On Wed, Mar 17, 2021 at 9:13 PM Jacob Beal <jakebeal@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi, folks:I wanted to get in touch with the DIYbio community because there's an initiative going on that I think a lot of folks here may be interested in.As you might already know, pretty much everybody who programs makes use of StackOverflow, which provides well-curated answers for programming questions, and the rest of the StackExchange network does this for all sorts of other subjects, from math, physics, and chemistry to travel, cooking, and personal finance.A group of us are now looking to do the same for Synthetic Biology: we think it could use a good, universal database of questions and answers. We've already passed the early stages of defining the site, and now just need to demonstrate a critical mass of people committing to participate in order to get a beta site launched.I think this is likely to be of particularly great interest for the DIYbio community, due to the strong spirit of information sharing and helping one another that tends to be strong in DIY circles.If you agree with us that this is a good idea, can you come help make it a reality?
I like the idea of something like this existing but I would hope that we as a community value open technologies.
I know that StackExchange at least licenses user-contributed content using an open license so it could be worse, but even if the data can be exported, importing to a different platform would be non-trivial. There's also issues around potential tracking of user behavior / sale of user data and what seems like an inevitable sale of the entire platform to Microsoft[0] given their past acquisitions. Let's try to build some resilience to corporate co-optation into this proposed community from the beginning. Moving a large active community to a different platform once it's already going seems likely to fail.
I would be happy to get a self-hosted Discourse and a Mattermost instance set up, find a competent sysadmin and set up a monthly recurring donation system where people can contribute to pay for the hosting and sysadmin's time.
The quick option if we just need Discourse is to pay for their hosted option. They offer 50% discounts to nonprofits and again I'd be happy to set this up and then migrate to self-hosted if it becomes relevant.
I also just realized to my horror that the first link on diybio.org now links to a Facebook group. Does anyone really think this is appropriate? Who made this decision? It does not seem in line with the code of ethics linked not much further down the page. Facebook is a company that directly works against open access to technology. Even if we as a community only care about open access to biotechnology there is no open access to any technology without open access to the internet.
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marc/juul
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