Watch the video here:

An excerpt from the transcript, chosen by Sharon Ede:

” ‘In the early part of the epidemic from Kenema, we’d had 106 clinical records from patients, and we once again made that publicly available to the world. And in our own lab, we could show that you could take those 106 records, we could train computers to predict the prognosis for Ebola patients to near 100 percent accuracy. And we made an app that could release that, to make that available to health-care workers in the field.

But 106 is just not enough to make it powerful, to validate it. So we were waiting for more data to release that. and the data has still not come. We are still waiting, tweaking away, in silos rather than working together. And this just — we can’t accept that. Right? You, all of you, cannot accept that. It’s our lives on the line. And in fact, actually, many lives were lost, many health-care workers, including beloved colleagues of mine, five colleagues: Mbalu Fonnie, Alex Moigboi, Dr. Humarr Khan, Alice Kovoma and Mohamed Fullah. These are just five of many health-care workers at Kenema and beyond that died while the world waited and while we all worked, quietly and separately.

See, Ebola, like all threats to humanity, it’s fueled by mistrust and distraction and division. When we build barriers amongst ourselves and we fight amongst ourselves, the virus thrives. But unlike all threats to humanity, Ebola is one where we’re actually all the same. We’re all in this fight together. Ebola on one person’s doorstep could soon be on ours. And so in this place with the same vulnerabilities, the same strengths, the same fears, the same hopes, I hope that we work together with joy.

A graduate student of mine was reading a book about Sierra Leone, and she discovered that the word “Kenema,” the hospital that we work at and the city where we work in Sierra Leone, is named after the Mende word for “clear like a river, translucent and open to the public gaze.” That was really profound for us, because without knowing it, we’d always felt that in order to honor the individuals in Kenema where we worked, we had to work openly, we had to share and we had to work together. And we have to do that. We all have to demand that of ourselves and others — to be open to each other when an outbreak happens, to fight in this fight together. Because this is not the first outbreak of Ebola, it will not be the last, and there are many other microbes out there that are lying in wait, like Lassa virus and others. And the next time this happens, it could happen in a city of millions, it could start there. It could be something that’s transmitted through the air. It could even be disseminated intentionally. And I know that that is frightening, I understand that, but I know also, and this experience shows us, that we have the technology and we have the capacity to win this thing, to win this and have the upper hand over viruses. But we can only do it if we do it together and we do it with joy.

So for Dr. Khan and for all of those who sacrificed their lives on the front lines in this fight with us always, let us be in this fight with them always. And let us not let the world be defined by the destruction wrought by on.”Photo by poptech

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In the conference’s opening keynote, physicist Michael Nielsen spoke about ‘open science’ – conducting research in a manner that makes ideas, data and thoughts available for others to look at and build on as you go along, rather than in hording them until publication (see also, as @alicebell pointed out, this blog post by Jack Stilgoe). The trouble is, open science is failing.

Nielsen says there needs to be a reward for sharing knowledge – it requires a change in the culture and reward system. He highlighted the efforts of Tobias Osborne, who’s tried to encourage open data sharing in the quantum physics community through an open lab book of sorts. But his efforts have revealed that few in the community give back. Nielsen referred to the ‘changing to the other side of the road’ metaphor – people are reluctant to change ingrained societal behaviour. But a change in regulation may well benefit the whole industry.

He asked about the concept of ‘the provision of ‘public good’ – under what conditions can we succeed in this non-rivalrous concept? For instance, ideas discussed by a researcher on a blog are already ‘in the public good’ by being revealed publicly.

So what’s the solution? Maybe it’s starting small. Nielsen drew comparison with the trade unions: these are made up of small groups formed around social incentives to help one another. The small groups then join conglomerate when their interests align and they have incentive to. Is that the way that open science might succeed?

Here’s the key thing for me: the problem with many open science projects is they start too broad. Like the unions, many social networks start narrower (in terms of audience) because it is easier to focus on small groups – easier to provide incentives and they can always broaden later. Look at Facebook starting with Ivy League colleges. As Nielsen said, narrowness is a feature and not a bug when you are getting started.

There is lots of interesting things here.  The fact that open science is struggling because the community was not giving back (aka freeloading) is not an issue unique to this area, but to all open projects (and discussion of possible remedies is here).  The trade union analogy is a good one, but the same issue occurs there from my experience with those involved often giving varying amounts of time to the union and most of the work being done by a few people.    Ultimately open science is the best way to go for many branches of inquiry simply because the problems science needs to help resolve, such as climate change, need a border push from all of us, and the best way to get people involved is to make them a part of the process.  So discussion and work on opening science is more welcome than ever.

I was also interested in this idea of narrowness being a feature – which I can see.  With a smaller focus and indeed group it does seem to me easier to make the common connections that will keep people working together.  Once the focus blurs, overall progress can blur too.  At Virt3c@Hull I had a really interesting set of conversations with Gabriella Coleman, who had studied the motivations of those who work on free software.  She said that in projects where all the participants got together to meet up in the real world and talk and socialise were much more focused and cohesive as a group that those project that did not.

For more from the event, see here.

(Also posted on my blog.)

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