Many of you reading and participating at TSL are University scientists at top notch universities. Imagine spreading your knowledge to other briliant people who are geographically challenged.

Imagine giving them the skills to really help in the collaborative process of open source biomedical research for tropical diseases.

Perhaps, http://academicearth.org/ is a platform to help you do that. Check it out. Can you post a lecture or an entire course?

Think about how you can help.

New Approach to Open Contributions Experiment at Google

From WHO's TDR mailing list:

-------------------------------------------------------------------
-for tropical disease researchers & friends: "tdr-scientists list"
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Please find below a message from Harvard University

*********************************************************

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Barry Bunin, a registered user here at TSL and CEO of CDD, is presenting at the upcoming BioScience Forum on April 18. If you're in the SF Bay area, it looks like an interesting meeting to attend.

TDR has just produced the following new publication:

Lessons learned in Home Management of Malaria -
Implementation research in four African countries
http://www.who.int/tdr/publications/publications/lessons_hmm.htm

I subscribe to the TDR news letter. Here's a recent email they sent me. Also notice that there's a link for subscription instructions if you too would like regular notes from them. I don't get too many - maybe 2 a month.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
-for tropical disease researchers & friends: "tdr-scientists list"
-------------------------------------------------------------------

       New PAHO publication on Malaria

For info,

The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) has issued a new publication
called: The Regional Strategic Plan for Malaria in the Americas,
2006-2010 [pdf 2.4 MB - long to download].

This report is downloadable from:
http://www.paho.org/English/AD/DPC/CD/mal-reg-strat-plan-06.pdf

For more information please contact Ms Mylena Pinzon, PAHO Publications
Program at mailto:dissemination@paho.org

Please do not contact TDR.

--
Sharing news with the t.d.r. community, mailto:tdr-scientists@who.ch To unsubscribe, or subscribe, write to:Â owner-tdr-scientists@who.ch News on UNDP/WorldBank/WHO-TDRÂ http://www.who.int/tdr/topmenu/news/
Â

In the U.S. we just celebrated Thanksgiving. It's a day we spend with family, eat too much (what's new?), and reflect on all the things we're thankful for. I have a lot to be thankful for. I have a wonderful family, we're generally healthy, and I've been relatively successful in my career in software.

A little more than a year ago, while feeling fortunate and thankful, I was reflecting on what I could do to give back to the world. I thought about it for quite a while, asking myself, with my experience with corporate portals (I was the R&D leader at PeopleSoft for their portal application), how could I best leverage my skills to give something back to the world. Founding The Synaptic Leap was and still is my answer.

It has become a calling for me. I believe passionately that this should be done; I know emphatically that it is technically possible. The question is simply a cultural one. Are biomedical scientists willing to do it? I think so. I believe in the human race. I believe that most of us will give a bit if we think it will make a difference. I hope, that providing The Synaptic Leap, we're giving you a place to connect with other scientists, a place to check your egos at the door and give your ideas freely, and a place to encourage and nurture the ideas of others. I hope we're giving you the perfect place to leverage your talents to give back to the world.

Sample ideas: 

• Volunteer. Help with an existing project.
• Take a project you're writing a grant for and make some of it open source. Granting agencies are increasingly favoring this.
  

Bernard Munos, from Eli Lilly, wrote a very thorough article on open and collaborative research for neglected diseases and it was just published at Nature: Can open-source R&D reinvigorate drug research. What I particularly like about the article are the details he provides in describing how he thinks pharmaceutical companies can and should participate in the process.

Let's face it; we're in uncharted territory. We don't really KNOW how it's going to work. We're in the midst of a big evolving experimental process.

My vision for how it will work tends to be a bit more grass roots, less centralized group driving the process. Collaborative process tools like a Gene Wiki will enable dedicated experts to suggest work for less involved volunteers to contribute. People will collaborate with the people they trust and trust must be earned.Â

I had the honor and privilige of attending Science Foo Camp at Google last weekend. O'Reilly and Associates, Nature and Google sponsored the event and brought together roughly 200 cross-discipline scientists and open source software geeks from around the world. There was definitely a theme of those invited - open, collaboration, biomedical science, global warming, semantic web...

It was fantastic. I met a lot of interesting people and learned a lot. I of course was there talking about The Synaptic Leap. The attached presenentation was my super deck I created before the conference. I didn't present it in whole. I did however talk to people on every topic - on the bus, at the cafe, by the tents... The presentation has comments I made before the conference as well as notes on feedback I gathered - both positive and negative.

tslfoo.pdf 

I encourage you to post additional feedback below.

Cheers!