10,000 Hours of caBIG?

In Malcolm Gladwell's recent book Outliers, he raises a very interesting point about subject mastery. In his book, he looked at the amount of time spent by individuals in the practice of an activity in which they have truly mastered. By looking over a variety of disciplines, he came to an estimate of about 10,000 hours of work as that threshold. When you think about it, it is not really that surprising. Employers often look for "5 years experience" as the measure of sufficient experience in a specific job. This equates to 40 hours a week for about 5 years, totaling roughly 10,000 hours. Gladwell found a similar rule true for a range of professions, sports and interests.

The question, then, is how to provide the opportunities and environment to support the development of true expertise in the caBIG tools, and the related underlying informatics framework. Given that the program itself is relatively new, and that there has hardly been time yet for anyone to develop expertise at the level that Gladwell describes, it shouldn't be a surprise that there are still many people within the caBIG community and outside of it who dismiss the tools as too complex and difficult to understand. The challenge for caBIG is to continue to establish a place where this expertise can be developed by the stakeholder community. One such critical component is the Knowledge Centers. Another is the experienced pool of caBIG implementers and developers who have successfully used the caBIG tools (often in conjunction with a wide range of tools from other sources) to satisfy the needs of their end-users. The formal documentation and training infrastructure that is provided buy the caBIG Documentation and Training Workspace, as well as the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT) at NCI provide the baseline for ensuring that the information needed by the ultimate users of caBIG is available, and is structured and consistent.

All the formal documentation and training in the world can not substitute for functional working systems at other institutes, and code and tools that can provide the template for similar successful efforts at similar interested institutions. Developers and integrators, especially in open source-rich environments, have long looked to software skeletons, "Hello World" examples and detailed tutorials to provide the foundation for their efforts. These kind of frameworks also provide demonstrable evidence that their particular needs can be satisfied by the tools. This kind of sharing of experiences is one of the things that has provided real impetus to many of the deployment efforts currently ongoing in the caBIG program, and has already led to sharing of innovative solutions to several shared needs within the community. To get to that true level of mastery, caBIG will need to ensure that such frameworks, skeletons and open demonstrators are available to everyone who is interested, and are well-categorized and presented, so what can be needed can be easily found.

One thing that is clear about gaining real proficiency in anything- the sooner that someone gets started, the better they will be in the long run. The old saying about training long-bowmen (you start by training his grandfather as a child) holds just as true with software systems and tools. Each of us develop our approaches to solving problems (and the associated toolkit) early in our careers. One of the great opportunities of the caBIG program is to give those just starting out in biomedical informatics (and there are bound to be more and more every year) a solid tool-kit supporting things like data-modeling, semantics, security, and the other components of robust systems. Perhaps even providing graduate students and postdocs support for attending caBIG meetings, or even grant support for participating in the development and integration of caBIG tools where they are supporting specific scientific and biomedical goals.

Gladwell points out in his book that success stories are almost never the result of a single independent effort, but rather made up of long-term and community-wide support. By providing the environment to support this kind of horizontal community participation in each deployment effort, we all can collectively give those separate development efforts the best possible chance for success.