[ox] BIOS - OSS Visions in Biology
- From: Soenke Zehle <soenke.zehle web.de>
- Date: Sun, 07 Nov 2004 14:18:24 +0100
Check out <http://www.bios.net>, part of a much broader effort to
counter the aggressive proprietarization in the natural sciences (here
especially ag-bio-tech research, <http://www.cambia.org>) with
OSS-derived models of research archives/commons etc., sz
About BIOS
BIOS is fundamentally an effort to develop new innovation systems for
market failures and for neglected priorities.
BIOS holds to a '3-D' philosophy espoused by its founding institute, CAMBIA.
Democratize, Decentralize and Diversify. These basic tenets of social,
economic, and environmental responsibility can equally be applied to the
harnessing of science and human creativity for improving the quality of
life, and for promoting sound business and prosperous communities.
Design, Develop, Disseminate. Grand philosophical ambitions must be
grounded with practical tools for achieving the goals in meaningful
timeframe. The communications and information technology revolutions
afford a unique ability to harvest and share information, knowledge and
wisdom within and between communities that have been marginalized or
inadequately served.
In so doing, we greatly multiply the potential for public good. However,
to do so requires paradigmatic shifts in the culture of innovation, law,
capital, intellectual property and indeed of business.
Hence BIOS and the BioForge.
The BIOS initiative will foster democratic innovation in the application
of biological technologies, through the merging of
* intellectual property informatics and analysis,
* innovation system structural reform, and
* cooperative open access technology development activities.
We are developing a web community to tangibly advance this ambitious
activity to reform biological innovation. Our goal is to empower
diverse innovators and engage creative spirit of many more people in
crafting solutions to their own problems, be they in food and
agriculture, natural resource management, public health or medicine.
This experiment will test our understanding of the limits of this web
space, in that we need to initiate threads of productive discussion, and
undertake practical activities towards such challenges as:
1. Porting the concepts, philosophies, normative behaviours, legal
mechanisms and public enthusiasm for Open Source into the vastly more
challenging area of patents, and biological research and development.
2. Making new opportunities to engage the worldwide biological R&D
community, empowering decentralized innovations and innovators.
3. Cooperatively prioritizing, designing, generating and sharing
transformative biological technologies that can improve the ability for
locally committed people to solve their own problems, and address
low-margin markets or market failures.
4. Creating practical business models that can encourage the
development of robust, economically viable small-to-medium enterprise
formation to address neglected market opportunities.
5. Creating the social and policy initiatives to make these things
happen. This must include constructive engagement in patent law reform,
international genetic resource policy, and much more.
6. Generating new software innovations for cooperative technology
development - e.g. BioForge - making Sourceforge-like toolkits and
enabling environments in which scientists and interested problem-solvers
around the world can cooperate to create real and practical innovations
that can be preserved for public use, empowering both public and private
sector to deliver attractive solutions.
7. Pioneering new, cost-free public access databasing, parsing and
informatics-rich technologies to render the massive, complex and opaque
world of patents and IP into a transparent and stimulating structure for
the public good, as originally intended by framers of patent systems.
For more information, see the BIOS Initiative (PDF document) and
the FAQ.
Discuss this page at the Forum section.
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Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.de/
Organisation: projekt oekonux.de