Tag: scifoo lives on

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Limits to openness – where is the boundary?

I’ve been fiddling with this post for a while and I’m not sure where its going but I think other people’s views might make the whole thing clearer. This is after all why we believe in being open. So here it is in its unfinished and certainly unclarified form. All comments gratefully received.

One issue that got a lot of people talking at the Scifoo lives on session on Monday (transcript here) was the question of where the boundaries between what should and should not be open lie. At one level it seems obvious: the structure of a molecule can’t really have privacy issues whereas it is clear that a patient’s medical data should remain private. The issue came up a lot at the recent All Hands UK E-science meeting where the issues were often about census data or geographical data that could pinpoint specific people. It seems obvious that people’s personal data should be private but where do we draw the line? I am uncomfortable with a position where it is ‘obvious’ that my data should be open but ‘obvious’ that personal medical or geographical data should not be. Ideally I would like to find a clear logical distinction.

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Scifoo Lives On session: Open notebook science case studies

Yesterday afternoon the Open Notebook Science case studies session was held as part of the Scifoo lives on sessions at Nature Island, Second Life. Jean-Claude Bradley organised, moderated and spoke first followed by me and Jeremiah Faith. We all spoke about experiences and implementation of different approaches to open notebook science.

Jean-Claude has put the transcript up here.

There was an active discussion about the need for more fun in science and the way in which science has become secretive has taken a lot of the fun out of it. CW Underwood talked about being sick of the ‘Secret Squirrel’ nature of science. One thing that was very encouraging was that Jeremiah said that in his search for his next post he had raised the issue as to whether the possible PI objected to him keeping his notebook open. So far he had had no objections.

Other issues that came up:

Open notebook science takes work and discipline.

It does involve some effort to get set up and to keep systems running as well as to maintain the observation that makes sure that things are running properly. CW pointed out that his PI would regard this as a waste of time. I can see this perspective being quite a strong one and a slow one to counter. Arguably the benefits of putting the effort in are not yet tangible enough to be convincing to people who are happy with the way their science works as it is.

What is the best system for holding the notebook?

Three different systems were presented. The UsefulChem Wiki by Jean-Claude using publically available hosted services. Our Blog based notebook which is a custom built and somewhat closed system. And Jeremiah uses Tex to generate a PDF of the whole thing. Jeremiah’s presentation included the comment that he had shown several people both a Wiki and the Tex based system and they had all preferred the Tex based one. This is the opposite of my experience where people seem to prefer whatever is closest to Word. This may be different communities or maybe just different people we have had contact with.

My feeling is that the three groups have evolved different systems because of three main things. Firstly a different initial aim, my initial aim for instance was not really an open notebook but an effective means of capturing data and procedures. Secondly differences in the procedures being carried out and the culture we work within. I am still slowly working my way through putting up Exp098 from UsefulChem in our blog system and this is certainly showing up some differences but I’m not sure I know what they mean yet.

Finally I think we have a different view of what the lab book is and what the ‘ideal’ lab book would look like. Jeremiah’s point was that he, and others, wanted it to ‘look like a lab book’, which is fair enough. I think my group is somewhere in the middle and Jean-Claude has pushed the idea of what a lab book is one step further. The finished product is a summary of the experiment – not precisely a point by point record of everything that happened along the way, that is all in the history tab – but the visual product is a clear description of the experiment that is immediately accessible to an outsider as to how to repeat the experiment and what the data and conclusions were. The point is,within the wiki framework, there is no need to worry about editing the page because the history is all still there. This means that it can be taken from the record as it goes – which is still kept – right through to ‘finished’ in a form that can go straight into a thesis or paper. I’m still not entirely comfortable with this, but I’m not entirely sure that this is particularly logical.

In any case in the end I think it will depend on what you want and why you want to go down the ONS route. There’s still a lot of work to be done.

Limits to openness

There was a discussion on where the boundaries should lie as to what can be open or not. I will handle this in another post because I think this is something I want to think about quite hard.

Postscript

On my way into work on Thursday last week I bumped into one of my RAL colleagues who, among other things, works on our communications and public relations. He thought that the ‘talk’ in SL made a nice little story and went to our central STFC comms people to see whether he might place it somewhere (website, newsletter, etc). Apparently the answer came back that they wouldn’t issue a press release (which would have been rather over the top in any case) because we didn’t have an institutional policy on Open Access.

Postscript 2

Jean-Claude has also reviewed the session at the UsefulChem Blog.

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How to get critical mass? Scifoo Lives on Session on Medicine and Web 2.0

I attended the session held on Nature Island as part of the Scifoo Lives On series being organised by Jean-Claude Bradley and Bertalan Mesko and wanted to record some of my impressions. The mechanics of the meeting itself were interesting. My initial reaction to the idea of meetings in Second Life was pretty sceptical. My natural inclination would have been to setup some sort of video cast or conference call. However there are advantages to the sense of actually having people milling around (and I apologise to all the people I bumped into or whose slides I inadvertantly changed). It was good to ‘meet’ Jean-Claude if not in the flesh then in the fur and the sense of actually seeing a person or at least a representation makes this somethow seem more natural.

The disadvantage was that as the dialogue is typed and at least on my connection was coming through quite slow it is difficult to have a real conversation. Several times I would start typing a question or comment and by the time I’d got through to the end the conversation seemed to have moved on. Audio would be better and this can be enabled but it would probably have its own problems with people talking over each other. Maybe we would need to learn to put our hands up? The advantage of SL is that it is a single package which once you’ve got working, gives you the slides, the talk, and the questions all in one package. I use video conferencing quite regularly for meetings but there are real issues with ensuring that participants are compatible with the package you are using – in practise it is almost entirely used either for internal (multi-site) meetings or one-to-one meetings via Skype or something similar.

The Scifoo Lives on session itself has been covered by Jean-Claude who also provides a transcript. An issue that came up with several of the posters is how big the community that supports them is or needs to be and how you go about growing that community. Sites that provide a ‘Wikipedia for Medical Information’ or a ‘digg for the bioscience literature’ are laudable efforts. Their succes, like that of other sites featured depends on a large enough community actively contributing to the site and providing added value. Wikipedia ‘works’ (not wishing to get into the argument about accuracy here) because an enormous number of people provide their time freely to add value. Arguably a number of other Wiki sites aimed at smaller communities have not achieved as much as hoped because the community support isn’t enough to provide critical mass. Its a tough world out there and competing sites will rise and fall but there is some critical mass required before they attract a big enough audience that the site builds itself.

This is also true of open research more generally. We are a long way from the critical mass that makes it worthwhile for people to put in a little bit of effort on a regular basis because they get a lot back. They key question to my view is what are the best steps to take that will put us on the right path as fast as is sensible. And where can we find some sociologists to help us on this? An argument for using the term ‘Open Research’ may be that we need the help of the social sciences community to figure out how best to proceed.