Map / Cadastre / List of Open science/hardware initiatives in Chile/LATAM

Hi!
I am new to the GOSH community, @paz is guilty of bringing me here.
I am working on a map of “science and innovation” in water resources in Chile for a goverment agency, and I am interested in any open science - citizen science initiatives on the topic that could be highlighted as part of this map.
Thank you!

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I am currently working with Aasura to create the “Map of african digital/physical third-places (makerspace, hackerspace, fablab ) and open Science initiatives”. We will do it using data visualisation with Open Knowledge Map. And we will release it during the Africa Open Science & Hardware summit.. Let me invite Asura there

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Hi Maria,

I’m equally new to the GOSH community and the forum here! As Thomas mentioned I am (hopefully) going to AfricaOSH in April. I am part of the Open Knowledge Maps team and while we’re trying to map academic texts we’ve had the chance to try our engine on various kinds of data (we mapped reports of infectious diseases and recently also created a map of the participants of a conference based on their short bios)

I would be curious to hear more about your map, especially because you specifically called it a map (often people refer to lists, collections, databases, etc) and I really like this notion.

Best,
Asura

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I hate to reference my own work, but take a look at this map --> http://u.osmfr.org/m/187670/

It contains info on open science projects in Argentina and Open Hardware projects in Latin America (check the layers). It’s still in progress but may be useful!

Feel free to ask me if you need any further info!

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Whaaaaaat such a cool map! Is it possible to make it bigger and more international and stuff?

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Thanks @gbathree :smiley:

Researchers at CENIT -the centre I work at- completed all the open science layers for Argentina. I added the open hw layer with cases from Latin America (part of my phd).

It’s done using umap exactly for collaboration purposes :slight_smile: So if anyone is interested we could just add editors to the map and start building a bigger one.

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Thank you @jarancio Are you a student of Mariano? It would be great to be able to replicate your methodology here in Chile

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Yup! Mariano Fressoli is my phd supervisor

Indeed this map is super cool! :slight_smile:

Here, here!!! :smiley:
Also, just came to mind, how big a group/initiative has to be in order to be referenced in the map?

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Thanks @amchagas :smiley:

I was talking about this with @gbathree through messages but I think it’s better to discuss it here.

The initiatives in the map come from different sources:

  • GOSH 2017
  • Online repositories
  • Cases I bump into as I research into the previous ones, or because someone points me to them

As it’s a first version, up to now each case only has three attributes: name, georreference, website/repository

I’m working on categories but more related to my phd approach (how open, diverse, documented, etc). This will take long and it will probably end up in a different map.

But for practical purposes, I think it would be useful to have at least the cases in the map categorized somehow. For example, I think a ‘GOSH’ tag would be really useful. It may show which initiatives are part of the movement and also potential people to approach. Another tag could be ‘Biohacking’ or similar, or ‘Independent Artists’.

I mapped some spaces also, as I didn’t want to lose them from the big picture (hacklabs, fablabs, etc). But I don’t know if it would be ok to map them and just create a tag ‘spaces’ or to leave them aside and only map their projects.

Regarding size, well it depends on how we measure it, # of members in the group? # of projects developed? Impact of the projects in terms of collaborations or replications? Networks created? # of countries affected? It’s an interesting discussion!

EDIT: I forgot to tell you also that I’ll open a separate map for the open science layers (the Argentinian cases), so we can have one map only for Open HW (I think we’ll have a lot of heterogeneity already!)

What do you think?

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I think the idea is great! I’ve never worked with map tools/approach, so I don’t know how hard it would be to implement these things, but if there is anyway I can help, let me know.

In lines with what you said: I made that question on the size of the group, because I think it would be cool to have a map listing individual projects (I think this is what you you mean with “a map only for Open HW”? and then we could have tags/layers for things like: active, not active, from a company, academic, non academic). I think this could be a great tool to see if there are “hotspots” of activity and try to track the whys/hows for them. Also, it would be a great visualization tool for showing people how this movement is growing over time/space (specially if one manages to have a tag for start/release dates and number of users/community size).

Since I never worked with any sort of map tool/approach, I really don’t know how easy/useful this is, but if it is useful in any sense, I would like to contribute.

For instance on the plos collection there are all these papers describing open/free hardware, that would look great in a map :stuck_out_tongue:

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Ok! I’m working on a nice way of dealing with the collaborative workflow without losing style =P

But, meanwhile, I’ve created this repo in GitHub containing a database with the projects already listed in the map and a tutorial to help everyone collaborate.

In two lines: We can use GitHub to have a version-controlled-database of projects (csv format, easy to edit by anyone) and then by converting .cvs to .geojson GitHub shows it automatically as a map.

Note: this map looks awful but contains all the data, so it works in the meantime :P… If you think it can work, I can post it in a separate thread so people start collaborating

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Super! I think people will fill it up for sure, but definitely consider mechanisms to remove projects (or archive them) once they are done. Actually, archiving would be best so they are still referenceable in the future - how cool would it be over time to see the growth and death of projects, kind of like this (but not nuclear bombs :slight_smile:

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Yup! As we have the active/inactive field we can remove the projects (well not remove them, maybe put them in a different layer) when they’re inactive.

I loved that map :heart_eyes:… I’m adding this now to my list of ‘things I need to do some research on how to do them xD’

@jarancio I love the map! If you want more information about worldwide DIYBIO / Biohacking movement, you should visit the following websites:

http://sphere.diybio.org/

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