Over the last two centuries, human civilization enjoyed unprecedented economic growth. Internationally, the standard of living improved as the world implemented scientific knowledge.
One could argue that the fruits of economic growth have not been shared as widely as they should be, just as one could argue that our unprecedented affluence has wrought environmental problems that will plague future generations in the decades and centuries to come. On balance, however, it would be hard to argue that we are not better off as a result of our new knowledge.
Arguably, one of the most important enablers of economic growth over the last few centuries was the Enlightenment and its role in encouraging scientific freedom and openness. Not only did the Enlightenment lead to a new culture of openness in science -- including key scientific conventions such as peer review -- it helped foster closer relationships between scientists who pushed the boundaries of knowledge and the entrepreneurs who put this knowledge into practice. Over time, this evolving relationship between the realm of science and the realm of private enterprise fuelled a virtuous circle of improvement in knowledge, technology, and human welfare.
Today, there is a new revolution in science that may turn out to be as influential and life-changing as the Enlightenment. As blogs, wikis, Web services, and other collaborative technologies are adopted by a younger, more Web-literate generation of scientists we are seeing the rise of open and collaborative research efforts that draw resources and insights from large, inter-disciplinary communities of scientists. Though collaboration is certainly not new in science, the Web 2.0 is bringing collaboration to a new level of speed, breadth, and intensity.
| Call it "collaborative science", or even Science 2.0, it's clear that the old, paper-based model of scientific publishing and peer review are being replaced by new forms of peer collaboration and open-access publishing on the Web. |
In this section of the wiki, we move beyond the material provided in chapter 6 of Wikinomics (the New Alexandrians) to flesh out a vision for the new paradigm of collaborative science and its applications in various sectors and disciplines.
Heightened competition, globalization, and spiraling R&D costs are causing many companies to rethink innovation. Firms that once developed all of their products and services behind a veil of secrecy are beginning to reach outside their walls to source ideas, inventions, and uniquely qualified minds from a vast global pool of talent. The result is a new model of innovation where companies conceive, design, develop, and market products with a diverse community of external participants.
Nowhere are these new collaborative models more important than in the partnerships between firms and scientific communities to advance the basic sciences. Though fundamental to the long-term capacity of industries to remain innovative, such research is fraught with uncertainty and the risk that costly, long-term projects may fail to churn out a marketable product. High costs and uncertainty, in turn, have forced many companies to scale back their investments in basic research. Though innovators still need to know the underlying sciences, their primary aim in-house cannot be to further them. For that they will increasingly rely on partnerships with universities and other research organizations, while corporate research teams use their skills and resources to move quickly to practical application.
Wikinomics goes into all kinds of examples of collaborative science ranging from OpenWetWare (an MIT project designed to share expertise, information, and ideas in biology), to the Tropical Disease Initiative (with its efforts to apply open source software development practices to drug discovery), to science blogs such as Bioethics, NodalPoint, Pharyngula, and RealClimate. One of the stories we didn’t get to go into revolves around a project called the Alliance for Cellular Signaling (“AFCS”), a bold new open science initiative. The project is not only breaking scientific ground, it exemplifies the emerging scientific paradigm and provides a template for how open source tactics could be leveraged to solve complex biological problems.
The Alliance for Cellular Signaling is a case study
While the Alliance for Cellular Signaling may not offer too many opportunities for the average layman to get involved, a growing number of scientific initiatives are making it easy for everyone to contribute, even those without a science degree.
For example, Sony Entertainment Systems recently announced a partnership with the folding@home project that will allow scientists to harness the spare processing power of millions of Sony PlayStation 3 users to better understand the causes of diseases like Alzheimer's, cystic fibrosis, and cancer. Sony's new processor and graphics technology reportedly packs a punch so the aggregate unused computing power of thousands of Internet-connected gamers will be sufficient to push the boundaries of biologoical simulation technologies. Researchers participating in the Folding@home project estimate that connecting just 10,000 PS3s together will enable them to perform up to one thousand trillion calculations per second and, as one participant put it, "address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally."
If they succeed, folding@home's distributed computing system will operate nearly four times as fast as IBM's BlueGene system, which, at 280.6 trillion calculations per second, currently tops the list of the world's most powerful supercomputers.
Folding@home illustrates one of the most exciting features of the new Web -- the falling costs of collaboration enable individuals to share knowledge, computing power, bandwidth and other resources to create a wide array of “free” and “open-source” goods and services that anyone can use or modify. In turn, low-cost collaborative infrastructures (including free Internet telephony provider Skype and open source software such as Linux, Apache, MYSQL, and Perl) allow thousands upon thousands of individuals to participate in science, politics, communities, and the economy in ways that were previously impossible.
Sony is not the first to exploit the distributed power Web users. SETI@home captured the imagination of Web users in 1999 with a popular distributed computing project that taps the spare computing power of Internet-connected computers to search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). The exciting part was that anybody could participate in SETI@home by running a free program on their desktop that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data. Some 5.2 million are reported to have participated and together they are thought to have logged over two million years of aggregate computing time.
The key in most instances of collective action on the Web is that people can contribute to the “digital commons” at very little cost to themselves and still derive significant benefits. The new economics of collaboration and sharing are unleashing some very profound changes in the economy. And, if it plays out it as we predict, mass collaboration will transform science too.
This section on the workings of collaborative basic science projects is very well written and researched, but I am wondering where the traditional wiki discussion section is. There are several topics and directions that could expand and extend this discussion, but I'm not clear where to put a discussion of what direction to take from here.
Maybe I'm too used to the normal wikipedia format that shows the history of how each page/topic is developed and where people can discuss or disagree without actually changing the page. I'm also not sure how roll backs will work on wikinomics.
Just as a for instance, one could discuss the brain project sponsored by Paul Allen. This is a collaborative project on how the brain works; mapping gene expression in every section of the brain in response to various environmental or chemical signals. I don't know enough about the project to write about its innermost machinations, like was done for the AFCS, but there might be someone who has the expertise or time to research the Brain Project for an article similar to the AFCS project. The Brain Project is particularly interesting because it was supported in large part by private money.
srlasky
contributed by srlasky on Feb 4 7:31pm
This Chapter (page 151) in wikinomics covers:
Page Last Updated: Aug 14 7:32pm by gabriel draven