Ubuntu is defined by Wikipedia as "an African ethic or humanist philosophy focusing on people's allegiances and relations with each other." The idea is that we become richer and derive meaning specifically (even primarily) via our interactions with others. Richer personally. What does Ubuntu have to do with modern technology, business, economics, and drug discovery?
A lot.
Ubuntu changes one's approach to collaboration. It is a paradigm shift from collaboration as an afterthought, to appreciating collaboration is the mechanism for success. Money is the universal convention to quantize value. Collaboration with "Ubuntu-colored glasses" provides a more spiritual way for projects and individuals to accelerate learning, growth, and get richer in every sense.
On a pragmatic note, in the Internet era, technologies like CDD provide intellectual insight and a framework for richer interactions. This is not true just for CDD, but for other technologies that facilitate collaborations (one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many). And technologies complement each other. GoToMeeting we use daily, sometimes even hourly, in combination with CDD for richer interactions and a reproducible way to catalyze better ideas, research, grant, patents, and papers. Different people look at the same data or complementary data in CDD with gotomeetings and calls with different lenses, education, experience, background. Very quickly, ideas emerge that rise above the noise. In December, we submitted 3 grants with partners. These efficiencies are not limited to CDD. They are part of the wonderful benefit of correctly adopting any collaborative platform. Ubuntu is the philosophy. Collaborative platforms are the catalysts.
Marshall McLuhan predicted the emergence of the world wide web 30 years prior and coined the infamous phrase "the medium is the message". Channeling Marshall's famous line now that the Internet is here, today the "technology is the medium".
Read Part 1: Collaboration as the key for turning around the drug discovery business – The Problem
Read Part 3: Collaboration as the key for turning around the drug discovery business – A Solution
Read Part 8: Collaboration as the key to turning around the drug discovery business – Standards
Especially read Part 9: Collaboration as the key to turning around the drug discovery business - Collaborate Better
Part 11: Collaborative as the key to turning around the drug discovery business - The Future
Part 12: Collaboration as the key to turning around the drug discovery business
P.S. Beyond collaboration as a more enlightened approach to science, here are the top 5 practical reasons collaborative scientists rock with CDD: 5 Reasons Why Collaborative Scientists Use CDD
You can also download the full series “Collaboration as the key to turning around the drug discovery business” by Barry Bunin as a pdf document:
This blog is authored by members of the CDD Vault community. CDD Vault is a hosted drug discovery informatics platform that securely manages both private and external biological and chemical data. It provides core functionality including chemical registration, structure activity relationship, chemical inventory, and electronic lab notebook capabilities!
CDD Vault: Drug Discovery Informatics your whole project team will embrace!