Open science and hacking This weekend sees developers and
scientists converge in London for the first Wellcome Trust
Hackathon. Kevin Fong tells us what a hack is and why we’re
running one around ‘open’. ‘Open’ has become the new buzzword;
openness the new ambition. It makes processes more transparent,
engendering trust, offering a new line of defence against
fraudulent practice. But it is more than a way of simply telling
people that you’re on the up and up. We live in an age when
we’ve begun to realise that the terabytes of information that
literally fly through the air all around us should be put to
better use. Somewhere, in all of that, lie answers waiting to be
discovered, the raw material – perhaps – of revolutions in
science and medicine. It’s an exciting time. The mass of
hitherto sequestered data, now made available to all, has come
to represent a virtual continent that might be explored, with no
one really sure what prizes might lie in its interior. But this
is only the beginning. There is a job to