Loose coupling and biopharma:
[Via business|bytes|genes|molecules]

A few days ago, via the typical following of links that is typical of a good search and browse section on the interwebs, I chanced upon a discussion about a presentation given by Justin Gehtland at RailsConf. The talk was entitled Small Things, Loosely Joined, Written Fast and that title has been stuck in my head ever since. Funnily enough, what was in my head was not software, and web architectures, cause today, I consider that particular approach almost essential to building good applications and scalable infrastructures, and most people in the community seem to understand that (not sure about scientific programmers though). What I started thinking about was if that particular philosophy could be extended to the biopharma industry.

Without making direct analogies, but without suspending too much disbelief, one can imagine a world where drug development is not done in today’s model, but via a system consisting of a number of loosely coupled components that come together to combine cutting edge research and products (drugs) in a model that scales better and does a better, more efficient job of building and sustaining those products. One of the tenets of the loose coupling approach to scalable software and hardware is minimizing the risk of failure that is often a problem with more tightly coupled systems and in many ways the current blockbuster model is very much one where risk is not minimized and one failure along the path can result in the loss of millions of dollars. I have said in the past that by placing multiple smart bets, distributed collaborations and novel mechanisms (like a knowledge and technology exchange), we can reboot the biopharma industry, reducing costs and developer better drugs more efficiently. I don’t want to trivialize the challenge, the numerous ways in which the process can go wrong, and the vagaries of biology, but resiliency is a key design goal of high scale systems, and is one we need to build into the drug development process, one where the system chooses new paths when the original ones are blocked.

How could we build such a network model? I know folks like Stephen Friend have their ideas. Mine are ill formed, but data commons, distributed collaborations, and IP exchanges are a key component especially in an age where developing a drug is going to be a complex mix of disciplines, complex data sets and continuous pharmacavigilance. I can’t help but point to Matt Wood’s Into the Wonderful which does point to some of those concepts albeit from a computational perspective

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Designing great and awesome tools for researchers to use will be critical for successful drug development. But there also has to be a cultural change in the researchers themselves and the organizations they inhabit.

Nature just published a paper by the Polymath Project, an open science approach to the discovery of an important math problem. They addressed the problem of authorship and reputation:

The process raises questions about authorship: it is difficult to set a hard-and-fast bar for authorship without causing contention or discouraging participation. What credit should be given to contributors with just a single insightful contribution, or to a contributor who is prolific but not insightful? As a provisional solution, the project is signing papers with a group pseudonym, ‘DHJ Polymath’, and a link to the full working record. One advantage of Polymath-style collaborations is that because all contributions are out in the open, it is transparent what any given person contributed. If it is necessary to assess the achievements of a Polymath contributor, then this may be done primarily through letters of recommendation, as is done already in particle physics, where papers can have hundreds of authors.

We need to come up with better ways to design useful metrics for those that contribute to such large projects. Researchers need to know they will get credit for their work. As we do this, we need to also help train them for better collaborative work, because that is probably what most of them will be doing.

Technorati Tags: Open Access, Science, Web 2.0

10 Golden Rules of Social Media:
[Via Nonprofit Online News]

Yes, the title is linkbait, but I like it anyway. Aliza Sherman has been doing this almost as long as I have and her digestion of 20 plus years of experience into 10 Golden Rules of Social Media are utterly simple and powerful. They could easily be a checklist for any social media project or campaign: (1) Respect the Spirit of the ‘Net. (2) Listen. (3) Add Value. (4) Respond. (5) Do Good Things. (6) Share the Wealth. (7) Give Kudos. (8) Don’t Spam. (9) Be Real. (10) Collaborate.

In fact, it makes me think that I ought to see if I could build some research around this list. Unfortunately, the most important one (indeed the one that leads to all the other nine, as far as I’m concerned) is a challenging one to test. “Respect the spirit of the Net.” I have a solid idea of what that means and oddly, I think it’s a large part of what people pay me for. But could I build an instrument for it? I’m not so sure.

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One thing the Internet is doing is requiring us to change and adapt social interactions, to create rules that work in the new environment. Society does this in order to control behavior so that the interactions are the most productive.

Not that trolls and spam will disappear but, just as we do with someone who to break some of our current social rules, we will do a better job of isolating and ignoring their behavior so it does not do as much damage.

Technorati Tags: Open Access, Web 2.0

by foodistablog

One of the great things about openness and transparency is the ability for people to mash together various things to suit themselves. So, look at this:

Listening to: Death of an Interior Decorator from the album “Transatlanticism” by Death Cab For Cutie.

I added that with a single click in ecto, the blog editing software I use to create and publish posts. Ecto has a nice add-on that grabs the info from the song I am listening to and puts it in the post. I can set up templates with formatting so it has the links, etc. But the original template created Google search links. I simply remade the template so it links to iTunes.

I’m doing the same thing with Twitterfeed. This has allowed me to push blog posts from my different blogs (Spreading Science, Path to Sustainable and A Man with a PhD). Now I’m seeing if I can push posts to my Facebook account.

So, a simple posting can also copy the post to both Twitter ad Facebook. It looks like I do a lot but it all comes from simply clicking one button. That is what open APIs and other aspects of the web allow us to do.

It all makes it easier for the right people to get the right information at the right time.

by Giuseppe Bognanni
Barriers to Intranet Use from Forrester:
[Via The FASTForward Blog]

Forrester recently released a report on What’s Holding Back Your Intranet? They were nice to share a copy with me. They found that 93% of employee respondents said they use an intranet or company portal (Forrester uses the terms interchangeably) at least weekly, and more than half reported daily use. However, they found that these intranets were mostly accessed for basic functions such as company directory, benefits information, and payroll. Access to collaborative tools, what some might called an enterprise 2.0 capability was ranked fourteenth.

At the same time studies have shown that a highly functional intranet can provide great value. A 2009 study at BT found that every £1 invested in the intranet produced £20 in exploited value. This certainly is consistent with my experience implementing such system in the late 90s. Despite this firms are underutilizing their intranets. They found several reasons.

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Why don’t employees use an intranet? Particularly if it can return twenty times on its investment?

Then there is this:

Most current intranets also do not reflect and support the specific roles and responsibilities of their users. The one size fits all approach is consistent with an IT centric intranet as it is easier and cheaper to maintain.

Too often IT buys an application that promises a strong and collaborative intranet. But this one size fits all makes it very hard to provide something that works in the culture of the organization. That is why I like Open Source approaches. The open nature of the software not only means that it can often stay current with fast moving trends (something a proprietary solution can often be far behind in implementing) but it also provides a much easier opportunity for internal employees or external consultants to craft a solution that works best.

All these things will happen eventually. But part of the way to increase the rate of diffusion of change in a company is to decrease the time it takes to adopt new approaches. This is just one example.

Technorati Tags: Social media

For anyone not already in IDEO’s PR reach, Tim Brown’s presentation at TED in July has been posted. Tim does a great job talking about how design become a narrow profession—”a priesthood of folks in black turtlenecks and designer glasses working on small things.” And in talking about how design can become something more.

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Design Thinking

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0

by psyberartist
It’s Time to Turn to Research’s Most Valuable, Yet Underutilized Resource: Patients:
[Via FasterCures]
By Margaret Anderson, COO, FasterCures

A piece in yesterday’s New York Times, Research Trove: Patients’ Online Data, recounts the story of a young woman stricken by a rare pulmonary disease, and her attempts to raise money and connect a network of scientists to research her ailment. In collaboration with a Harvard cancer researcher, she launched a Web site for others facing her same diagnosis, on which patients could share symptoms and report health information.
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Much of our medical system uses a top-down approach, where the doctor, informed by his colleagues, current research or, most likely, pharmaceutical representatives, tells the patient what to do or what drugs to take.

It could be very problematic, since many people really do not want to be active. they want the doctor to tell them what to do in order to become well. Many doctors are effectively trained to respond in this way. But some people are seeking a different approach. It will be interesting to see if social media approaches can alter the current paradigm and to what extent.

Technorati Tags: Science, Social media

by Rusty Darbonne
Explainer Tip: Remember the Curse of Knowledge:
[Via Common Craft - Explanations In Plain English -]

One of the books that I read just before creating our first videos was Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. More than almost any other, this book helped me see new opportunities to present ideas in a unique way. One idea from the book really stands out - it’s The Curse of Knowledge <insert scary music.>

We’ve all experienced it - in talking to a doctor, an engineer or academic, we get lost. Despite their best efforts, they explain a topic using words and examples that don’t make sense to a beginner. These people are suffering from the Curse.

The idea behind the curse of knowledge is that the more we know about something, the harder it is for us to explain it to someone who knows nothing. We have a hard time being able to imagine what it’s like not to know. For example, think about a lawyer who spent his life reading and writing legal documents, talking to lawyers all day every day, etc. When you ask this lawyer about tort reform, you’re likely to get an explanation that confuses you more. This person knows too much to answer your question in a language you understand.

We’re all guilty of having the curse. We all have something in our life that we know very well - perhaps too well to explain easily. The key is know that the curse exists. To be able to recognize the challenge before you. Here’s how:

Consider every word. Sometimes a word that is completely natural to you can doom an explanation. For example, let’s say you’re a financial planner and you sit down with a young couple and they seem to get everything you’re saying. Then you mention “amortization” as if it were any other word. You use it every day and the people around you do too. It may seem that amortization is perfectly normal. But it’s not - their eyes glaze over and the explanation takes a turn for the worst. You have the curse.

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What Common Craft does is tell great stories. This is the easiest model for communication between diverse communities that may not have a common language.

Most of what we deal with every day is really too complex to easily discuss and evaluate without years of experience and lots of jargon. In fact, few people actually think like that. They create heuristics, rules of thumb, that permit them to deal with complexity.

Because stories often are used to communicate very complex ideas but in terms that anyone can understand. Watch any Common Craft video.

Technorati Tags: Technology, Web 2.0

Systems Thinking: Ancient Maya’s Evolution of Consciousness and Contemporary Thinking:
[Via Ackoff Center Weblog]

Posted by Assistant Professor Tadeja Jere Lazanski, University of Primorska, Portoroz, Slovenia on his blog: “Systems thinking is a framework that is based on the belief that the component parts of a system can best be understood in the context…

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I may not hold with all the aspects of this model but it certainly could be a nice starting point for an interesting conversation of using synthetic approaches to solve problems. At least now I can understand why I should be excited about 2012.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Sustainability

I’ve taken a little break reading and thinking. I’ve spent the last few days working on some ideas regarding the traversal of innovations across a community and then working on the data to support these ideas. I’m really excited by some of the information my model fits now.

I’ll also get back to blogging. Should be fun.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0

by James Cridland
Get Ready to Participate: Crowdsourcing and Governance:
[Via Confessions of an Aca/Fan]

Crowdsourcing and Governance

by Daren C. Brabham

It’s been three years since Jeff Howe coined the term “crowdsourcing” in his Wired article “The Rise of Crowdsourcing.” The term, which describes an online, distributed problem solving and production model, is most famously represented in the business operations of companies like Threadless and InnoCentive and in contests like the Goldcorp Challenge and the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl Contest.

In each of these cases, the company has a problem it needs solved or a product it needs designed. The company broadcasts this challenge on its Web site to an online community–a crowd–and the crowd submits designs and solutions in response. Next–and this is a key component of crowdsourcing–the crowd vets the submissions of its peers, critiquing and ranking submissions until winners emerge. Though winners are often rewarded for their ideas, prizes are often small relative to industry standards for the same kind of professional work and rewards sometimes only consist of public recognition.

Recognizing that not all creativity and innovation resides in-house, some organizations are looking for connections to outside innovators. New social tools allow them to make connections, through such sources as InnoCentive. When done well, these approaches can not only produce new ideas but help vet these ideas for suitability.

This approach can work in areas other than for-profit settings. Think non-profit biomedical institutions or government.

Though you’d be hard pressed to see them ever use the word “crowdsourcing,” one such example of crowdsourcing in governance is Peer-to-Patent. Begun in June 2007, Peer-to-Patent is a project developed by New York Law School’s Institute for Information Law and Policy, in cooperation with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The pilot project engages an online community in the examination of pending patent applications, tasking the crowd with identifying prior art and annotating applications to be forwarded on to the USPTO. The project helps to streamline the typical patent review process, adding many more sets of eyes to a typical examination process.

Another attempt to use crowdsourcing in public decision-making is Next Stop Design, a project with which I am involved that asks the crowd to design a bus stop for Salt Lake City, Utah. With Thomas W. Sanchez and a team of researchers from the University of Utah, we’re working in cooperation with the Utah Transit Authority (UTA) and funded by a grant from the U.S. Federal Transit Administration. On the Next Stop Design Web site, you can register for free, submit your own bus stop designs and ideas, and rate and comment on the designs of others. Launched on June 5, 2009, the project runs through September 25, 2009, and the highest rated designs will be considered for actual construction at a major bus transfer stop in Salt Lake City. Winning designs will be publicly acknowledged and included on a plaque affixed to the built bus stop.

It will take some changes in viewpoints but the ability of the public to directly engage important aspects of government should only enhance policy. Obviously, this approach could not be used in every area but careful positioning of the approach could have real consequences.

There is much potential for crowdsourcing in government, certainly as one of an array of social media methods quickly being embraced by all levels of government. President Obama has made his intentions with technology and transparency in government clear. His appointment of Beth Noveck, the New York Law School professor who launched Peer-to-Patent, as Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, makes his intentions very clear. I predict over the next two years we’ll see in the U.S. a rapid proliferation of government by the crowd, for the crowd. Get ready to participate.

It will be interesting to see if this approach also harnesses some of the social commitments seen in the Millennials. This generation is already connected and has shown some strong willingness to work on social needs. I think that the impact of these approaches may be greater in non-profit settings than in for-profit. By engaging people in the charitable work in ways that easily make them a part of the process, non-profits have an advantage that few for-profits do.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0