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Comment by jeswin | Hacker News Reader

> Where people can pull down the latest data and ideas, and add to them, then push our changes back to the main scientists.

A repository of ideas from non-experts will probably slow down things rather than help them. I'm not dismissing the idea outright; perhaps there's a way structured inputs from patients and caregivers can be helpful (again with some review mechanism so that real researchers don't have to wade through irrelevant data.)

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Thanks for the feedback. So maybe the main scientists would host the repository, with their ideas and data. Then we could review and perhaps add to the main scientist's ideas, or find problems with the data. Or add more data with our own experiments. In other words, a collaborative approach. Maybe the main scientists could limit contributions to people who met a certain threshold of earlier verified contributions. Or let other people corroborate and verify before the main scientists even saw the layperson's contributions. Just an idea, open to improvements!

How do you feel about opening up your company's git repositories to non-experts? I think an adequate example of the difference in expertise between an average software developer and a cancer researcher means we should probably open up your git repos to a 9 year old.

Most of the people in this thread have about as much reason to "share ideas" with cancer researchers as a 9 year old has to share ideas about your line-of-business form-over-data web application.

The fact is that research at this level results in such specialized knowledge that not a lot of people would be able to contribute. Additionally, the pressure of academia would probably prevent scientists from disclosing publishable results.

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