{"id":2146,"date":"2011-01-12T22:15:06","date_gmt":"2011-01-13T03:15:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/?p=2146"},"modified":"2011-01-13T10:35:13","modified_gmt":"2011-01-13T15:35:13","slug":"open-questions-about-open-source-for-open-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/2011\/01\/open-questions-about-open-source-for-open-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Questions about Open Source for Open Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post contains lots of questions and few answers. Feel free to use the comment thread to help me answer them!<\/em><\/p>\n

Just about every scientist I know would agree that being more open<\/a> is a good thing. But in practice, being fully open is fraught with difficulty<\/a>, and most scientists fall a long way short of the ideal. We’ve discussed some of the challenges for openness in computational sciences before: the problem of hostile people deliberately misinterpreting<\/a> or misusing anything you release, the problem of ontological drift<\/a>, so that even honest collaborators won’t necessarily interpret what you release in the way you intended. And for software, all the extra effort it takes to make code ready for release, and the fact that there is no reward system in place for those who put in such effort.<\/p>\n

Community building<\/em> is a crucial success factor for open source software (and presumably, by extension, for open science). The vast majority of open source projects never build a community, so, while we often think of the major successes of open source (after all, that’s how the internet was built), these successes are vastly outnumbered by the detritus of open source projects that never took off<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, any lack of openness (whether real or perceived) is a stick by which to beat climate scientists, and those wielding this stick remain clueless about the technical and institutional challenges of achieving openness<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Where am I going with this? Well, I mentioned the Climate Code Foundation<\/a> a while back, and I’m delighted to be serving as a member of the advisory board. We had the first meeting of the advisory board meeting in the fall (in the open<\/a>), and talked at length about organisational and funding issues, and how to get the foundation off the ground. But we didn’t get much time to brainstorm ideas for new modes of operation – for what else the foundation can do.<\/p>\n

The foundation does have a long list of existing initiatives<\/a>, and a couple of major successes, most notably, a re-implementation of GISTEMP<\/a> as open source Python, which helped to validate the original GISTEMP<\/a> work, and provide an open platform for new research. Moving forward, things to be done include:<\/p>\n