Hi all,
During last TECNOx in Chile (April) I shared some ideas with the GOSHers there about a (very)draft method for evaluating our projects, based on Bonvoisin et al, 2017. Slides are here, in Spanish.
I got interested in this by seeing the differences in openness and nature of OScHw projects, a question we share with @rpez who also was in Chile.
In the roadmap we say that documentation is a topic to work on so we make sure projects are open. But GOSH projects are super heterogeneus, there are some “types” we usually identify when talking between us (artistic, community science, biohacking, etc) and openness is usually different between them (what is being opened, how, how much, etc).
So the work of Bonvoisin et al was super interesting for me, they propose a global index based on assessment of product openness (transparency, replicability, free for commercial use) and process openness (how accessible for people to modify it).
I took that and added some categories into the ‘process’ openness:
- Accesibility of documentation in terms of languages and formats
- Number of collaborators
- Diversity of collaborators (gender, academia/extra academia, age)
- Decision making process (horizontal, centralised)
The idea is not saying “this is right, this is not” but perform a self-assessment of our projects and start generating some more specific information about them - therefore, about GOSH. Could be useful to detect temporal variations in openness, to show these different ‘types’ we already see, detecting which axes require more time&work, as a draft for a future good practices guide, etc-
I also like the idea of customizing the “index”, according to different contexts (so we don’t fall in comparing apples with oranges)
I’m working on turning this variables operative by seeing what we currently have in the community and looking at what another open communities do. What do you think? Would you add another variables? What data would that require, is it available?