OpenWetWare is, and I quote, an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology & biological engineering.
Essentially, it's a wiki for biological labs to share information. Think about it: An editable database of all your reagents, projects and protocols and all you need is a web browser.
The aims of the project are certainly laudable: OpenWetWare represents an initial effort to decentralize and lower the barriers to information exchange among all researchers, be they professors, students or research scientists.
This could be worthwhile, or it could be a tremendous waste of time. I'm not sure which at the moment, and it boils down to if it would take too much effort to convert everything we have in (e.g.) Filemaker databases and administer the thing.
Let's look around a little. By providing a common space for people to post information about their work, graduate students are more likely to be aware of the work going on in other labs locally. It seems like this will improve the likelihood of collaboration, and also a provide a source for finding out where certain expertise lies. Now that might be true, but it relies on a minimal number of 'local' labs actually getting involved. So you have to persuade them. And you have to persuade them to keep the information current. Conventional scientific networks are really quite extensive, and I'm not convinced that word of mouth is less effective at finding collaborators than trawling through nearly 3,000 web pages.
Currently there are ~15 labs on OWW, and they are involved with the project to varying degrees. A lab that I used to collaborate with seems to be taking it seriously, but are doing little more than mirroring the website hosted by their institute. It strikes me as a waste of potential to limit the application to being a central repository of reagent lists and plasmid maps. The critical thing is to get people exchanging ideas, not (just) protocols. A few years ago I tried to do something like this for a bunch of labs that shared a Human Frontier grant. I wrote the website and published it, but getting anyone else to contribute was a lost battle (despite promises at the meetings we held). I don't think having a wiki would have improved my chances.
So for the societal aspects, there are various fora and bulletin boards around the web that might fulfill the aims just as effectively. But I'm open to persuasion and am seriously tempted to punt the URL at the Boss and see what he says.
I'll say this though; OWW has entertainment value. Just clicking on random labs I've discovered that 'Tania' is responsible for fine chemicals and ordering computer programmes [sic] and that People that work with Radioactivity and have not filled a personal work permit form are not insured when working with P32 and are hence NOT allowed to do so. Does that information really need to be on the WWW?
What is it with capitals in the middle of names anyway? Not everything is an objectOrientedClassName.
