Hi GOSH folks! It’s been a rapid tumultuous time following up the pandemic with an entirely new kind of governance structure, but we are slowly getting things together! We wanted to introduce this new category on the GOSH forum with some introductions of the people who were elected to the GOSH council.
In this category we will try to post the latest news and things we are discussing. And there is a whole “Council Discuss” section where you can send the council feedback or questions!
On the council I am helping on the Gathering Working Group where we are putting together another fun event for November 2022! There’s a lot of tricky things (like COVID), but i think we can put together something fun and amazing and safe for us to all see each other again by next year!
As always, send us any questions whenever!
PS at our lab we also run our own DIY plastic recycling initiative
I am Julian Stirling. I am a Post-Doc at the University of Bath. I work on the OpenFlexure Project and develop a documentation program called GitBuilding. My core focus at the moment is on transitioning open hardware from prototypes into products that can be made anywhere. This include, improving designs with manufacturing in mind, quality systems to ensure the design meets specifications, getting the documentation in order so that manufacturers can use it.
On the council I am most interested in how we can fund smaller open hardware projects, facilitate knowledge transfer between projects, and use the community to build resources that open hardware projects need.
When I am not working on Open Hardware I maintain a 200 year old waterwheel and run it for the public. Any GOSHers visiting Bath are welcome to come for a visit!
The many hats I’ve worn include 10+ years of ecological research with field studies from tree frogs in the rainforests of Costa Rica to visiting oil-spill-impacted corals on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico in a submarine, and during this time I developed a passion for open science (e.g. publishing a Guide to Reproducible Code in science), open source hardware/software (as a researcher in the Open!Next project), and community/citizen science. This led me to becoming a co-founder of the MammalWeb citizen science project (@MammalWeb) where we partner with communities in taking ownership of monitoring local wildlife, growing from one town in England to an international network across 5 countries.
While I have a little bit of experience building hardware, my primary interests as Community Council member are:
Help improve our governance process such as by learning from the g0v civic tech network representing civic engagement groups across east Asia “hacking” democracy for good; and
My name is Laura Olalde, my pronoun is she/he and I am a visual artist, educator and researcher working at the intersection between disciplines. I am currently based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
In my hybrid sciart practices, I conducted research on iridescent, luminescent and coloured microorganisms and biomaterials. Together with molecular biologists and social scientists we have carried out research that has not only allowed us to transduce our diverse experiences, but has also led us to question discourses and standardised forms of visualisation in the scientific field by proposing alternative gazes to the dominant ones.
On many occasions I repeatedly faced the challenge of building my own hardware devices to develop the processes required during my experiences in an autonomous and independent way. That was the milestone that pushed me into the Open Hardware Community, attending my first GOSH meeting in Santiago, Chile, where I helped with the photo documentation and later in 2018 in Shenzhen, where many of you have seen me in the role of documentation team coordinator.
In May this year I was honoured to be elected as a member of the Community Council for a two-year term, during which time I hope we can overcome this time of struggle and high global uncertainty and be able to put together the regional events, the collaborative development programme and finally hold our Global gathering at the end of 2022. All of these goals will be realised through the active participation of each of us, so please do not hesitate to contribute your ideas and suggestions, even if they may seem still tiny they are very important! Also you are very welcome to join the working groups as a volunteer to make this movement grow.
, I’ve contributed to the 