Hello all,
I am delighted to announce the creation of CodersCrowd, a new platform for Bioinformatics CrowdCoding, that was previously discussed at Biostars
CrowdCoding is inspired from Crowdsourcing, but different in its goal. Whereas in Crowdsourcing people are financially rewarded for solving problem, the crowdcoding concept aims to create a knowledge base for bioinformatics developers to make development faster by unlocking the crowd intelligence. The idea was implemented to tackle a big problem in the field, the knowledge is scattered, and we don't learn enough from people experiences which makes some problems redundant.., the goal is to create a platform where people expose their development problems, bugs, coding issues to the crowd and profit from people's expertise and know how to solve their problem faster and see their codes improve over time. Problem poster can validate multiple answers to one issue, merge changes and learn more optimized implementations, and this will enrich automatically a central knowledge base and serve as a reference as well as a resource to scientists that might have the same issue in the future.
Here is a short description of CodersCrowd platform :
An Application to Measure Your Coding Progress
Whether you publish a problem, or you solve one, the more you contribute at CodersCrowd the more you learn. We designed metrics that let you monitor your progress as developer. Technology is moving fast and as a computational biologist you need to be a fast learner. You can read books, follow online tutorials or attend conferences, but the learning curve is not comparable to the one you get from learning by doing. CodersCrowd let you try and be corrected, no matter the complexity or the simplicity of your code is, our community will just bring its expertise to let you know how to do things the right way.
A Platform for Publishing Stable/Reviewed Code
Publishing stable and reusable code is primordial. You are what you code! Using CodersCrowd will bring you the know how of the community to review your source code before publication. Besides, one of the reasons CodersCrowd was developed is to overcome the problem of code reproducibility in bioinformatics. A lot of projects will not make it because the lack of support to a developed package, if your code is not reproducible enough, finding arguments to support your package will be a very tough exercise. (Not the only reason though)
A Bioinformatics Knowledge Base
One of the biggest problems in Bioinformatics is that the knowledge is scattered. CodersCrowd stores automatically the community's solutions into a knowledge base. Although a lot of resources exist to bring help to the community, from mailing lists to Q&A websites, we are still living that moment where you say :"I've seen that problem before !" The reason is that solutions are not well handled, there is no a central repository to store "user experience". We see that as a major problem in the field. Since we keep always learning, we would like to make someone's experience available to the community, that will save us a lot of precious time.
Bioinformatics Insights
Wondering what is trending in the field ? What is the most used programming language ? What are the new technologies ? CodersCrowd turns community engagement into stats. We translate your achievements into useful graphs, the more users will be engaged, the more we will see and report trends in real time. Currently, we are reporting programming languages distributions, bioinformatics applications (NGS data analysis, comparative genomics ...etc), but with your help we will create much more useful data visualization in the future.
And much more ...
To learn more about CodersCrowd please visit the links below
Visit coderscrowd.com and I invite you to subscribe to be notified on the launch day, also you can follow us on Twitter: @CodersCrowd and Vimeo : https://vimeo.com/75278368
I will be glad to answer any question or comment.
Regards,
Rad
UPDATE :
CodersCrowd is ready to ship. On November 20th, we are going to run a beta test with our pre-registered users. If you did not sign yet to be notified, you can still do it here: http://www.coderscrowd.com .
