Talk:ICampus Application for OWW

Funding

What kinds of things are you requesting funding for (e.g., what equipment, UROP positions, other)?

• I'm really not sure what money could be used for other than lots of advertising so people use OWW. --Austin Che
  • Well, we'll see. We can list things that we think could help drive usage of the wiki

Other

Any other comments or questions.

• What's the difference between student and faculty sponsored projects? I think faculty projects can get more money (not sure OWW needs it).
  • This is true. But it would be nice to be driven by the students, and, as you point out, we probably don't need too much money.

Project description

Please provide a brief (a few paragraphs at most) description of the proposed project.

• We should decide here if we should focus on developing a tool for biological information... or a more general tool for the MIT community... what do people think?

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.

• One thing that needs to be highlighted in our proposal is how radical the use of something like a wiki is to biological researchers. While in computer science, there are established traditions/examples for collaborative efforts (like the Free Software Foundation and GNU/Linux), no such movement exists in biology. In biology, expertise tends to be compartmentalized and passed on either in books/articles or by word of mouth. OpenWetWare offers a novel alternative approach. I haven't figured out how to best express these thoughts which is why I put this comment here rather than in the proposal itself.