We need a GitHub of Science

> And for the posts on social sites, are they more often about the creator or what they created?

You hit the nail right on the head. Github is about sharing code. The code is the creation. Github's unique selling point is the webinterface to show the code: It's the best designed interface in the industry to show code in a browser.

> Does GitHub provide this feature better than SourceForge or others?

Various software is available to show code in the browser, but none works as well and is polished as well as Github. The creation (code) therefore can be best shared on Github. As such, others willing to check out the creation are, from the moment they arive at github, mostly busy this exactly that: check out the creation (code). Every time I visit repo's visualizing the code in html on other places then github, I get agitated by the annoying interface. Example: some interfaces require you to click on a file, after which the postback returns a site containing a list of revisions, and new buttons to 'view' a revision. This causes me to wait for a postback, and click, twice per file I want to view. Github instead instantly shows the last revision.

All these small tweaks account for much better usability on Github compared to other sites.

I guess for scientists, there must be the same approach as Github approaches programmers. For programmers, it's about code, and for scientists, it's about data and the conclusions derived from it. Instead of showing code, show a paper with the possibility to drill down on data. The data being shared can then be treated the same as code being in a source repo, so the usual git stuff (branching, merging, pulling, pushing) can be applied on the paper+data.

I agree.

I think that github is such a good tool to interact with git repos that if they made a version that can work locally (the main difference is explicitly dealing with the index and the current tree) I'd use it to manage git projects in a heartbeat.

arXiv.org?

http://science.io was featured on HN recently. Not github, but at least a place to discuss and sift research.

The biggest problem with CS academicians have been in their misinterpretation of computers. Its a very different field from traditional sciences like Physics, Chemistry etc.. In traditional sciences, we study the world, understand it and express those ideas formally. With computers, its upto one's imagination what they can do with it. We just get so lost in the depths of formalism, that we forget that hacking and exploration are what can break boundaries and enable people to make computers do what they could not.

Funnily, academia harbours the most brilliant minds of CS, and barely produces usable software. Its people who identify problems, and provide software/ideas who actually get things moving. Github/Blogosphere etc allow such solutions to emerge more efficiently by allowing a lot of people to look at such solutions. In academia, a publication is taken as a end point for problem solving. There are no incentives to build real software or real systems.

If computer science wants to make a difference, it must move away from its publish or perish culture.