Tough question indeed, no easy answers... My take is that most current efforts have a "build it and they will come" attitude, but unfortunately, "they" (or "we") haven't been coming. My current thinking is that building a critical mass is dependent on appealing to researchers' selfish interests, where selfish can be very broadly defined (professional, personal, social, egotistical, etc.)... - Andrew Su

I agree: Build and promote didn't work very well. The public SEED (http://theseed.uchicago.edu/FIG...) allows anybody to annotate anything; yet, there is almost no outside contributions. Workshops slightly work better, but they're expensive and their effects fade two days after the workshop. Why do people spend time evaluating books, rating movies, etc. but not tagging/annotating genomes? - Ramy Karam Aziz

So you think that genus/species-based efforts are better than pathway-based ones? The problem is that they introduce inconsistencies - Ramy Karam Aziz

Interesting, I wasn't aware of the pseudomonas database. But it appears that they are no longer accepting community annotations? http://www.pseudomonas.com/quickSu... I wonder if that's true and if so why... - Andrew Su

I agree with Su and Ramy that scientific altruism is overestimated. Here a talk and model that might make it work http://nubes.esof2010.org/stored... - joergkurtwegner

Here more details and a link to the article about "(true) collaboration via voluntary sanctioning" - http://www.joergkurtwegner.eu/... - joergkurtwegner