ICampus Application for OWW
The MIT-Microsoft Alliance has provided funds for the development of tools to help research in technology education. This page will be used to collaboratively develop an application for funds to push OWW to be a more useful tool. Please put your input below. This is still in the early draft stages, so please put ideas down.
We've been doing a lot of editing--deleting comments etc--working towards a final draft. Find the old page here: [1]
Preliminary Student Proposal Questions
Title for this proposal
Give a short, descriptive title for this project
OpenWetWare: A collaborative information tool for the biological research community
Name and email address of proposer
- Jason Kelly: jasonk AT mit DOT edu
Project description
Please provide a brief (a few paragraphs at most) description of the proposed project.
OpenWetWare is a collaborative environment designed to foster the sharing of expertise, information, and ideas among researchers in biological science and engineering. Inspired both by Wikipedia and MIT OpenCourseWare, OpenWetWare is a wiki where content related to research laboratories can be generated and disseminated quickly and efficiently. Participating laboratories and individuals can post information concerning their research, protocols, tools, equipment, laboratory materials, biologicals, etc. onto both lab specific and community pages. We believe that the decentralized nature of editing provides more detailed, accurate, and up-to-date information than is otherwise possible with static websites where edits are usually funneled through one webmaster. Finally, we expect that these shared resources will encourage collaborative projects, increased communication, and renewed efforts towards repeatabilty, analysis, and standardization of biological experiments.
Significance
Describe, as succinctly and as compellingly as you can, why you think this project is significant - from an educational perspective, a technical perspective, or other.
In the biological sciences, the primary mechanisms for sharing information have traditionally been reference books, journal publications and personal communications. These sources of information are static (updated based on a publishing cycle) and fractured (access to information is dependent on one's location via access to costly publications and the expertise of peers in adjoining labs). Such a system contrasts with the open source movement in computer science which relies heavily on the World Wide Web as a means for disseminating information as well as soliciting and organizing contributions. OpenWetWare (OWW) is enabling similar collaboration for the biological science community. Even in its current early state, OWW has shown two significant contributions to scientific communication – a developing knowledge base and a collaborative research environment.
Learning a new technique in the biological sciences can be a daunting task, especially for interdisciplinary researchers entering biology for the first time. Oftentimes a single information source is not sufficient, and one must integrate basic biological facts, published protocols, and “lab folklore” from disparate sources in order to properly perform and debug an experiment. OWW is serving as a repository for these types of information. For example, the OWW entry on DNA Ligation includes a basic explanation of the relevant biology, a general procedure, lab specific protocols, and notes with debugging tips. This knowledge base will offer a tremendous productivity boost to practicing scientists. It will also be a great resource for students in biology related classes who will be able to learn how key experimental techniques are performed in practice and how the science they are learning feeds back to promote the development of new tools and techniques.
OWW offers users space where they can post information about their own research projects. Current users use this space to post research briefs, thesis proposals, posters, and even online lab notebooks. This openness will promote collaboration between scientists, since it will be easy for scientists with shared interests to find one another and combine their results and ideas into new research directions. We fully anticipate that this open spirit will grow along with OpenWetWare.
The strength of OWW is the information content entered by the user base. Consequently, organizing information, enabling easier entry of information, and growing the user base are the most important goals towards increasing the effetiveness of OWW.
Key participants
Who are the key participants in this project? What year are they at MIT? Will they all still be students through the fall semester 2006?
- Barry Canton -- 3rd year graduate student (will be a student in Fall 2006)
- Austin Che -- ?
- Sean Clarke -- 1st-year graduate student (will be a student in Fall 2006)
- Danielle France -- 4th year graduate student (will be a student in Fall 2006)
- Jeff Gritton -- 4th year graduate student (will be a student in Fall 2006)
- Jason Kelly -- 3rd year graduate student (will be a student in Fall 2006)
- Sriram Kosuri -- 5th year graduate student (unsure if he will be a student in Fall 2006)
- Alex Mallet -- 2nd-year graduate student (will be a student in Fall 2006)
- Reshma Shetty -- 4th year graduate student (will be a student in Fall 2006)
- Ty Thomson -- 4th-year graduate student (will be a student in Fall 2006)
Other Participants
- Ilya Sytchev -- 4th year graduate student at North Eastern University, bioinformatics intern at MIT
Goals for the spring
List two or three specific milestones to be achieved in the project by May 2006.
- X number of labs on board
- X total pages
- X unique visitors to the site
- X other institutions
- Any thoughts on target values here?
Goals for the one-year project
List two or three specific milestones to be achieved in the project by December 2006.
Funding
What kinds of things are you requesting funding for (e.g., what equipment, UROP positions, other)?
Hardware Due to the intial success and promise of the project, OpenWetWare is currently receiving web hosting support from the Computational and Systems Biology Initiative at MIT. Thus, iCampus funding is not needed for hardware.
Software
Data Management
- Content Development
- Dedicated wiki 'curators' who evaluate and implement different "templates" or other methods for organizing information on the wiki.
- For instance, collecting and organizing protocols posted on various labs' wiki pages into coherent protocol pages each of which might contain a 'meta-protocol','local protocols', and 'common questions/feedback' sections.
- Dedicated wiki 'curators' who evaluate and implement different "templates" or other methods for organizing information on the wiki.
- Tool Development
- Better tools to make websites from wiki pages in order to encourage more groups to host their website through OpenWetWare. For an example, see here.
- Improved import of other file types (excel,work,latex) in order to lower barriers to contribution.
- Better integration with other MIT information sharing programs (OWW,Dspace).
- Cultivating and Maintaining a large and vibrant user base
- It is necessary to cultivare and maintain an active user base in order to ensure the sucess of OpenWetWare. We would like to dedicate funds to enable tutorials, conference visits, and other mechanisms for advertising OpenWetWare.
Advisor
Who is your project advisor?
Other
Any other comments or questions.
