Dr. Greenberg’s paper on Toolkits and Interface Creativity encourages toolkit development to foster faster innovation in groupware research. The paper attributes the success of graphical user interfaces on to the availability of GUI toolkits.
In looking beyond the paper, toolkits are a just a particular instance of a technology that enables new research to be conducted. Withholding access to these technologies is analogous to chemist researchers not providing basic chemicals to conduct research. The foundational technology has to be provided in order for further research to occur.
I speculate what would have to change in the research community to give access to technologies such as toolkits. I think that there will be a cultural shift in philosophy from protecting one’s competitive advantage to sharing access to underlying technology, similar to what has emerged in the open source software community. As Greenberg states in the paper, the research community has to accept publications of toolkit research. I further believe that repositories of toolkit research should be aggregated and shared for others to use similar to how research papers are placed in the ACM Digital Library and IEEE xplore. Funding agencies may have to encourage researchers to release their technology publicly, similar to how research _findings_ are already released publicly.
