of
using git, *then* let's think about what works well, what doesn't, and
what our long term goals are about repositories for digital things and
processes. Once we've got *some* intertia (but not too much, and
definitely not 0 like today), well have practical experience and
material on which to test our ideas and we won't have spent a
significant amount of time up-front theorizing on the best path
forward.

Bryan, I like you and I find your vision stimulation. My only
complaint is that objectively, you sometimes seem to overpower other
people in digital conversation with your prolific posting about your
particular views.

Mac

Bryan Bishop

unread,
Jul 15, 2009, 7:47:21 PM7/15/09
to diy...@googlegroups.com, kan...@gmail.com
On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 6:22 PM, Mackenzie Cowell wrote:
> I will spend some time today reading up on toolbook, the software
> carpentry article, and the convergence of software and hardware.  I
> agree with you about the importance digital repositories of physical
> things will play in the next publishing paradigm.  I thought the
> following statement was particularly useful in understanding your
> position:
>
>> So, in the case of package distribution systems, all of
>> the "software" and "hardware" and all of the "work" that was put into
>> it is made so that it just *works*, and consequently there may not be
>> any publication about the software (except the documentation). So
>> instead of just publishing a paper and having it lost to the sands of
>> time, there's now this functional unit that you can play with and
>> download.
>>
>
> Let's elaborate on this more, particularly thinking how the
> peer-reviewed scientific publishing system might morph into a

There are a few issues with this, however. First, do we care if the
mainstream scientific publishing paradigm is the same one that we use?
Given the tools that we're already using and finding increasingly
useful, what difference does it make? After all the point is to DIY.
If these tools enable us to do-it-yourself more effectively, then
that's great- but that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone else
will in academia will follow. Why should they? Maybe if they thought
it was useful for their own purposes, sure, but we can't expect the
amateur distribution model to come from them- we (by this I mean the
free-software/hardware loving community) can just go ahead and make it
ourselves in the DIY mindset and spirit.

Second, there may be no "morphing" but rather acknowledgment of the
alternative paradigm of working (the DIY paradigm). This paradigm is
really not present in the literature, because in many cases the point
of papers is to show what some people did with some government funding
or other form of funding. In some cases the funding is for particular
projects, that's true, but other times the publications are just
showing what a certain amount of money was used on.

I'm somewhat speaking out of my ass, not knowing too much about the
intricate hells of academic science. However, the DIY paradigm is more
universal because the majority of people aren't being given these
grants and are not indoctrinated into academic culture. So we have
some real opportunities here. Maybe there will be no metamorphosis of
academia to heed to our needs.

> framework in which the core unit was not the paper but instead a
> digital copy of a tool.  I can imagine future hardware *engineers*
> publishing digital construction instructions to a repository which
> interested parties could then instantiate and test on their matter
> compilers.  But what about scientists?  How does the framework help
> researchers describe new discoveries about the world and test those

Analytical instrumentation is always going to be important, if that's
what you're asking about. For me, theories tend to be that which
informs the design of new and further tools- so I don't see a
separation of "analysis/science" and "engineering".

> discoveries?  I guess that the methods section of papers might become
> a set of assembly instructions  that would automate the set-up and
> execution of the experiment.  But a scientist would still be
> interested in sharing more than just the methods section with his
> peers.

Sure. I have no problems with extra documentation, other links and
other commentary existing around the tools and methods. But without
the tools and methods, the paper can sometimes be nearly useless (and
in other cases, not).

>>> See, and I think it's more important that for this procedural stuff,
>>> people start just getting out there and *doing* it. It's important for
>>> Marnia to be looking over what Jonathan's done and thinking about
>>> interesting ways to combine microfluidic structures and sketching
>>> stuff up on Inkscape. It's also important that she check those
>>> Inkscape drawings into a repository so that everyone can look at them,
>>> and if they so desire, fork and merge from other repos. Maybe common
>>> structures will evolve over time. certain types of organisation will
>>> turn out to be evolutionarily advantageous somehow :D
>>
>>No arguments there. Why aren't more people using inkscape, for
>>instance? That is a very newbie-friendly app.
>
> I agree with Meredith.  More action, less talk.  Let's start using
> github immediately for all our git repository needs (or someone can
> set up an "official" diybio git repository somewhere else if there is
> some good reason not to use github).  After a couple of months of
> using git, *then* let's think about what works well, what doesn't, and
> what our long term goals are about repositories for digital things and
> processes.  Once we've got *some* intertia (but not too much, and
> definitely not 0 like today), well have practical experience and
> material on which to test our ideas and we won't have spent a
> significant amount of time up-front theorizing on the best path
> forward.

I still think your measurement of our inertia is completely wrong. :-)

> Bryan, I like you and I find your vision stimulation.  My only
> complaint is that objectively, you sometimes seem to overpower other
> people in digital conversation with your prolific posting about your
> particular views.

Maybe if the problem is sense-making, somebody could try to make sense
of it by replying and resolving whatever the issues are with whatever
views or ideas.

Andrew Hessel

unread,
Oct 10, 2010, 8:26:42 PM10/10/10
to keen101, diybio
Garage Bio Magazine just didn't get enough interest at the time to make a go of it.  I still have the domain if there's interest in a reboot.

Andrew

On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 7:58 PM, keen101 <kee...@gmail.com> wrote:
HEY! What ever happened to this? Did it just fade into the
background??

I love the idea. I think we should model it after the Ubuntu Community
Magazine. http://fullcirclemagazine.org/

I no longer read Fullcircle magazine, because i'm not as involved in
the Ubuntu Community anymore, but when i was i loved how community
driven and successful it was. If possible, we should try our best to
make it so we can use the same Open Source programs they used, but
even if we don't... We can still learn from their success.

I'm willing to try and help kick-start this again.

-Andrew

On Jul 2 2009, 12:31 pm, Andrew Hessel <ahes...@gmail.com> wrote:
> A few of us have been tossing around the idea of founding Garage Bio
> Magazine -- a magazine dedicated to the Garage (or kitchen, basement,
> closet), DIY, open source, alternative, amateur or otherwise unconventional
> biologist.
>
> Topics to be explored would include the history of DIY biology, security and
> safety issues, profiles of leaders and workspaces, technologies and tools,
> entrepreneurship, training resources, forecasting, legal and social issues,
> and more.  The goal is to become a forum for the social, technological, and
> economic issues generated by the distributed use and improvement of
> biological technologies.
>
> There's a healthy amount of interest in moving forward, so we've secured a
> web domain and mocked up a few cover templates to help visualize the idea
> (see below, thanks Chris!).
>
> While it's probably too early to do a newstand print magazine, a digital/pod
> (print on demand) offering, like h+ magazine, is within reach.   Having a
> publication platform will facilitate meeting key people, learning more about
> companies or laboratory groups, attending conferences, and more.  I believe
> it could help grow the DIYbio community, and grow in step to become a widely
> recongnized brand and sustainable enterprise.
>
> To get this rolling what we need to build are management and editorial
> teams.  I'm interested in learning the industry side of things.  We'll need
> a great editor-in-chief and senior editorial team, and people that are great
> at getting business stuff done.  If you'd like to be involved on the exec
> team please contact me <ahes...@gmail.com> off list about what your
> experience is, what role you'd like to have, and what amount of time you
> could devote to this project.
>
> Also, does anyone out there have experience with advertising sales?  Getting
> ads onto the pages will be crucial to supporting the effort if we want to
> make a quality product.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Andrew Hessel
> Founder, Garage Bio Magazine
>
> PS - Please forward this along to anyone or other groups that might be
> interested.
>
> [image: Garage Bio Magazine.png]

Bob Keyes

unread,
Oct 10, 2010, 10:03:18 PM10/10/10
to diy...@googlegroups.com


--- On Sun, 10/10/10, Andrew Hessel <ahe...@gmail.com> wrote:


From: Andrew Hessel <ahe...@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Garage Bio Magazine
To: "keen101" <kee...@gmail.com>, "diybio" <diy...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Sunday, October 10, 2010, 8:26 PM

Garage Bio Magazine just didn't get enough interest at the time to make a go of it.  I still have the domain if there's interest in a reboot.
Andrew,
You are perhaps in a unique position to tell us the difficulties and triumphs of such a magazine. Who did you find was your audience? What kind of numbers did you get? A 'reboot' may be in order.

-Bob

Andrew Hessel

unread,
Oct 11, 2010, 4:42:55 PM10/11/10
to diybio

Hi Bob,

I was sitting in an airport last year and I came across Garage Magazine -- they write about hot rodding and custom cars, often featuring a car and an attractive woman on the cover.  It seemed that DIYbio or the garage bio movement might benefit from a having a communication channel that would pique the interest of mainstream folks not necessarily steeped in life science, and I wanted to test the waters if there was enough spare cycles in the community to produce enough content for a quarterly.  I thought it would be great to showcase some of the great projects and people  and sometimes it really helps those new to the ideas to hold something physical in their hands. I was looking at print-on-demand magazine service MagCloud -- figured a bit of advertising support and low production costs could allow for some small print runs.  The rest could be formatted for a website.  I've had some friends make MungBeing for the last 5 years or so, really like some of issues they've published, even if their template needs a revamp.

I got the domain, paid for a graphic designer to make some templates for the masthead and page layouts, organized a couple of skype meetings, but at the time there just wasn't enough material produced by the community at the time to make a go of it.  I was already spread too thin personally to push it, so I just let it go for now.

Mainly, I just hoped it would help promote DIY and community bio and attract new people to the field.  It would mainly be a website.  The print-on-demand format meant that those that wanted hardcopies could order them.

A small passionate editorial/production team could make it work, if commitments from 10-15 writers could be secured each quarter, and a few advertisements to cover page layout costs, stock graphics, and web hosting.

Andrew


Fernando Lindenberg

unread,
May 20, 2012, 9:52:46 PM5/20/12
to diy...@googlegroups.com
Hey guys, I would like to know how's the magazine idea going, I am interested!

Thanks

QDragon Leet

unread,
May 21, 2012, 12:35:54 AM5/21/12
to diy...@googlegroups.com
ditto 

Paul Sian

unread,
May 21, 2012, 7:07:09 AM5/21/12
to diy...@googlegroups.com
I am interested as well. 

Sent from my iPhone
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "DIYbio" group.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/diybio/-/aBaTHQHBCwoJ.
To post to this group, send email to diy...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to diybio+un...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/diybio?hl=en.

Cathal Garvey

unread,
May 21, 2012, 10:05:48 AM5/21/12
to diy...@googlegroups.com

Andrew Hessel

unread,
May 21, 2012, 2:06:47 PM5/21/12
to diy...@googlegroups.com
Thanks Cathal.

I highly recommend CSQ, great magazine.

Derek

unread,
May 21, 2012, 3:11:49 PM5/21/12
to diy...@googlegroups.com
BTW. I've been using the http://garagebio.org website for a podcast series that I've unfortunately lost momentum on. I don't have the time to help too much to organize a magazine effort, but I'm happy to repurpose part of the website if Garage Bio is still the naming that feels right.

--Derek
>> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to diybio+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
>> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to diybio+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.

Forrest Flanagan

unread,
May 21, 2012, 5:54:04 PM5/21/12
to diy...@googlegroups.com
CSQ is starving for content, just so y'all know.

http://citizensciencequarterly.com/writers/

I'm serious. Submit stuff.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/diybio/-/to4cPB66q-AJ.

To post to this group, send email to diy...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to diybio+un...@googlegroups.com.

kingjacob

unread,
Jun 2, 2012, 4:55:13 PM6/2/12
to diy...@googlegroups.com
Hi Yall,
CSQ was the result of the conversation we had about a need for a DIYbio magazine about a year ago. However, as with most community projects, there was lots of verbal support at the beginning but it's kinda waned.  So If anyone's interested in contributing (especially if you can commit to do so regularly), please shoot me an email. 

We are also looking for a new managing editor, if you've any experience in that area.

P.s. If anyones curious why its CSQ and not DIYbio or garage bio magazine, I explain that in the first issue (attached; If google groups lets me..It didn't email me direct if you'd like a copy or if you're feeling supportive).
--
Cheers,
Jacob Shiach
editor-in-chief: Citizen Science Quarterly
twitter: @jacobshiach

Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages