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from "Meredith L. Patterson" <clonearmy@gmail.com> -----
A few of us have been tossing around the idea of founding Garage Bio Magazine -- a magazine dedicated to the Garage (or kitchen, basement, closet), DIY, open source, alternative, amateur or otherwise unconventional biologist.
Maybe this would be a good opportunity to review the ToolBook project.
Not to piss in your Cheerios or anything here, Bryan, but it's worth unpacking and examining some of the assumptions that the links you provided seem to be making.
In particular, Eric Hunting seems to have a major hate-on for the one-off, weekend-builder style of making stuff. Why? I don't see a good argument for why Make Magazine-style "recipes" are as inherently, objectively bad as he seems to think they are.
One key thing to remember about human psychology is that people like to learn by example. As a real-life example, Noisebridge has a regular Monday night circuit hacking workshop. People come by with electronics projects they're working on and get help from other attendees; they also come just to learn basic techniques, which is why Mitch Altman keeps a stock on hand of kits he's designed. A person who's never held a soldering iron in their life can show up on Monday night, buy a kit for $5 at-cost, have someone show them the basics of soldering a part, learn to do it themselves, and an hour later walk away with a brand-new skill and a neat little gadget. It might not be all that useful of a gadget -- does anyone actually *need* an RGB LED that cycles through colour intensities and resets itself when you wave a hand over it? -- but it's a cool little physical reminder of the fact that now that person can do something they never knew how to do before.
People also like discrete weekend projects -- things that they can expect to complete from start to finish in a fairly well defined period of time and not have half-finished messes lying all over the place (she said, looking at her apartment). Recipes lend themselves well to this.
Yet at the same time, the recipes that Hunting condemns are both learning procedures and experimental procedures. If I decide to build something based on an Instructable or an article in Make, I'm in no way obligated to mindlessly follow the steps one after another; I can take a detour or make modifications in any way I like. The recipe gives me some reassurance that I'm not just jumping off a cliff, and thus *encourages* me to spread my wings to the extent that I feel comfortable doing so. And, of course, different people will feel comfortable taking detours at different levels of skill. The girl who came to Circuit Hacking Mondays this past week and built a Trippy RGB Waves kit emailed the mailing list to ask for advice on what kit to build next -- she wants some more hands-on experience before she tries to modify an existing design (in hardware or in software) or forge ahead with a design of her own, and *that's totally okay*.
Add to this the fact that existing search engines are doing a pretty decent job of indexing the archives of Make, Instructables, eHow, academic journals, and so on, and you end up with a situation where the internet is rapidly becoming a searchable repository of HOWTOs for things that might not be *exactly* what a person wants to do, but which can probably be kitbashed together (perhaps with help from subject matter experts, who have gained their expertise through hands-on work and the fact that they love what they're doing) into a plan for making whatever it is the person wants to make.
But perhaps I'm being needlessly reactionary. I confess I have a difficult time piecing together, from the links you sent, exactly what ToolBook is supposed to *be*, despite the fact that one of the posts is supposed to be a business model for it. Bryan, how about an elevator pitch? Hunting mentions that it's hard to get funding for something like ToolBook; pretend I'm a VC and you have fifteen seconds to get me excited about ToolBook. What would you tell me?
An elevator pitch like "Garage Bio Magazine is a magazine dedicated to the Garage (or kitchen, basement, closet), DIY, open source, alternative, amateur or otherwise unconventional biologist" is a start. Better would be "Garage Bio Magazine is a magazine that features articles about biology research and engineering projects that people can safely conduct in home or community labs, along with details of how to build useful tools at low cost and adapt existing low-cost equipment for home use." That describes who the audience is, what the magazine aims to provide to the audience, and -- most importantly for anything that has a business model underlying it -- where the revenue will come from (in this case, advertisers who want to sell their products to biohackers).
Again with the elevator pitches: what's wrong with Make Magazine, and how would ToolBook fix it? Fifteen seconds or less.
Cheers, --mlp