Open Source Fundraising

2016 is ending not completely without marvel for me. Two great things happened last week. First, on Dec. 16, the family of Canadian philanthropists Larry and Judy Tanenbaum donated $20 million to create the Tanenbaum Open Institute at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital. Inspired by open science, these donors understand that researchers will be able to find cures and treatments faster by sharing their data.

Open science allows the exploration of data by many people to generate many new questions. And new questions generate new answers. Open science is a subset of open-source philosophy which comes from software. In open source — or view source —  developers look for ways of making and sharing software to improve their products and solve human problems. A famous example is the Mozilla Project, where the participation of a community of 40,000 people created the Firefox browser.