[Hplusroadmap] Post over at the Immortality Institute

[Bryan Bishop]

Hi all,

I was talking with the immortalists last night and posted a thread:
http://www.imminst.org/forum/Open-source-DIY-biohacking-kit-t20226.html

> Hey,
>
> I am participating in the chat in the background re: stem cells, and 
> realize that the ImmInst community does not know about my latest 
> project. It's over at http://biohack.sf.net. Synopsis: Join the fight 
> against diseases, aging and death -- while also doing some other 
> really awesome projects in the process.    
>
> The goal of the project is to collect as much information on synthetic 
> biology and DIY biotech as possible. This means gene therapy, genetic 
> engineering, biobricks, stem cell therapy, organogenesis, tissue 
> engineering, etc. (Soon we will be sharing genes, digitally). It 
> contains loads of experiments, protocols and explanations as well as 
> cached copies of important websites out there on the internet. There's 
> also a mailing list and community growing around it.       
>
> The website was even featured on MAKE last Friday. So things are going 
> well. I hope to hear from ImmInst members about what they think of the 
> project and whether or not any would like to help.  
>
> - Bryan

One of the responses from a "dr_chaos":
> I downloaded the zip file and was not amused. Too chaotic for my taste
> and many of the html files are very hard to read. Furthermore a zip 
> archive with other peoples downloaded web pages is not open source.  

To which I replied, and I think should be shared here:

> Woah there, hold on. The 'open' aspect is in the community revision of
> the content. We will be quickly replacing the old material with new 
> material, probably under the same license that Wikipedia uses for 
> publishing (GPL documentation license). Remember, this is a sort of 
> first announcement, designed to attract people to a vision so that we 
> can work on this sort of project. BTW, what's wrong with downloading 
> web pages? This is exactly what all of the search engines do: they 
> cache the pages and give you a file. In many cases, they also give you 
> your search results in a gzip format (much like a zip), except your 
> browser automatically interprets it as an exact web page, so the 
> difference is very minute. If you are concerned about any of the legal 
> issues with this concept, please (please!) feel free to contribute and 
> help get the project on track.             
>
> As for it being too chaotic ... that's a problem that I have been 
> trying to solve. I have been tempted to publish an ontology to the 
> mailing list. Perhaps something like a few folders for protocols, a 
> few for equipment design, and then another for the cached news 
> stories? I suspect that the real way to do it would be to have 
> multiple files that explain certain aspects of the project and how to 
> do certain protocols, and that would be the starting base for 
> organization. I'd be glad to entertain other ideas too, I think we can 
> do multiple releases at the same time or provide multiple variations 
> on organization of the information. Whatever works, really.         

And this reminds me to mention to the list the general idea of providing 
updates through svn so that people can sync up their packages with new 
additions or modifications so that people do not have to download the 
entire package each time. Thoughts? Has anybody ever done svn or cvs 
for documentation?

- Bryan
________________________________________
Bryan Bishop
http://heybryan.org/