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This has taken me longer than expected to write up. Julius Lucks, John Cumbers, and myself lead a workshop on Open Science on Monday 21^st at the BioSysBio meeting at Imperial College London.  I had hoped to record screencast, audio, and possibly video as well but in the end the laptop I am working off couldn’t cope with both running the projector and Camtasia at the same time with reasonable response rates (its a long story but in theory I get my ‘proper’ laptop back tomorrow so hopefully better luck next time). We had somewhere between 25 and 35 people throughout most of the workshop and the feedback was all pretty positive. What I found particularly exciting was that, although the usual issues of scooping, attribution, and the general dishonestly of the scientific community were raised, they were only in passing, with a lot more of the discussion focussing on practical issues. Read more »

Posted: April 23rd, 2008 under Open Science PSB09, biosysbio2008, ethics, identity, open notebook science, open science, open-science-charter, osci-protocol, psb2009, trust, workshop.
Comments: 1

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One thing that has been becoming clearer and clearer to me is the need to an agreed central authority for identify. This is one thing, possibly the one thing, that needs to be absolutely secure and inviolable for Open Science to work. Trust relies on provenance. Attribution, which is at the heart of open practice, relies on provenance. And pulling all of my data together from multiple streams in an automatic way relies on a record of their provenance.

There has been a lot of discussion about Google App Engine but two posts in particular have collided for me. First was the first blog post about an app I saw off the rank which uses a Google account to access an open id. Useful and cool. Secondly was the emphasis in another post from David Recordon about Google Apps as a potential Facebook Killer that the access to Google accounts is a key part of the offering.

Then I realised. Google already probably had the highest penetration as a validator of identities but these only really provide access to Google services. OpenID is great in principle but is not perhaps getting the traction it needs to go global. But all of that now just goes away. If you can write an app to authenticate someone via Google and then link that to OpenID you can do it for anything. Google have just positioned themselves to be the de facto provider of identities. And they may have solved the provenance problem into the bargain.

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Posted: April 9th, 2008 under identity, provenance.
Comments: 7