hplusmag - winter 2009 - cover "Hi there, Ray"

Parijata Mackey wrote an article for the Winter 2009 h+ magazine about diybio titled “diybio: a growing movement takes on aging.” She provides an overview of diy -hardware, -software, and -wetware, and gives shoutouts to some of the projects listed at diybio.org/projects (man we gotta develop a better system for collecting projects).  Overall she provides an overview of where diybio came from and where it’s going in an optimistic manner consistent with h+. She also provides tantalizing interview coverage with John Schloendorn concerning his DIY SENS lab and biotech co-working space in the Bay Area.

Andrew Hessel wrote another article called “Why DIY Bio” in which he explains his vision, based on open source & synthetic biology principles, for a distributed, open anti-cancer research collective. He calls it Pink Army.

UPDATE: slashdotted on 26 Jan 2010.

[@molecularist](http://twitter.com/@molecularist) [blogged](http://www.molecularist.com/lifeblog/2009/11/video-diybio-meetup-22nov09.html) about the 22 Nov 09 [diybio-boston meetup](https://diybio.org/boston/) at [sprout](http://thesprouts.org/) and recently posted a great little (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcZtnT8mbaA&fmt=22) of the tour. You can see us setting up Sprout and touring through the mobile lab. Read Charlie’s [full post](http://www.molecularist.com/lifeblog/2009/11/video-diybio-meetup-22nov09.html) for more info.

Open source hardware and software, low-cost and DIY instruments, cloud computing, and the internet of things. Come build the future of scientific labs.

We are putting together a workshop called FutureLabCamp in Boston in early 2010.  The focus is building the future of science laboratories with open source hardware and software, low-cost and DIY instruments, cloud computing, and the internet of things. We’re bringing together hardware hackers, HCI wizards, standards builders, and forward-thinking researchers together for an amazingly productive weekend.

It’s not a conference – it is a workshop, with an emphasis on producing useful output.

Find out all about it, and sign up to get on the mailing list, at http://futurelabcamp.org.

We believe every lab instrument should provide a data feed of its measurements and that data aggregation and storage should be effortless, automatic and routine. To that end, our goal during the workshop is to prototype new and existing feed systems for popular lab equipment (Cameron Neylon’s work, Pachube, etc) and to develop a consensus of standards and an ecosystem of projects that lay the foundation for future work. When data aggregation is effortless and routine, a rich new landscape of opportunities emerges for data visualization, micro-attribution, augmented research, better scientific reproducibility, more finely-grained and realtime collaboration, and much more.

In addition to building prototypes, we hope to run several tracks dedicated to the applications of ubiquitous laboratory sensing:

• Hardware: Building open lab instruments and hacking existing lab instruments with an eye toward data logging and automation.
• Software: Automating, augmenting, and aggregating research; from mobile to desktop to cloud.
• Data: Starting, spreading, and refining repositories, journals, micro-attribution, uber-big datasets and standards. Making science machine readable.
• HCI: Natural User interfaces to augment research; visualization techniques for exploring the increasing influx of data

As we’re still in planning stages, we’d love to get your feedback on the event. Is this something you’d find useful? What in particular should we try to build at FutureLabCamp?  Let us know in the comments!