Open science and hacking « Wellcome Trust Blog

"It’s an exciting time. The mass of hitherto sequestered data, now made available to all, has come to represent a virtual continent that might be explored, with no one really sure what prizes might lie in its interior.  But this is only the beginning.  There is a job to be done in better organising and expressing content.  There is suspicion to overcome, privacy to be respected and trust to won – especially when it comes to biomedical data. Patients have yet to be convinced that what they have to gain by sharing is greater than what they have to lose. Pioneers in this field have a duty to win their trust.  That’s part of the reason why we’ve organised this Wellcome Trust Hackathon around the theme of ‘Open Science’. ‘Hacking’ has historically been regarded as the electronic equivalent of breaking and entering. The sort of thing one might get arrested for. But recently the term has come to mean something else. The new ‘Hacking’ is about making objects, electronic platforms and software do things that their manufacturers perhaps never intended. It’s about finding the hidden utility in things and realising the potential in everyday objects. At its best, hacking is an ingenious alternative use or a shortcut to make our lives easier. Hacking, in this sense, is an innovative and constructive pursuit. Our hackathon invites developers and designers to explore ways that biomedical research data can be made accessible, interesting and useful to a wider public beyond the scientific community. Participants will spend the weekend developing mobile and web applications using publicly available research data, health data (such as those we collect and share through running apps and the like) and medical equipment. Making research data widely available to the research community in a timely and responsible manner en­sures that this data can be verified, built upon and used to advance knowledge and its application to gener­ate improvements in health. Part of the goal of this hack is to demonstrate something of what might be gained by individuals and organisations from a more open approach to the data they own and generate.  What we might gain in better understanding the world around us and ourselves, simply by adding our information to the pot and allowing it to be used for the greater good..."