Pack: Presentation - The Experiment that is myExperiment

Abstract:

myExperiment (http://www.myexperiment.org) is a community repository and virtual research environment that supports the sharing and reuse of scientific workflows and (increasingly) other kinds of experiment plans and methods. For researchers it provides a social infrastructure that encourages sharing and a platform for conducting research, through familiar Facebook-like user interfaces. For developers it provides an open, extensible and participative environment built using Web 2.0 principles. The team is made up of software developers, social scientists and scientific informaticians from a range of disciplines.

Launched in November 2007, myExperiment.org has around 3500 visits a month and over 1600 signed up members who have publicly contributed 600+ workflows from 10 different workflow systems. It is now the primary source of publicly shared workflows.

myExperiment is an experiment - How do we incentivise scientists to share with people who could be their rivals? Do they share? When and why? Do they curate each others content? Do scientists tag? Do they reuse and under what conditions? Is reuse of complex methods possible? What special mechanisms do we need to incorporate to protect the intellectual capital of our scientists and support their contributions? What kind of information do people share? Does this Web 2.0 thing work for science? How do we work with scientists and social scientists to build myExperiment? What worked out, and what didn’t? And what general lessons can we learn about collaboration drawn from our experiences?