Inside scoop on ICON’s Good Wiki & how to access some Nature Nano

ICON (International Council on Nanotechnology) is calling its safe practices wiki, Good Wiki. Dr. Kristen Kulinowski mentioned it in her presentation for Nanotechnology BC’s breakfast meeting this am. It was a pretty high level presentation covering definitions for nanotechnology,  showing images of different nanostructures, discussing the various nanotechnology sectors (energy, medicine, materials, electronics, defence, etc.), and reviewing some of the material on risks and safety practices.

There weren’t a lot of details about the wiki as they’re still figuring out what they’re going to do. They have an editiorial board and are going to beta the wiki sometime soon with the hope of launching it in Dec. 2008.

For me, an editorial board = hassle and is not wiki-friendly. (Note: I’m not their target market, so it may not be a problem.)  From ICON’s perspective, they need some way to ensure the integrity of the information on the wiki, as per Kulinowski’s response to my question.It isn’t meant to be a formal editorial board as per the peer-reviewed journals but more of an informal vetting process (I don’t know if I can get past my Pavlovian response)  so that they didn’t end up with wackadoo (my term) entries. She also pointed out that there could be legal issues.

They don’t seem to have a plan for how they’re going to get people to contribute and that might not be a problem. If there’s a pent up demand to trade information on nano safety, then ICON has no worries about participation.

When I talked with Kulinowski afterward she did mention that they are looking into content management issues, ontologies, and all that good stuff that users don’t see but need.

There’s some meeting this afternoon with Kulinowsk, Darren Frew and Victor Jones of Nanotech BC, and BC government safety representatives from WorkSafe.  According to Kulinowski, Canada has done a lot of work (I think she said, led the way) on worker safety issues vis a vis nanotechnology.

More info. about that article/commentary on nanotechnology folks learning from past mistakes. From Andrew Maynard (one of the authors):

The full text of the Nature Nano commentary still seems to be accessible without an account here:

http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano.2008.198.html

Alternatively, the conclusions are reproduced in full here:

http://community.safenano.org/blogs/andrew_maynard/archive/2008/07/20/late-lessons-from-early-warnings.aspx

Cheers,

Andrew

Thank you and that second url is for Andrew’s blog. Do check it out. I was intrigued a few months ago when he mentioned finding a good article on nanotechnology in Elle magazine.

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