Questions about OSS projects.

[Daniel Dittmar]

bio_enthusiast wrote:
> I was wondering how to go about starting an open source project for
> doing routine biological problems? There is a plethora of scripts and
> a fairly large biopython project to back up anyone who tried, these
> however cater to the bioinformatics community and it loses the vast
> majority of the wet-lab scientists. How can someone who is used to
> writing small scripts and doing wet-lab work contribute to the open
> source community? Starting software projects seems to be the domain of
> people with much more experience and skill but there are some serious
> needs by people who do not have the skills to upkeep any software
> based project.
> 

If you've written a few small scripts that might be of use to others and 
that you assume that there are others who do the same, you might start 
with a wiki or something like the Python Cookbook 
(http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Python/Cookbook/), but geared toward 
labs and biology.

If this gains any traction (that is if you get additional code snippets, 
people are commenting etc.), after a while, it might be useful to look 
at the material and see if there is enough code that warrants a library. 
This does not mean to simply package all the scripts into one package, 
but to see if there are any common tasks among the scripts to 'refactor' 
them into a library.

Daniel