Tell Your Friends We Could Use a Little More Crowding

Robert Kaye at O'Reilly Radar blogs about a session at ETech 2009, O'Reilly's emerging technology conference that's going on now. The session was a presentation from John Wilbanks (of Science Commons fame), who talked about "how creating a science oriented commons presented unique challenges," Kaye writes. "So far, the science world has taken paper metaphors and made them digital, which doesn't really enable new models of easy data sharing. John likened the scientific community to a stable system that has an "immune response" that is resistant to change." Wilbanks also discussed the inherent dilemma in a crowdsourcing model for science -- namely, that the basic knowledge needed to participate in useful conversations is so sophisticated that there tend not to be enough contributors to make up a crowd in the first place.