The Blue Obelisk Movement
I talked about the first informal meeting in March but things are becoming a little more organized this summer.
The Blue Obelisk Movement now has an official website, mailing list, and is moving towards sharing data and algorithms. After years of mostly proprietary code, balanced with scattered code sharing among groups, open source chemistry is becoming more organized.
A rhetorical question… do you need a manifesto to become a movement?
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Peter Murray-Rust — 2 years, 10 months ago.
Presented Open Chemistry at two meetings - US goverment chemical databases (at Fredrick NCI) and also at School of Informatics Indiana University. Have got a good number of positive responses as well as the normal sceptics. Highlighted the Blue Obelisk at both.
P.
Egon Willighagen — 2 years, 9 months ago.
What we need is funding to set up activities important to spreading our word. E.g. to make a live CD
with open source chemoinformatics software and data sets, which we can spread whenever we are on conferences.
Geoff — 2 years, 9 months ago.
Egon -
I think the funding will come. The NSF has been recently talking strongly about open “cyberinfrastructure” which certainly implies some academic funding towards such activities. On the scale of a research grant, spreading Blue Obelisk and its components will be cheap. (Pressing CDs is a great idea and a few hundred isn’t that expensive.)
Obtaining money from industry may also be possible — a variety of open software development manages it. The question is how to gain the right contacts for this. I suspect time and better networking will help.
And of course constant discussions and presentations (like Peter describes above) are critical. I consider software development as “outreach” and just good for the community — but I’m willing to talk software in addition to my key research. A point I try to make again and again is that Open Babel and other Blue Obelisk activities enhance productivity. If we can spend 5% of our time to make the remaining 95% more productive, our core research always benefits.