I'm the project lead for the Glowing Plant project. This project came together out of the Biocurious Bioluminescent meetup on Monday evenings. People like Kyle, Raymond, Cameron and Patrik (plus many others) have been integral to the success of the project. We would like to continue working out of Biocurious' lab space but they have a policy of not releasing organisms created in the lab which is in conflict with our goal of putting a glowing plant in the public's hands. The project will contribute rent to any lab space in which it works, but Raymond at Biocurious (quite appropriately) didn't want to discuss that whilst the policy question was not settled.
The first goal of this project is to educate and inspire the public about the potential of synthetic biology. As we discuss in this update, every single output from the kickstarter campaign will be released open source: the DNA designs, the methods we use and the parts which we synthesize:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-plants-natural-lighting-with-no-electricit/posts/469999
The iGem parts are not available to the DIY Bio community, we hope our synthesized parts will become the foundation of the equivalent of Biobricks for DIY Biologists. If you want to use these parts get in touch with us (obviously they haven't been synthesized yet).
The second goal of the project is to create trees which we can use to replace street-lights. This is a Big Hairy Audacious Goal, but by creating publicly available parts we hope to accelerate that journey by encouraging more groups to collaborate and innovate in the space and big goals are widely recognized as the way to achieve that. The best open source projects involve a collaboration with industry as they work well when there are multiple incentives to participate. I was at Maker Faire a few weeks ago and it was amazing to see the innovation taking place around 3D printers, triggered by the same kind of basic open source components: we hope to create the same kind of ecosystem around glowing plants.
Rather than accusing Genome Compiler of exploiting the DIY Bio movement we should thank them for supporting the community and putting resources into making this project happen. The future of this industry, as the costs to participate drop and knowledge becomes more available, will be small groups working out of community labs and garages - this is where innovation comes from and hopefully more companies will start to recognize this and get involved themselves.
Antony
On Tuesday, June 4, 2013 3:11:54 PM UTC-7, Bryan Bishop wrote:
On Tue, Jun 4, 2013 at 4:54 PM, Pieter <pieterva...@gmail.com> wrote:--Christina raises another great question in the third comment below the article: to what extend should / shouldn't companies that spin out of community labs contribute to it? When using the lab in Amsterdam on open days, one is committed to sharing the designs and documentation under a Creative Commons license
Good question. Most self-identifying hackerspaces aren't incubators, but incubators definitely take equity in businesses going through their doors. Having neither a policy of work being free licensed or a policy of establishing equitable relationship with the incubator is probably going to lead to trouble (or exploitation).
- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507
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