Talk given as part of Auckland University Office of Research's seminar series, November 2012.

1. Open Innovation
Nat Torkington
12 November 2012

2. FOO

3. Past
Present
Future

4. 1991

5. Hyper-G and WWW
• Bidirectional links • No back links
• Document groups • Isolated documents
• Searchable • Unsearchable
• Backed by a company • Given away by CERN
• Marketing • Word of mouth

6. My Paradox World
• DNS • Database
• Sockets Networking • Mail Server
• Operating System • Messaging Client
• Programming Language • Calendar Server
• Browser • ...
• Web Server

7. Open Source Software

8. Ingredients Baked
Source Binaries
Produce Consume
Improve Tolerate

9. “If you can’t open it,
you don’t own it”

10. Richard Stallman’s
Printer

11. Four Freedoms
• To run for any purpose
• To study and change
• To redistribute what you got
• To improve and release your improvements

12. Wikipedia

13. Wikipedia
• 1.5B readers (en)
• 10M views of 5M articles
• 81.5 edits/article on average
• 34k people (en), 80k globally

14. Invisible Walls

15. Software
• Charismatic leader • Discussion
• Useful • Change tracking and
control
• Enough motivated
contributors • Clear process
• Reputation • Clear standards
• Bug tracking • Easy entry

16. Wikipedia
• Charismatic leader • Discussion
• Useful • Change tracking and
control
• Enough motivated
contributors • Clear process
• Reputation • Clear standards
• Bug tracking • Easy entry

17. RedHat
$1.3B / $10B

18. MySQL
$1B, 40%

19. Google
$38B / $189B

20. Facebook
$3.8B / $82B

21. Amazon
$51B / $103B

22. Google, Facebook,
Amazon are all open
source companies

23. Four Freedoms
• To run for any purpose
• To study and change
• To redistribute what you got
• To improve and release your improvements

24. Crowdsourcing

25. Galaxy Zoo

26. Problem: categorize 1M
galaxies from the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey
(2007)

27. 24h: 70k/hr
>50M in 1st year
50k people

28. 2007
Hanny van Arkel:
“what’s this voorwerp?”

29. Galaxy Zoo: 'Hanny's Voorwerp', a
Quasar Light Echo? Chris J. Lintott, Kevin
Scawinski, William Keel, Hanny van Arkel, Edward
Edmondson, Daniel Thomas, Nicola Bennert,
Daniel J.B. Smith, Peter D. Herbert, Matt J. Jarvis,
Dan Andreescu, Steven P. Bamford, Kate Land,
Phil Murray, Robert C. Nichol, M. Jordan
Raddick, Anze Slosar, Alex Szalay, Jan Vandenberg.
MNRAS Volume 399 Issue 1
pp. 129 - 140

30. Zooniverse

31. ‘Ancient Lives’
Oxyrhynchus papri

32. ‘Old Weather’
Royal Navy ship logs

33. FoldIt

34. Mason-Pfizer virus
Diels-Alder enzyme

35. X Prizes
‘Grand Challenge’

36. Human Genome
Project

37. Ansari Space X Prize
3 passengers, 100km,
2 in 2

38. 26 teams
7 nations
$100M
$10M

39. Google Lunar
Archon Genomics
Nokia Sensing
Qualcomm Tricorder
Wendy Schmidt Oil

40. Netflix
$1M 2006-2009
200 teams

41. Kaggle

42. Open Data

43. GenBank
126,551,501,141 bases
135,440,924 sequences

44. Jim Kent
June 22
June 25

45. Checklist
• Charismatic leader • Discussion
• Useful • Change tracking and
control
• Enough motivated
contributors • Clear process
• Reputation • Clear standards
• Bug tracking • Easy entry

46. US Geospatial Industry
$4B

47. GPS
TIGER

48. NZG Cabinet
Declaration on
Open Data

49. open.org.nz

50. Gates Foundation
Global Health

52. Marsden
Requirements
Include the following matters in the final report to the Society required under clause
4.2(c):
(i) which data and sample repositories will be used to store the metadata, data
and samples collected as part of the Programme; and
(ii) where the metadata will be stored if no data or sample repositories are
available.
(k) Unless prohibited under any required ethical consent or approval, establish
adequate and reasonable access to metadata, data and samples collected as
part of the Programme within twelve months of the Completion Date of the
Contract to:
(i) people carrying out research; and
(ii) national and international repositories.

53. What’s the Internet
Good At?

54. 1. Copying and Shipping
2. Forming Groups

55. Effects
• Lower barrier to entry
• Downstream impact
• Not in academic publications

56. We Don’t Value
• Lower barrier to entry
• Downstream impact
• Not in academic publications

57. Incentive-Created
Distortion

58. ‘Impact Factor’

59. Time
Quality
Reproducibility

60. Biggest Successes

61. R

62. Weka

64. Resources
• http://open.org.nz
• Fabiana Kubke
• Nick Jones
• Tim McNamara

65. Nathan Torkington
Kiwi Foo
nathan@torkington.com