Hi All
Please find below a summary of the outcomes of last week’s community call. If you were not able to attend the call, we would still love to hear from you! You can provide further responses to the issues that were discussed on the call, in the thread below. We will leave this thread open for one week and then start reviewing and synthesising all the responses and planning a way forward.
As announced, we are planning another community call. The date will be Tuesday 14 July, 14:00 UTC/GMT. In this call, we will discuss next steps in establishing a community governance council and progressing with the grant activities. Sign up for the next community call here! A reminder will be sent on a separate thread.
Links to relevant resources
- Scope of funded GOSH work
- History of GOSH
- GOSH website, manifesto, roadmap, and code of conduct
- GOSH forum
Here are the questions we asked during the call:
- What are you most excited about now that we have more resources to grow and sustain GOSH?
- What is the most important thing for us to focus on and honor as we collectively move this forward?
- What are your questions and concerns given what you understand of this new phase of GOSH’s work?
- Any other comments/questions?
- What region are you from?
- Signal your interest to get involved in the GOSH governance working group or any other part of what lies ahead.
Below are summarised the answers that participants shared during the call. The first two questions concerned your priorities, the second two were a chance to gather further questions and comments that you may have. For the first two, we list below the answers in order of how many +1s they received from the participants on the call. We’ve gathered the responses to the last two questions into two groups - those we can provide some answers to right away, and those that we hope to deal with in future. In the latter category, we’ve further sorted into those questions that concern community governance and those that are more wide-ranging.
If you want to read all of the notes from the community call, you can do so here!
What are you most excited about now that we have more resources to grow and sustain GOSH? [in order of +1s added in original notes]
- Working together to supply kits, procure parts, etc - a network of distributed production for OScH? [+5]
- more support for small local events [+4]
- more support to engage with non-hardware relevant local actors (universities, public schools, research centers) [+2]
- support for educational/outreach initiatives on open science hardware [+2]
- making online conferences / interactions compelling so we can make this a sustainable community. [+2]
- the opportunity to open LatinAmerican residencies to global participants [+2
- support and mentoring for new open science hardware projects! [+1]
- joining global GOSH and AfricaOSH
- More Global GOSHes
What is the most important thing for us to focus on and honor as we collectively move this forward?
- Improving the forum and documentation system to help use better connect online and collaborate remotely [+9], promoting use of open source tools where possible [+4] and being carbon neutral [+2]
- Becoming fully and fiscally independent/fully self-sufficient [+2]. Particularly strengthening local groups so that GOSH continues to exist even without global funding [+9]
- Make sure that the extensive OScH use is equitable [+4]
- Improving the website (note that Julieta made a diagram for a possible layout) - there is funding in the grant to help with this [+3]
- Bridge the gap between ground-up OScH you can make anywhere, and work done in Universities where there’s less attention to resources/infrastructure needed [+2]
- Investment in projects and actions to achieve the roadmap [+2]
- Solving the issue that a great proportion of the world cannot participate fully in gosh due to language barriers [+2]
- Review GOSH activities and actions to detect areas for improvement.
- Strengthening the GOSH network and applying it to help achieve ubiquity of open science hardware e.g. through distributed manufacturing [+1]
- Bring more new people into the community [+1]
What are your questions and concerns given what you understand of this new phase of GOSH’s work? PLUS Any other comments/questions?
These are questions with an answer!
- Where will the NGO be legally based?
It is a US-based 501c3 non-profit organisation
- Can we extend the grant timeline beyond 2 years?
At the present time, this is not an option.
- Is there going to be some kind of funding for people (besides projects/events)? (something like scholarships) in order to avoid the bias towards participants who are in academia vs volunteers
This is not included in the current Sloan grant, you can see the proposal and budget here. The community could develop a proposal and locate a funder for further activities.
- How easy will it be to keep the global aspect, if the funds are on US bank accounts?
Funds for GOSH have been administered through a US bank account since 2016. We do not foresee this being a major restriction for the currently planned activities.
- Can we have more info on the community governance model, how was it developed?
You are watching it being developed There is no governance model in place for GOSH at present, rather an ad hoc organising committee and an informal group of active volunteers. We are aiming to move to something more structured and the June community call was the very start of that process.
- Are we working on open source hardware for science, or hardware for open science?
GOSH was founded as a convening place for those involved in open source hardware for science, although the majority of the community also promotes open science in all its forms!
- How is GOSH different from all the other efforts to create Open Hardware?
Primarily that we focus on science hardware which has specific characteristics, communities and requirements compared to the broader open hardware field. For a summary, see the “What is the major-related work in this field?” section of the recent proposal to Sloan Foundation.
All of the questions below will be clarified as we establish a community governance structure for GOSH:
- What is a Community Governance Council?
- This is the working title for the group who will have specific roles in community governance. Further details are to be determined.
- Is the Community Governance Council legally part of the entity?
- What types of decisions are located in this Council? Which are not?
- How are decisions made?
- In the future, would it be useful to have a second base for the NGO?
- Which are the responsibilities of the comm manager?
- Could the governance model being distributed in geographical groups?
The following are questions with no immediate answers, they are noted for answering as we move forward:
- Will Sloan be interested to go further with this community?
- As we grow, are there other funders we should target?
- Making OScH ubiquitous by 2025 - do we have an idea of what such a transformational goal would cost, and how we will know we achieved it? And of course, not just in money, but in time and effort of the community.
- I have seen the community most active online, when we talk about funds or academic publications, but very little responds on real world projects. How to encourage this more?
- Can there be a clearer/more tangible picture of what we want GOSH to look like at the end of this funding, and what we can/are going to do at that time?
- How do we better link the GOSH forum and Gitlab?
- Why are we loosing even more active people from the asian regions?
- Is there part of the roadmap that focuses on validation or community adoption of new hardware? That would be included in the ‘Grow’ section, because users can also be part of the community (and OSH users are more that just users)
- Do we envision efforts that are going into technologies that are more advanced/expensive? (ex: stuff like mass-spec, NMR, or other instruments that one wouldn’t usually build at home)
Thanks again for everyone who turned out to celebrate this next phase of the GOSH community and created such a warm, welcoming and constructive environment on the community call. It was great to see a combination of people new to GOSH and those old-timers who can claim to have been around from that start. A beautiful moment at the end of the call was an impromptu poll of where people were joining from, which was characteristically international!
What region are you from?
- Canada!
- Chile/Argentina+1+1+1+1
- Brasil
- East Asia (Taiwan, currently in UK)
- UK+1
- Spain (Currently in US)
- Switzerland +1+1
- SE Asia (Singapore) +1
- China
- PERÚ
- Chile / Israel
- U.S.A. southeast
- Africa (Nigeria) [added after meeting]
Below are the people that signalled interest in getting hands on and involved in the GOSH governance working group or any other part of what lies ahead, let us know here via the forum or via organizers@openhardware.science if you would like to join them!
- Julian
- Nano
- Miguel novik
- (dusjagr)
- Marina de Freitas (marinappdf)
- JPM
- Obasegun Ayodele
- Andre M Chagas
- LizBarry
- Pen-Yuan “Pen” Hsing (@hpy in forum)
- Greg (gbathree)
- Gustavo
- Thomas Mboa
- Ji Li
- Emmanuel Kellner
- Kaspar Emanuel
- Kevin Chen
- Julieta A.
- Dulce
- Paz B
We missed those of you who couldn’t join and look forward to hearing your thoughts here and at future calls!
Don’t forget to sign up to join us on Tuesday 14 July, 14:00 UTC/GMT.
Jenny
