GitHub for Biology: Build or Buy

When I describe Synapse, the software platform we are building at Sage Bionetworks, I use the analogy “It’s like GitHub for biologists” or “GitHub for data science” a lot.  This seems to be useful, at least for the subset of people that I talk to that know what GitHub is.  For the rest of you, in a nutshell GitHub is a set of online tools to make it super easy to share code and manage software development projects.  It’s evolved into an active community where developers can quickly launch projects, contribute to or reuse existing projects, or recruit new developers to their projects.  It’s got a particularly strong following in the open source community, but is also used by a number of major corporations to run at least some of their projects.

Another noteworthy project in the realm of Open Science. We will see how that one evolves.