Here's a link if you want to read it again. http://mndoci.com/blog... - Pawel Szczesny

Would've been quicker but for our day jobs. If only biogang were our day jobs. - Neil Saunders

Neil nailed it, and I think we have a bigger group now. Helps a lot - Deepak Singh

Neil, biogang as a day job is exactly what I want to achieve :) - Pawel Szczesny

Deepak, this is exactly what amazes me. In the discussion around this idea a critical mass was the requirement number one. And it looks like we have it. - Pawel Szczesny

Biogang as a day job sounds good. - Michael Barton

Indeed. - Paulo Nuin

I am not sure we do have critical mass. We have a group of early adopters that will move to test new ideas and tools but even with a bias for bioinformatics I don't think there is enough people sharing similar projects to kick start collaborations. - Pedro Beltrao

I am not sure we have critical mass either, but we're definitely getting there. But once you have proofs of concept, it becomes easier. I am sure there are a lot of programmers, not necessarily science/informatics savvy who would be interested in solving, e.g. scaling problems. If Matt can organize a BOF session with a bunch of science people at RailsConf, there are definitely people out there - Deepak Singh

Well, in terms of numbers we could probably make a decent lab, but in fact these numbers may be not big enough to create a focused collaborative group, that's true. On the other hand I think we have enough people participating in the discussion and that is going to drive next steps. - Pawel Szczesny

agreed with Pedro. It would be good to have a statistics of people here in terms of area of expertise. Still not enough wet lab folks. - Attila Csordas

Wet lab collabs are going to be more difficult, albeit not impossible, at least based on who's online. One thing to do on the wiki is to collect everyones experience interest. That will get us a start. and we should not forget thatl a lot of the tools are targeted at wet lab types - Deepak Singh

If there will be enough, near professional home labs around, the need for web based cooperation will be much bigger as the home labs are separated by default. - Attila Csordas

Trying to think whether there is a cool enough problem that we could get a grant (Human Frontiers Science Programme?) that would fund some wet lab people and a lot of integration and informatics people to 'work from home' essentially a big consultancy budget - I can contribute (and would love to) a load of structural biology infrastructure but it needs hands to make samples and run experiments (and you guys can tell from my lab book precisely how often _I_ actually get into the lab :) - Cameron Neylon

Cameron, I have this ONS project in synthetic biology I twiterred about some time ago. It goes currently through the first round of pre-review and hopefuly immediately after I will apply for seed funding. I'll post more when pre-review is done, but maybe it would be a cool enough for HFSP? - Pawel Szczesny

Cameron - the Gates proposal I submitted on the synthesis of antimalarials is based on a similar model - I also included a prize mechanism - Jean-Claude Bradley

Jean-Claude, are you aware of any other foundation that is awarding grants in a similar way to the Gates? A frequent suggestion is Google, but that's usually end of the list. - Pawel Szczesny

I think doing bioinformatics analysis is essentially free, where as wet-lab work will have a cost in terms of reagents etc. Therefore I think a pure bioinformatics project might be a good starting focus as there will be no need to worry about being able to afford an experiment. - Michael Barton

To some extent that's the idea of Bursty Work. Since the cost of the informatics project is very low (--> free), you can develop the project to a place where, e.g. wet lab folks could then run with the results/concepts to validate, etc if someone feels its worth the cost or a collaboration - Deepak Singh

I think I mentioned this elsewhere. Its not biology but it might be an interesting test bed for development folks: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-foc... - Cameron Neylon

@Jean-Claude: Haven't had a chance to go through the proposal in full yet. Looked at what you put on ThoughtMesh briefly. But I think a prize model is an interesting route. @Pawel - it has to have implications for human health (and not be drug discovery) so if it fits that then why not. I am working something up on 'Structural Biology 2.0'. Alright, I've been thinking about this but haven't written anything yet.... - Cameron Neylon

Cameron, I need to see what comes out of the pre-review. The original idea had changed significantly three times over last two months. - Pawel Szczesny

That happens a lot - but assessing the reviewer comments it always a good way of an external validation and/or criticism of the ideas and focus - Cameron Neylon