Nano Needs a Wiki

Enough already.

We may have heard that nanotechnology can open doors to curing cancer, solving the energy crisis, revolutionizing electronic devices and improving national security. And that the tiny particles might cause disease or contaminate the environment.

But if, as the director of International Council on Nanotechnology and executive director of the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology at Rice University, I am invited to sit through one more workshop articulating the complexity of those risks or discuss one more of the countless policy recommendations to manage nanomaterials, I just might decline. There's been enough of that already. Real-life people who handle nanomaterials on a daily basis are still pretty much clueless about whether what they're doing is actually safe.

And it's not their fault. Scientific studies zoom in on issues like a space satellite zooming in on a blade of grass. While this is good for the field as a whole, hardly any of those studies specifically address occupational practices.

What nano needs is to tap the wisdom of the crowd. Nano needs a wiki. Most people have heard of or even used Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. But wikis are not limited to this forum. A wiki is any collection of web pages that anyone can access, contribute to and modify using a simple application.

Imagine a wiki that captures the collective wisdom of people working with nanomaterials. This includes the occupational safety expert in a government agency, the health and safety officer of a large nanomaterial manufacturer or research-intensive university, a process engineer in a small start-up venture, a labor representative or someone else with practical know-how. Each of these people might have some nugget of wisdom about a particular process, particle or piece of personal protective equipment.

That's exactly what we're working on.

The International Council on Nanotechnology is developing a wiki on occupational practices for nanomaterial handling. The goal is to create a central repository for good practices for safely handling nanomaterials that can be used and contributed to by people from all over the nano-world. The idea was hatched during the coffee break at a nano conference focusing on workplace safety and brought to ICON to administer. This effort builds on ICON's survey of workplace practices as well as the good work of the Department of Energy, the Institute for Work and Health, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, University of Wisconsin's Center for Nanotechnology, InterNano, the Institute of Occupational Medicine, and many, many others.

Initially there will be a little more control over the content than is typical with a wiki, to avoid the propagation of misinformation, whether intentional or not. Registered users will be able to contribute content, which will be monitored by an editorial board composed of occupational health and safety experts. This will ensure that the content is based on accepted practices that have been adjudicated by a standards organization, governmental agency or other respected authority.

Not all useful information can be subjected to such a formal process, however, so it is important to create a mechanism for capturing that wisdom as well. Therefore, the wiki will have a "sandbox" where people can post information that has not been validated or is in draft form. The site will be clearly labeled to indicate which information is backed up by validated facts or accepted practice and which is more speculative in nature, much like Wikipedia's flags to unsubstantiated content.

What really excites me is the prospect that the community will share lessons learned from its "oops" moments where something didn't go quite as planned, such as a fire breaking out in a trash can where someone had improperly disposed of a nanopowder. This would be an invaluable service to others in the community who might then be prevented from making the same mistake. It will take courage and a strong sense of shared responsibility but I see a lot of will in the community to get this done.

Stay tuned for more information as the wiki on nanotechnology moves through the planning and implementation phase. Meanwhile, if you'd like to help develop best practices for nanomaterial handling, give us your thoughts or sign up to become a beta tester. I promise we'll find a way to incorporate your feedback. But I can't promise I won't invite you to our next workshop.

Kristen M. Kulinowski, PhD is a flagrant convener of nano risk meetings, producer of documents concluding that more research is needed to safely manage nanomaterials and source of many quotes about the balance between risks and benefits of nanotechnology. These views are her own, not necessarily those of the ICON steering committee, the wiki planning team or Discovery Tech.