What is the Goal of the ACS project?
Our long-term goal is to establish a community of professionals and amateurs, interested in making science available in a hands-on way, loosely modeled on the various open-source communities, of which the Linux project is probably the most visible one. Science may well be the oldest and largest open source project of all times. Since the days of Galileo, more than a dozen generations of scientists have worked together to produce a public body of knowledge about the natural world that is unique both in its accuracy, and in the fact that it transcends traditional boundaries of cultures and belief systems. The ACS project aims at rekindling the spirit of the eighteenth-century enlightenment movement, where educated lay people were invited to join professional scientists in their explorations. The main shifts are from traditional salons to the world wide web, and from tabletop experiments to laptop computers.
