Some challenges are immense and defy resolution despite offering tremendous opportunity. The development of germplasm repositories to protect genetic resources of aquatic species is such a challenge. Despite 70 years of cryopreservation research, fish and shellfish have only minimal frozen collections although there are thousands of publications, primarily addressing creation of freezing protocols. This is in stark contrast to livestock such as dairy for which massive collections exist that drive multi-billion dollar global markets for improved genetics. The lack of repositories suppresses advances across aquaculture, conservation programs, natural fisheries, biomedical models, and efforts to address food security and poverty alleviation. Recognitio n of this as an immense challenge ( not likely addressed by current approaches) is a step towards resolving it. Because large problems such as this are beyond the resources of single entities, other models are required to address them. An emerging model involves use of distributed networks to combine the efforts of large, interconnected communities that share common motivation. This approach was used for example to develop the Linux operating system in the 1990s through open-source software development driven by thousands of volunteer compute r programmers. This sharing and community-based approach was in direct response to the limitations of proprietary development. The tremendous success of Linux provided impetus for other open-source projects, and the experience gained opened doors to expand distributed development. This spirit has emerged in renewed form with the advent of new consumer-level design and fabrication technologies that can enable study, distribution, production, modification, improvement, and commercialization (all based on licensing agreements) of computer-aided design (CAD) files shared over the internet. As such, these open technologies provide a powerful alternative to traditional research and proprietary development to combine efforts across multiple communities to establish repositories (Figure 1).