GitHub for Science

This stems from my skin-to-replace-plastic idea. Really what I want to do is encourage those with varied backgrounds to collaborate to make something happen. This is the open source software model: People who are expert software developers spend their time developing software on the side as an open source project. GitHub is central to this (though one would argue that GitHub is a relatively recent phenomenon in open source).

The point is this: For someone who is spending some time developing software that is open and consumable by others, GitHub provides a valuable and free resource for them to do so. Science does not have the same resource. What if there was a GitHub style collaboration space for science? Would scientists contribute their expertise to little side projects with the aim to build a better world?

I don’t know what this might look like, but I imagine it might be a bunch of people contributing to scientific docs and research plans, perhaps booking out research equipment and the like.

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