[open-science] NeuroStars, a Q&A site for neuroscience

Fri Jun 27 23:31:43 UTC 2014

Thanks, both! Will be sure to give this a look. :)

- K

sent on the move. apologies for typos. 

> On 28 Jun 2014, at 08:21, Roman Valls Guimera <roman at incf.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi Bill,
> 
> Thanks for your feedback!
> 
> This afternoon Satra and I sat down and put together some, more specific, set of the issues over GitHub:
> 
> https://github.com/incf/biostar-central/issues?labels=MozillaScience&state=open
> 
> Please feel free to ask further either over GitHub or this mailing list.
> 
> Hope that helps!
> Roman
> 
> 
>> 27 jun 2014 kl. 08:41 skrev Bill Mills <mills.wj at gmail.com>:
>> 
>> Hi Roman,
>> 
>> Neurostars looks like a great tool with demonstrated potential, and the things you're thinking about getting developer help on sound like potential good fits for our project.  We'll be choosing projects to move ahead with around the end of next week, but before then and as part of the decision process, I'd like to zero in a bit on exactly the tasks you'd like developers to focus on.  Points 1-3 all sound interesting, but pretty broad; any one of those broken down into a collection of smaller goals could be an excellent project at the right scale.  Also, the UI & django work you mention could be real watersheds here, since as you point out there is low to no domain knowledge getting in the way of onboarding designers and developers there.  If you can choose the goal you most want outside help on and break it down one more zoom level, I think we'll have a strong collaboration proposal on a valuable project.  Let us know, looking forward to it!
>> 
>> 
>> On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 7:31 AM, Roman Valls Guimera <roman at incf.org> wrote:
>> Dear Kaitlin,
>> 
>> We would like to know whether a project that we have been working on is along the lines of what you need for the call for #mozscience.
>> 
>> Briefly, http://neurostars.org is a question and answer site for discussing and sharing knowledge about neuroscience and neuroinformatics that is based on http://biostars.org, a highly successful question and answer site for the Bioinformatics field.
>> 
>> NeuroStars.org was forked to foster a cultural shift in the biomedical imaging community away from software-specific mailing lists to a more efficient platform for collaborative problem solving like stackoverflow.com (which is not open source), since many of the posts on the software-specific mailing lists were identical in either content or concept.
>> 
>> Currently, Paolo, our Google Summer of Code 2014 student is taking care of pushing new and exciting features to the site:
>> 
>> http://nimiq.github.io/my-summer-of-code/
>> 
>> We pullrequest back to the original author, Istvan Albert, so that the bioinformatics community (among other sci communities) can benefit from our additions:
>> 
>> https://github.com/ialbert/biostar-central
>> 
>> Our current broad development goals are to:
>> 
>> 1. Provide an RDF integration that is able to cross reference resources within and across sites and neuroinformatics resources such as NIDASH, a scientific provenance standard for bioimaging data.
>> 2. Integrate and expose different dataset sharing protocols such as Bittorrent, git-annex, and iRODS, to simplify data sharing within science.
>> 3. Integrate ORCID, a popular researcher identifier to increase publication awareness among scientists working on related fields.
>> 
>> As you might notice when visiting the site, there’s room for improvement, both UI and backend. We could definitely benefit from good graphics designers and javascript experts, for instance.
>> 
>> At the end of the day, *stars sites are Django apps, so the domain-specificity is rather low, allowing developers to jump in rather quickly. On the other hand we definitely benefit and learn from scientific needs and feedback from experts, on CC and also on GitHub:
>> 
>> https://github.com/INCF/biostar-central/issues/36
>> 
>> I hope it sounds interesting!
>> 
>> Best regards,
>> Roman
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Best Regards,
>> Dr. Bill Mills
>> TRIUMF
> 