GitHub and Our Connected Planet
-A piece by Nick Lallo.
The planet that we live on has gone through many environmental, political, and cultural changes throughout history, but so have the people who live on it. For some, using a computer or smartphone is not something they want to do. Some people want to live how they’ve always lived — a simple home telephone and a television set with a few channels would suffice. These people are generally born in the ’40s and ’50s, where if you called a girl it would be her dad answering the phone wondering who in the world this person is wanting to talk to their daughter. Maybe they would watch their favorite soap opera or television series and finish it off with some local news to see what’s going on in their area.
Fast forward sixty years, now we have people who need to be stimulated constantly. Smartphones are only the start. We now have kids that are digital natives. These kids are using tablets, laptops, video game consoles, and smartphones at a younger age. Make a Facebook page, use a Twitter handle, post an Instagram picture to see how many likes they can get. Kids nowadays can make friends on the Internet. They can play video games and talk with their team or partner, and they are instantly connected because they already have something in common. One can play video games with someone in Belgium or talk about computer specifications in an online forum with an individual in Norway. Our world has gotten smaller because of the communication we are able to have, which is enabled by the Internet.
In the same regard, the way we share information is starting to change. A great example is GitHub®. As time went on from the development of computers, people learned to write computer language to tell a computer what to do. If one needs a specific source code, it’s more than likely on GitHub®. Even Apple® has their operating system source code in the database. The company has added many features to make it more robust for users to produce projects, such as rendering 3D files, notifications, geospatial data, graphs, and much more. From a business standpoint, putting code that you wrote on an open source database does not seem like the best idea. After all, you can make money by licensing out this code to other corporations. But what about GitHub® makes it so attractive for people to throw their code in the database? Is it the want to do good for society? Is it the want to see what other people can do with it? There is no sure-fire answer to individuals’ motives, but there is a certain outcome; it drives change. It seems like GitHub® was on to something when Microsoft® bought the company for a substantial amount of money ($7.5 billion, that is). The available codes on the website have driven thousands of projects, from Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Augmented Reality (AR) to driving without a driver. The world has changed because of those codes, and it will ultimately make our lives a little easier, a little more entertaining, and a little less tedious.
Much like computer codes, research projects are just another form of information. Teams of devoted individuals take existing information to test different aspects of this information and hypothesize an outcome.
Research in today’s world is largely driven by money. This is usually done in the form of grants or large contributions from non-profit organizations. But what happens when there is no money? Nothing. The project gets sidelined and put on a shelf for another time. But many of these labs and organizations get patents on these projects to prevent other people from experimenting with the techniques, reagents, and information that they used too; this prevents commercialization in certain areas by anyone not under the patent. It also locks out the world from the information they have gathered, which could be valuable to other labs testing the same disease or dysfunction. Why are these labs locking up this information? More than likely these patent holders do not want anyone else to make money from their discovery because they want to make the money themselves. This does not drive change.
Knowbella Tech’s mission is to drive the change of how scientific information is shared. There are so many projects that are sitting on a shelf that could end up becoming something that could benefit society. There is an estimated $4 trillion (yes, with a t) of uncommercialized IP that is lying dormant on our planet. There are potential treatments to all sorts of cancers and other developmental diseases sitting on a shelf, locked up from the world because of the potential profit. Just recently, the Center for Advancing Innovation had a Freedom from Cancer challenge that gave access to 100 anti-cancer IP’s for institutions willing to continuously develop these technologies. There are therapeutic IP’s out there. There are different inventions that could save lives by predicting natural disasters or preventing harm to your body. What if IP holders gave these intellectual properties to researchers to continue their development? Like a Github. A scientist in Nigeria could further test methods to diagnose and treat Multiple Sclerosis. Or an individual in Indonesia that could test a new method of transmitting more data from a buoy in the Pacific Ocean that collects temperatures, waves, and other information that could be indicative of a tsunami that has the potential to end thousands of lives. These idle IP’s exist. You may see them in the near future if teams of individuals take on the challenge of developing them.
Change is something that could be positive or negative, depending on one’s perspective. We have seen political regime changes in history that have been disastrous, but we have also seen changes that have benefitted society and made our lives as humans better. GitHub® is the perfect example of a positive change, and that is mainly because people put their interests aside to see what humanity could do with provided information. How innovative can we be? We live in a world where we can have instant communication with anyone we want. We have grown to be more caring because of our connected planet, and I wonder how much positive change we could bring with open access to intellectual properties that are dormant.
Header image used under licence from shutterstock.com
