GOSH 2022 SESSIONS
*Note: As the body of each Forum Topic is limited to 32000 characters, the post of the sessions has been split in different Topics according to the Blocks originally defined in the program. This way it is better distributed and easier to manage.
Sessions Friday / Sesiones Viernes
Block # 4 ( Friday / Viernes, 9:30 am) )
Lab / field hardware #2
Date: 2022-10-28- Friday
Time: 9:30
Place: Main room
Facilitator: George
Notetaker: Juul
Participants: -
Notes:
Talking about how to do open hardware mass spec
Types of mass spec
- Quadropole
- Magnetic and electric sector
- Time of Flight
- Cyclotron (probably not)
Vacuum technology
How can we get a good enough vacuum at a low enough cost?
Ideas:
- Re-usable metal materials (maybe combined with purging with nitrogen)
- Purging with oxygen and oxygen e.g. steel wool (not reusable but cheap. potentially dangerous)
Community and existing projects
- Applied Science built one
- Young person on youtube who makes his own chips from scratch and the community around him
- There is a CERN group that made a DIY mass spec for teaching
We decided to create a matrix channel and collaborative notepad so we can collaborate on a literature search.
Matrix: https://app.element.io/#/room/#mass-spec-madness:matrix.org
Note pad: Mass Spectrometry Madness - HedgeDoc
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Lab Hardware 2.5 (split from Lab Hardware 2)
Date: 2022-10-28
Time: 09:30
Place: Tapir room
Facilitator: Amanda Matthes
Notetaker: Amanda Matthes
Participants
- Amanda Matthes, University of Oxford, working on SnapperGPS
- Byron tarabata Universidad san francisco de quito working in semiconductor analysis and chip design
- Niko Arranz - NYC Designer w/ Genspace.org - Syringe pumps/tiny microscope
- Lenin Rueda Torres - CENSOPAS/Peru - Open Point of care test for diagnosis -
- Dario Taraborelli, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative - Open Science program -
- Moritz Maxeiner, Research Assistant - Free University Berlin
- Shannon Hicks, EnviroDIY and Stroud Water Research Center
- Rajas Poorna, PhD Bioengineering Georgia Tech; Frugal 7$ ultrafast 7 min PCR, 100$ Raman Spectrometer
Discussion notes (not necessarily chronological, grouped by topic)
Labs constantly build cool hardware for themselves. Why isn’t it common for labs to make this hardware open?
– Rajas: It just doesn’t occur to many. Personally, I have some projects that were just never uploaded anywhere.
– Shannon:
Some academics might be embarrassed thinking it’s “not good enough”, e.g. loose cables or glued parts
Many will also be worried about unpublished results.
– Moritz: Academics are often worried about sniping when publishing tools and methods.
– Rajas: Some might be worried that their UI is not “idiot proof” yet. Hardware can be intimidating to replicate, especially electronics.
– Niko: Also documentation is hard and requires organisation. If it’s something particularly good, some academics may consider selling it later.
– Dario: It takes effort to make something usable and presentable.
But there are also some examples of success. Protocols.io is like a Wikipedia for methods (e.g. wet lab protocols). It lets you give a method a doi and supports version control.
– Shannon: You can also create dois for GitHub.
– Amanda: It can be really hard to discover open hardware projects. For example, I have been co-developing SnapperGPS, an open source location data logger for wildlife tracking. But without knowing the name it’s impossible to find because the search results are flooded by proprietary GPS tech.
Does an indexing platform like protocols.io exist for OSH? If not, can we build one?
– Moritz: here is OHO (OHO - search engine for sustainable open hardware projects) for open hardware in general.
It would be cool to have a platform that tracks trust in hardware projects.
Need to be aware that copyright and makers rights are different in different countries.
Conclusion notes
We believe that there are multiple reasons why academics often do not make the hardware they build open. They include
Not even considering that someone else might be interested
Being worried that the things they build are “not good enough” or too “amateurish”
Not wanting to document the project (or not knowing how to)
Wanting to avoid another group publishing results first
Hoping to eventually sell the project
Not knowing how to make something open
Some of these points can be tackled by introducing academics to OSH early (e.g. 1st year of grad school or even undergrad) and explaining the upsides of making things open as well explaining how to do that.
We also think that it’s currently hard to know what open lab/field tech is out there already. There is no single place that indexes existing open science hardware projects.
Suggested action points
-
Reach out to academic institutions to introduce an introductory course for their students (e.g. “How and why to share the stuff you build”). A one-off 45 min session in the first year of grad school could be a great start. For this purpose, it would be good if GOSH could provide a “starter package” with materials (e.g. slides, links, videos) on
Why is it good to make things open?
How do you make things open? (Publishing platforms, documentation, license…)
Examples of great OSH projects.
This could be useful for other outreach projects, too. -
Create a platform that indexes open science hardware projects. Perhaps build on protocols.io?
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Legal
Date: 2022-10-28
Time: 9:30
Place: Back of main room
Facilitator: Martin
Notetaker: Alison
Participants
- Martin
- Alison
- Number of participants: 2
International context:
- Free software laws in Bolivia
- Previous law in Uruguay
- Argentina - if the state is funding, needs to be licensed openly; not always followed because of the incentive system of academic work globally
Standards-based solutions
- e.g. ODS ODT LibreOffice
- Multi-government standards bodies
Need to require:
- All source to be published
- All schematics published
- License to reuse
- Efforts made to promote reuse
Government procurement ideas
- Military is most hardware intensive
- Medical supplies
Hardware has the potential to be more transparent - e.g., open source voting machines
Ideas
The problem of centralized manufacturing - idea for pilot community demonstrating distributed manufacturing
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DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) of GOSH
Date: 2022-10-28
Time: 09:45
Place: outside
Facilitator: Bri
Notetaker: Laura
Participants
- Nat
- Bri
- Gourav
- Guillermina
- Laura
- Katie
- Number of participants: 6
Notes:
Here some of the highlights during the discussion:
The code of conduct is usually related to a couple of people, so it is necessary to find ways to involve people.
– Nat: Instead of establishing a code of conduct, try to improve practices that reflect the values expressed in the code of conduct. Also, at the time of registration, ask people to read some highlights from the code of conduct.
– Guillermina: It is important to take into account language barriers: We are discussing the concepts of diversity, equity and inclusion, to welcome new members and make it as inclusive as possible and to attract people. At the end of the conference it would be good to reflect privately on the aspects of the meeting that did not work well in relation to the code of conduct or any other aspect. It may be to provide some box where people can anonymously put their thoughts by writing them down on papers, also an online source where people can put their thoughts after the event.
– Nat: The structure of the meeting consists of very long days. And if we set a session to be in Spanish, another in English, to attenuate the linguistic stress?
– Gourav: It is a good idea to have sessions in Spanish. Also Gourav was thinking if he was good enough to facilitate a session or if there was someone better for the job. As there were more technicians than biologists, he did not feel able to facilitate most of the technical discussions. There was a lot of content to digest and no time for it.
– Guillermina: By the end of Thursday, some facilitators were a bit overwhelmed and tired, and there is no point in continuing like this. It may be necessary to find a way to cancel some of the sessions.
– Nat: There is no opportunity to say if things feel bad. Maybe a thumbs up as a check methodology.
– Guillermina: It is important to find a way to wrap up the content of what happened in each session during the day. There is not enough time to disconnect for a while. It would have been nice to post a summary of what was going to happen the next day. Yesterday I facilitated a session, but only one person showed up, perhaps because it was not communicated properly the day before.
– Nat: How about scheduling the session by different topics per day?
– Guillermina: The idea is to experiment in order to fix spaces such as the one in the council.
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Participatory / Community Science
Date: 2022-10-28
Time: 10:30
Place: outside
Facilitator: Lara Jatar and Niko Arranz
Notetaker: Lara Jatar
Participants
- Nat
- Guillermina
- Rachel
- Niko
- Lara
- 5
Links
Images: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1RMAm_CPJfeJEpiePS3DETTZaVRqnJtwD
Comenzamos la sesión construyendo binoculares (_MG_1938 | GOSH Community | Flickr) hechos con papel con el objetivo de ir a recorrer parte del predio viendo a través de esas “cajas”. En el camino nos encontramos con un árbol muy antiguo que fue talado y allí nos quedamos un rato observando. Encontramos una tarántula muerta y hongos. Luego volvimos a las mesas del exterior a trabajar sobre distintas preguntas:
1. What does participatory/community science mean?
2. Why participatory and/or community science?
3. What tools do we know to create participatory spaces?
Conclusiones:
Block # 5 ( Friday / Viernes, 11:00 am) )
Supply Chain
Date: 2022-10-28
Time: 11:00
Place: -
Facilitator: Juul
Notetaker: Rajas
Participants
- Saad Bhamla - Prof At Georgia Tech (GT)
- Elio Challita - PhD Bioengineering GT,
- Rajas Poorna - PhD BioEngineering Frugal Raman Spectrometry (GT)
- Amanda Matthes- GPS tracker
- George Albercook - Many projects
- Marc Juul - Open Spectrometer
- Martin - OSS, Open Contracting, Water quality
How politics is affecting supply chain
– Saad: Is here because he has been doing OSH stuff and wanted to connect with GOSH for the sake of community. Synbio is well documented; translate to hardware?
– Elio: During covid, was building face shields. Interested in scaling, transportable, low-cost, available, effective
– Amanda: Affected constantly, replacing parts constantly because of chip shortage. Specs are the same but new part = risky.
– Rajas: Wants to compress the supply chain, make things work locally. Manufacture Too interconnected.
– George: Just-in-time warehousing: mismatch between optimising and brittleness
– Juul: Was in Sri Lanka, Crisis everywhere… Got MOSFETs from Alibaba, didn’t work. Works on anti-censorship.
– Martin: Got a faulty pH sensor. Usually China to Mexico takes 3 months. The dream is that each river will have a device to measure water quality. Would be nice to manufacture locally. How to do QA on that locally manufactured sensor?
– George: Sharing didn’t really happen during the pandemic.
– Saad: Adafruit: They add QC. Consider biomedical products. There was this guy who had 65 innovations for maternal care: how many can you translate for use in Africa? Problem for translation is that the QC for biomedical stuff is insane. 0.1 degree C change is ok in most cases, but in BMed not easy.
– George: Medical best practices standards are pretty hard. When some group made a baby holder, plastic holders, they needed a NIST traceable meter stick.
– Amanda: People bought
– Rajas: Can use mass-manufactured stuff to standardise hardware. Use Coke to standardise pH for instance. Or use their bottles for plastic because they will use standard plastic.
George: Google bought some fab
Saad: Moderna and Pfizer could find the standardized process to make the mRNA vaccine. Everyone knows the mechanism of the lipid nanoparticles.
Martin: Nixon era modifications to patent law: you don’t need to put calibration info in your patent.
Saad: US WW2 made the best process to make battleships, so scaled up battleship production in 8 years. Focus: the process is something we are all underestimating.
George: Manufacturing revolution.
Scaleup and scaledown is interesting.
Can we make a transport container size fabrication machine? For 10k$ put one in the city and have it be able to build things.
Field Ready: idea was that 3D printers can make whatever part you need.
Problem with the 10k$ container is who has the skill to run it? Unclog nozzles etc.
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Innovative Contracting
Date: 2022-10-28
Time: 11:00
Place: -
Facilitator David Lang
Notetaker: Alison Parker
Participants
- Greg
- Jenny
- Josh
- Greg
- Dorn
- Constantin
- Harold
- Moritz
- Approximate number of participants: 10
Three ideas (philanthropic tools)
Advance Market Commitments (AMCs)
Michael Kramer
e.g. vaccines
scibetter.org/amc
Equipment Supply Shocks (made up term)
Opposite idea - pre-buy a bunch of tools and distribute it to community
eg a Mac in every classroom in California
Neil Gershenfeld FabLabs - pre-buy 5 fablabs
Not sure what the tool will be good for yet but put it out there
Manu Prakash - distribute foldscopes
Underwater drones - buffer of supply, then donate
David wrote an essay on this Equipment Supply Shocks — science better
GOSH could be a facilitator
Patent Buyouts
Lot of interesting IP locked behind corporate walls
Buy and release patents
No real life examples?
IP at the margins - not critical like Coca Cola’s recipe
Contract Sofar to finish development of a standard
Initial patent for seatbelts
Tesla
Pull things into the commons
Concern - don’t want it factored in by companies
Josh - Two factors here, should be decoupled: actual buyout of IP + investment in the workaround, documentation etc (investments in open ecosystems)
Why standardization efforts fail (essay) - no commercial adoption. Incentivizing this might be a jumpstart
Patents require documentation, but not enough - big difference between documentation for internal teams vs documentation for open use (Greg notes: worst possible documentation for patents, not something we want)
Mologic - interesting combination of a couple of these, show how these can combine in interesting ways
Diagnostic company, pregnancy tests, diagnostics for low income countries
Originally independent, bought by big manufacturers then bought themselves back out, bought by Open society foundation and Gates Foundation, bought the patents and the team and supported local manufacturers. Senegalese governments + foundations are subscription members, de-risks
Still figuring out what it will be longer term
Foundations and others more open to these ideas, interesting time to propose
Once you prove them, easier to scale up
Huge investment for HIV diagnostics, distributed all over Africa, should have paid dividends for coid but it was proprietary - there is a need for a case study of how the open piece of it can benefit long term
Developing this language is really important
Another - Foundation for Food and Ag requires a match
Could bring a tool, could bring it as a match, converting historical work into something you can currently leverage
Jenny - who would be the expert on contractual terms for open interoperable projects - we need a contract lawyer, are there innovative contract lawyers?
Dorn - Dasa Greenwood with Civics.com
Machine readable contracts, parcelable and traceable.
Philip Sheldrick - peer to peer foundation, question the whole patent structure, Bergman Center
Clinic at Duke University doing really interesting stuff on contracting
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Community Management
Date: 2022-10-28
Time: 11:00
Place: Outside
Facilitator/Notetaker: Bri
Participants
- Alexandra Covor
- Linda Aidoo
- Goldjian
- Laura Olalde
- Ryan George
- Stoica Mihnea
- Madalina Banica
Notes
This was an exploratory session focused on the role of intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships as community managers. To do this, we used tarot cards to guide us through a process of self-reflection. Each participant pulled a card from the deck and was given 5 minutes to themselves to reflect on their card, what imagery stands out to them, and how it relates to their positionality within communities. While doing this they were asked to write notes to themselves that they can keep.
After spending 5 minutes individually self-reflecting, we paired up to share our reflections with one another (10-15 minutes) and afterwards spent the remaining time coming together as a large group and sharing our reflections.
Links
https://twitter.com/GOSHCommunity/status/1586034027454078978\
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Distributed manufacturing 1
Date: 2022-10-28
Time: 11:00
Place: Coati room
Facilitator: Constantin
Notetaker: Constantin
Participants
- Greg Austic
- Andrew Lamb
- Ryan George
- Josh Greenberg
- Obanda Johanssen
- Number of participants: 6
The global distribution network is falling apart and rather than try to fix it we are thinking of some sort of recipes to achieve local sustenance when it comes to creating products locally.
Right now based on the materials needed to build something there is a rule of thumb if you can produce it locally: things that use two or three materials like soap or buckets are relatively simple to create in any country, and things with more than four are already a bit more demanding for example basic devices containing a single PCB, some basic electronic components, screws and an enclosure, 10 types or more materials are complex and demanding and you need the effort of multiple combined countries.
A follow-up of this discussion will be done on Sunday to decide what a good testpilot would be.
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Standards
Date: 2022-10-28
Time: 11.12 am
Place: Tucan room
Facilitator: Nico
Notetakers: Nico and Pierre
Participants
- Nico
- Katie
- Pierre
- Andrew
Nico Notes
Post It prompts
Connecting OSH and FOSS efforts, specially to support common metadata practices.
Broad metadata about projects?
Adoption of standards - what is needed to make this happen?
Hardware standards at least for common problems.
Integrating OSH for platform-level standards in science.
What does “platform” mean in this context?
Methods of standardizing open hardware designs.
About content: BOM, Design files, …
About how to design: no black boxes, modularity, reusability, repairability.
About how to implement: electronics, mechanics, whatever!
How does open hardware gain credibility for use in academia? Eg. There is no standard for testing or calibration for DIY hardware.
Being the “far superior” product.
What does “for DIY hardware” mean? free?
Do we need testing devices?
Facilitation ideas
Come up with a standard game we can play.
List of common problems and solutions.
Example: “EMI noise countermeasures and related standards”.
Micropipettes?
Map each device to a standard.
Make a list of first implementation steps towards standardization (isolation, not routing traces on top of each other in PCBs). Standard practices to build stuff. Make a booklet on critical things to watch out for. This is very related to design decisions.
Make a list of testing tools (e.g. ventmon).
Standardize interfaces between OSH devices.
Format
Options:
Exploratory
Get work done: prepare a fanzine of common problems we know and how we fixed them. Towards the booklet.
Previous posts
Standards and open science hardware - any experiences with designing to conform to standards? 1
Standards in Open Science Hardware 1
UNESCO launches a global consultation to develop a standard-setting instrument on Open Science
DIN standard: Contribute to the development of an international open source hardware standard
An opportunity to create an inclusive dialogue on OSH standards [help needed] 1
Pierre’s notes (pasted below):
– Katie
- She is interested on standards for metadata
- Calibration for environmental sensing
– Pierre
Design principles for bioinstrumentation: Principles of open source bioinstrumentation applied to the poseidon syringe pump system | Scientific Reports
– Andrew
There are three kinds of standards
Open-Know-How Case:
Hired a company specialized on writing standards and they did the following steps:
- Interviews
- Came up with a draft on Git
- Face-to-face meetings
- Analysis and Discussion
Several platforms have adopted Open-KnowHow: Appropedia, Thingiverse, etc.
Future projects: Interoperability
Two kind of standards:
- quality standards (e.g. high quality or low quality)
- general standards (e.g. general technical spec)
At community level:
- People who follow standards from previous published designs.
- People who set their own “standards” for specific applications.
- People who make a bechmarking with commercial equipment.
Performance criteria
GOSH should create its own standards
Links: