On Saturday, I had the chance to attend OpenCon 2015, an offshoot from a larger conference in Brussels about the future of open access, open data, and open science.

Hosted at the Mozilla’s Toronto office, the event involved talks from a number of local open science advocates, such as John Dupuis, head of York University’s Steacie Science Library, and Keith McDonald, the City of Toronto’s Open Data Lead.

Arliss Collin’s talk Building Open Projects on the Web shared interesting initiatives like Software Carpentry, a workshop series to introduce scientists to the technical skills they need to manipulate and work with digital data, and Mozilla Science Lab’s Collaborate project, which helps scientists call for the help of external collaborators when their research leads them to areas outside of their expertise.

These initiatives seem to validate the need for a means for researchers to collaborate, but in a different way that I originally thought. This collaboration is about supplementing skills rather than knowledge. This raises a question: is what I’m making about addressing large and unsolvable scientific problems, like the Polymath Project? Or is it about building an everyday tool. Which is more valuable? And to whom?