OpenWetWare:FAQ: Difference between revisions

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==General==
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===Who are you?===
===Who are you?===
OpenWetWare is a group of researchers that are interested in increasing the amount of organization, dissemination, and communication in biological research (or just want an easy way to keep a lab webpage up-to-date).  Everyone that has access to OpenWetWare can edit all pages in the site. Thus the evolution of all the pages are due to everyone involved.  If you want to know who has done what, check out the history file associated with every page.
OpenWetWare is a group of researchers that are interested in increasing the amount of organization, dissemination, and communication in biological research (or just want an easy way to keep a lab webpage up-to-date).  Everyone that has access to OpenWetWare can edit all pages in the site. Thus the evolution of all the pages are due to everyone involved.  If you want to know who has done what, check out the history file associated with every page.  If you have questions, please [[OpenWetWare:Contact|contact us]].


===Can I/we join?===
===How did this site get started?===
Yes!!!  The more people that are contributing, the more useful the site becomes.  Please [mailto:admin@openwetware.org email us].
The site was started by graduate students in the [[Endy]] and [[Knight]] labs at MIT on April 20, 2005 (called Endipedia).  The site was officially opened to researchers worldwide, and renamed OpenWetWare, on June 22, 2005.


===Why would I (or my lab) want to join?===
===Why would I (or my lab) want to join?===
Check out the [[OpenWetWare:Why join?|Why join?]] page for a list of reasons why OpenWetWare may be of use to you and your lab.
Check out the [[OpenWetWare:Why join?|Why join?]] page for a list of reasons why OpenWetWare may be of use to you and your lab.
===Are you people just a bunch of scientific hippies?  Why are you doing this?===
See the "who are you?" question above.  In general, we are not all hippies.  We are doing this to construct a resource for ourselves.  It is ultimately a selfish pursuit. Peruse some of the pages and you will notice that different labs/groups/individuals use OpenWetWare in different ways. Like many other things in life, OpenWetWare is what you make of it.


===Do you ever plan on going commercial?===
===Do you ever plan on going commercial?===
No.
Probably not.  OpenWetWare will always remain a free and open site dedicated to encouraging and celebrating open scientific information.  It is possible that in the future that partnerships with organizations and/or commercial entities to ensure the long-term sustainability of the site will be considered.  For now, and while we still have funding, the answer is no.


===How can I be assured this site will be here tomorrow?===
===Is OWW backed-up? / How can I be assured this site will be here tomorrow?===
Currently there are several labs to whom wiki functionality is vital, thus the wiki minimally will remain as long as these labs are in existance.  Hardware and support has generously been donated by the MIT BioMicro Center.  OpenWetWare is backed up daily, and we are continuing to improve the redundancy and backup capabilities.  So as far as relying on an academic initiative goes, this is a fairly good bet.
Currently there are several labs to whom wiki functionality is vital, thus the wiki minimally will remain as long as these labs are in existence.  Hardware and support is contracted to [http://rackspace.com Rackspace], an industry leader of managed hosting.  Rackspace provides server monitoring provides several redundancies for hardware, network access, and power. OpenWetWare is backed up daily, and we are continuing to improve the redundancy and backup capabilities.  As far as trusting others with your information goes, we are probably a safe bet.  Also, if you are really worried, we would love others to host mirrors of the entire site, or the [[OpenWetWare:Data_dumps|daily dumps]].  Please [[OpenWetWare:Contact|contact us]] if you are interested.


===Why the dual license?===
===Who runs this site?===
Long story short, we like Creative Commons for its machine and human readability.  We like GNU's FDL because Wikipedia and others use it.  We would like the two groups to settle their trivial differences, so that we can all move on with our lives.
The [[OpenWetWare:Steering committee|OpenWetWare steering committee]] is responsible for the overall direction of the site as well as ensuring that OpenWetWare continues to adhere to its [[OpenWetWare:Mission|mission]].  The steering committee is all-volunteer group of OpenWetWare users from many institutions.  You are welcome to [[OpenWetWare:Steering committee members|join]].  The [[OpenWetWare:Board|OpenWetWare board]] is responsible for ensuring the long term sustainability and success of OpenWetWare.  It consults with the steering committee on all decisions affecting the user community.


===How did this site get started?===
===Sound like a cool idea, but I have nothing to contribute!===
Sure you do.  One of the motivations for OpenWetWare is to lower the barriers of entry into biological research.  Many of the researchers on OpenWetWare are relative newcomers to biological research and are struggling to cope with the steep learning curve in biology.  We're trying to accumulate enough information on OpenWetWare such that a person with little lab experience could, for example, go to the [[DNA Ligation]] page, read it and be able to carry out a successful DNA ligation reaction.  Thus, some of the most useful contributions to the site are from people doing a technique for the first time.  They are more likely to document the little things that can easily trip up someone new to a procedure.  So newcomers to biological research are strongly encouraged to edit OpenWetWare with whatever information they learn along the way.  Or if you have a question, ask it in the [[Questions and Answers | research help forum]].


===Are you people just a bunch of scientific hippies?  Why are you doing this?===
===Can I/we join?===
See the "who are you?" question above.  In general, we are not all hippies.  We are doing this to construct a resource for ourselves.  It is ultimately a selfish pursuit. Peruse some of the pages and you will notice that different labs/groups/individuals use OpenWetWare in different ways. Like many other things in life, OpenWetWare is what you make of it.
Yes!!! The more people that are contributing, the more useful the site becomes.  Please check out the [[OpenWetWare:How_to_join|How to join]] page.
 
==Access==
===What's the deal with access?===
Currently we have the site as world-readable and member editable, and there are essentially no options to make pages be otherwise. We decided upon the current level of access based upon our key goals of open access and collaboration.  We also understand that there are times where information cannot be posted for the world/other students/et al., to read.  The Endy lab handles this by certain members having private wiki's on their own computers where they organize their thoughts and information.  Other groups have internal secure wiki's to which only lab members have access.  However, we feel that there is a lot of information that people will benefit from sharing on OpenWetWare.
 
In the future, we may be able to implement a system with more edit/view options for individual pages. After talks with some of the people over at Mediawiki, they have begun writing code to make edit/view access more dynamic and programmable by individual users.  In time, perhaps we can incorporate some of these improvements as they are made available.  This will offer some semblance of security (and would not get indexed by google for example), but is not as safe as say having a site behind a firewall.  Anyways, there are a variety of options, but in the end you have to balance increased security with decreased ease of access and manipulability.  For the time being, we will keep OpenWetWare at the current access level.


===I don't want someone else editing my site.  Can you change who can edit what?===
==More FAQs==
We hope for OpenWetWare to achieve as large and active a user base as possible while maintaining a collaborative environment.  The collaboration is critical, otherwise OWW is of no use to the community other than a glorified web hosting service (which will soon be obsolete anyways).  With this in mind, we find ourselves frequently evaluating options which would increase the "comfort level" for some potential users of OWW, but decrease the overall ease and extent of user contribution and especially collaboration.  This is particularly the case when evaluating access levels for editing. 


For example, a researcher in a different lab on our floor recently posted a general notice on our group meeting page about an issue occuring in a shared space. Now the page outlining the topics for a lab's group meeting would very likely fall into the category of "lab-only editing", however someone from outside the laboratory made, in their good judgement, an announcement in the relevant section of our group meeting schedule page.  (Our group meetings are driven from the wiki where people post announcements or whether they want to talk that week.  At the start of the meeting, our PI will go to the wiki and use it to direct the schedule of what we talk about). 
[[Image:Gettingstarted green.png|left|40px]]
[[OpenWetWare:FAQ/Editing|'''Editing''']]<br>
FAQ on contributing to OpenWetWare


While this may be a particularly mundane example, it illustrates the most important points.  First, It is often hard to decide ahead of time, what particular groups of people should have edit access to a particular document.  In this instance, the announcement placed by a researcher outside the lab was in the best interest of everybody.  What we have generally found is that the scientists and researchers that join are usually the best adjudicators of whether they should be editing another's site or not.  Second, we currently have >15 labs and a fair number of individuals that currently contribute to the site.  We have not had a single complaint of someone incorrectly/unknowingly/maliciously making bad edits to a particular page that is private or "belongs to a user".  This may be a testament to the norms of behavior that were established for the site (see our etiquette page; for instance pages beginning with "UserName:" are pages that we ask others not to edit), but probably is also due to the intelligence of the users, and the fact that any changes are tracked and attributable to one identifiable person (by virtue of login/password requirement on editing). 


One side note that has also assuaged some concerns: It is quite easy to point to a particular history page (history files have a static address), so if users want a document that in not editable, they can save it and always refer to that particular history file instead of the evolving document.
[[Image:Groups turquoise.png|left|40px]]
[[OpenWetWare:FAQ/Access|'''Access to the site''']]<br>
FAQ on viewing and editing access to OpenWetWare


So in summary, we understand the concern of allowing non-lab members to edit a lab's protocols, however we feel that by putting an access barrier at the level of the code itself we would be creating a barrier to contribution in order to solve a problem that thus far does not exist.  If and when we have a problem, we will re-evaluate.


===I don't want someone else seeing my site.  Can you change who can view what?===
[[Image:Service lab.png|left|40px]]
This is an issue we are not completely certain on how to deal with.  It is very possible that by allowing subsets of OWW users to collaborate on pages that are not viewable by the general community, collaborative opportunities could be increased.  The problem is that such accessibility constraints lead to people automatically labeling more things private, and once again, OWW would become just a web hosting service for individuals and their labs. 
[[OpenWetWare:FAQ/Labs|'''Labs''']]<br>
FAQ on having a lab wiki on OpenWetWare


For now, we have no way of implementing this, so the problem has been solved for us.  In our lab however, a number of people have created private wiki's that the regulate access to.  However, this is not a solution that is scalable.  Their wiki's aren't managed/backed-up/supported other than by themselves. 


We here through the grape-vines that such editability/accessibility options are being built into the next revision of the MediaWiki software.  If these capabilities become available, we will definitely consider adding different levels of accessibility.
[[Image:Service course.png|left|40px]]
[[OpenWetWare:FAQ/Courses|'''Courses''']]<br>
FAQ on hosting a course on OpenWetWare




==Technical==
[[Image:Community orange.png|left|40px]]
===How do I edit a page?===
[[OpenWetWare:FAQ/Copyright|'''Copyright''']]<br>
See the [[Help:Contents|help page]].
FAQ on copyright issues and OpenWetWare


===Are there any rules?===
|}
Check out the [[Etiquette|etiquette]] page for guidelines on creating and editing pages.
</div>


===How do I make the wiki pages for my lab/group look like a static website?===
__NOTOC__
Check out [[OpenWetWare:Dewikify]] for instructions on generating static websites from OpenWetWare wiki pages.  See [[Synthetic Biology]] and http://syntheticbiology.org for a comparison of a wiki page with its static counterpart.

Latest revision as of 13:02, 8 May 2007

Labs & Groups
From around the world 		Courses
Host & view classes 		Protocols
Share techniques & more 		Blogs
Read OWW blogs

Who are you?

OpenWetWare is a group of researchers that are interested in increasing the amount of organization, dissemination, and communication in biological research (or just want an easy way to keep a lab webpage up-to-date). Everyone that has access to OpenWetWare can edit all pages in the site. Thus the evolution of all the pages are due to everyone involved. If you want to know who has done what, check out the history file associated with every page. If you have questions, please contact us.

How did this site get started?

The site was started by graduate students in the Endy and Knight labs at MIT on April 20, 2005 (called Endipedia). The site was officially opened to researchers worldwide, and renamed OpenWetWare, on June 22, 2005.

Why would I (or my lab) want to join?

Check out the Why join? page for a list of reasons why OpenWetWare may be of use to you and your lab.

Are you people just a bunch of scientific hippies? Why are you doing this?

See the "who are you?" question above. In general, we are not all hippies. We are doing this to construct a resource for ourselves. It is ultimately a selfish pursuit. Peruse some of the pages and you will notice that different labs/groups/individuals use OpenWetWare in different ways. Like many other things in life, OpenWetWare is what you make of it.

Do you ever plan on going commercial?

Probably not. OpenWetWare will always remain a free and open site dedicated to encouraging and celebrating open scientific information. It is possible that in the future that partnerships with organizations and/or commercial entities to ensure the long-term sustainability of the site will be considered. For now, and while we still have funding, the answer is no.

Is OWW backed-up? / How can I be assured this site will be here tomorrow?

Currently there are several labs to whom wiki functionality is vital, thus the wiki minimally will remain as long as these labs are in existence. Hardware and support is contracted to Rackspace, an industry leader of managed hosting. Rackspace provides server monitoring provides several redundancies for hardware, network access, and power. OpenWetWare is backed up daily, and we are continuing to improve the redundancy and backup capabilities. As far as trusting others with your information goes, we are probably a safe bet. Also, if you are really worried, we would love others to host mirrors of the entire site, or the daily dumps. Please contact us if you are interested.

Who runs this site?

The OpenWetWare steering committee is responsible for the overall direction of the site as well as ensuring that OpenWetWare continues to adhere to its mission. The steering committee is all-volunteer group of OpenWetWare users from many institutions. You are welcome to join. The OpenWetWare board is responsible for ensuring the long term sustainability and success of OpenWetWare. It consults with the steering committee on all decisions affecting the user community.

Sound like a cool idea, but I have nothing to contribute!

Sure you do. One of the motivations for OpenWetWare is to lower the barriers of entry into biological research. Many of the researchers on OpenWetWare are relative newcomers to biological research and are struggling to cope with the steep learning curve in biology. We're trying to accumulate enough information on OpenWetWare such that a person with little lab experience could, for example, go to the DNA Ligation page, read it and be able to carry out a successful DNA ligation reaction. Thus, some of the most useful contributions to the site are from people doing a technique for the first time. They are more likely to document the little things that can easily trip up someone new to a procedure. So newcomers to biological research are strongly encouraged to edit OpenWetWare with whatever information they learn along the way. Or if you have a question, ask it in the research help forum.

Can I/we join?

Yes!!! The more people that are contributing, the more useful the site becomes. Please check out the How to join page.

More FAQs

Editing
FAQ on contributing to OpenWetWare


Access to the site
FAQ on viewing and editing access to OpenWetWare


Labs
FAQ on having a lab wiki on OpenWetWare


Courses
FAQ on hosting a course on OpenWetWare


Copyright
FAQ on copyright issues and OpenWetWare


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