Open Crystallography: How to start it and where should we base it?

#opencryst

At #iucr2011 Saulius Grazulis and I agreed to set up Open Crystallography. We’ve both been working in this area (he with the Crystallography Open Database community (http://www.crystallography.net/ ) and our group with Crystaleye (http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/crystaleye/ ), Chempound for crystals (http://crystaleye.ch.cam.ac.uk/ ), etc.). These complement each other very nicely and we are aiming to

make all published crystallography Open.

That’s very similar to the Blue Obelisk, with Open Data and Open Source. COD has a lot of Perl and we’ve a lot of Java. They’ve got 150K structures, we’ve got about 250 K. Many overlap of course. We campaign for more crystallographers to make their structures Open, and this will come. We have to create the social and technical framework where it’s easy and attractive.

Anyone can join us. Crystallography is fun and appeals to mathematicians, high-school students, artists, etc.

So we are starting with creating Open communications where we can share what we have got. That’s something we are well used to in the Open Knowledge Foundation. So here I am outlining what we plan to do and asking readers for help and guidance.

• Blog. A blog is s really good idea of getting messages out, indexed etc. reporting on news. Presenting interim results. And we are developing our own crystallography data blog for structures. What blog? Current suggestion: create a blog on wordpress.com. Comments, please!
• Wiki. We need a wiki to host all the links, overviews, and pointers to our own material. Where? Current suggestion: use http://wikispot.org/ ; any other suggestions?
• Mailing list. This is for day-to-day communication of technical issues, policy, debates, etc. Suggestion: use googlegroups. Any other ideas?
• Realtime communication. This is for virtual meetings. For this we’ll use skype and Etherpads.
• Sourcecode. We use Bitbucket.org. Not sure what COD use.
• Hosting data bases, repositories, etc. This is hard work and a major effort of both projects
• Hashtag. I am suggesting #opencryst, which seem to be free.

We’ve used this mixture very successfully in several virtual projects. Please suggest other things we’ll need to do.

This is a model for Open Foo (so far Foo includes ScienceData, Bibliography, Government Data, amd lost more). So if you are interested in developing Open anything, this project may be a useful learning ground.