SciencePAD is currently in its early design and prototyping phase. Most of the functionality of this site is under development and it is not as automated or user friendly as we plan it to be for the final production version. Your contributions to the site with new registrations of users, organizations, collaborations and software, comments and new ideas are warmly welcome. For more information make sure to check the current SciencePAD Roadmap
The 1st ScienceSoft workshop will take place at CERN on February 8th. This workshop is an occasion to share ideas and comments on the ScienceSoft initiative proposal and get involved in the very initial phase of its definition. Participation is open to anybody with an interest in using or developing open source software for scientific applications and providing related services.
The ScienceSoft initiative design phase started officially in December 2012 with the creation of the expert Steering Commitee. The Steering Committee is a group of representatives of DCI projects, user communities and SMEs interested in investigating the concept of creating a vertical super-community of software users and developers focused on assisting scientific communities in satisifying their software end-to-end needs.
The first prototype implementation of the Member, Organizations and Collaborations features is now available on the ScienceSoft web site. Members can set up personal profiles and register new organizations and collaborations. Simple relationships can be created among the registered entities. This is a basic first step, but it allows us to start seeing some action and collect ideas. It also provides the base for the Software registration feature to be enabled soon.
The ScienceSoft initiative enters its design phase. This phase is planned to last until the end of September 2012 and focus on the refinement of a few major requirements in well-defined pieces of functionality and concrete implementation plans. A major goal is to clearly understand whether the functionality already exist somewhere and can be reused, whether it has to be implemented anew, who wants to contribute to what, what resources are needed. Read the ScienceSoft Overview for more Information on ScienceSoft.
There is a wealth of open source software in use across scientific communities but the value of its contribution to science is under-estimated, under-utilised and often poorly coordinated. Some websites such as ohloh (http://www.ohloh.net/) offer directories that attempt to rate the quality and impact of open source software projects, but currently lack the means of attracting developers and users from academic communities and harvesting a large enough body of essential data to make their results meaningful for the scientific research environments.
