I hear your criticisms Julian. I don’t actually disagree with most them. Like I said above. I definitely felt upset because it didn’t come across as about the program, but linking individual people which felt unfair. This to me felt unkind and not needed. I can accept after our discussion that you did this to hold up your overall criticism and not to attack those people.
For things like the summit, our summit fellows, etc, we for sure do seek out all kinds of people and see always trying to improve that. Hope to see many of you help us make these connections a d share our call so we CAN continue to grow in this way.
I don’t want to talk about the definitions of policing now…feels out of scope for this conversation.
Trying to add to the de-escalation as well, and since I would like to connect more as part of the GOSH community
I think this platform is a fantastic opportunity to connect, we all have more than one common interest, and personally, I’ve been met with professionalism. I like to support fun, sincere, and respectful dialogue while acknowledging each other’s viewpoints.
I have learned a lot by just reading this post, and I wanna say that I understand julianstirling, and agree with the essence of your comments, also thank you for raising your voice about the fellowship struggles and point out important improvement points. I understand this is a topic that people are very passionate about.
At this moment I do suggest (to all including myself), to take a step back from the keyboard, take a deeeep breath and just try to relax for a few minutes (trust me, contemplation is very helpful at problem-solving)
Also helps to put in perspective personal feelings while considering that maybe there is no malice in others’ point of view? I strongly think in general people really want to help, and really want to make a positive impact in the world (at the end of the day that’s why we are here right?) Also, I see lots of comments agreeing on improvement points for the OSHWA Fellowship, this is what will help us to move forward and here is where I would focus.
To conclude my rant: I also agree with hikinghack and amchagas, in my own words i feel that being behind a computer writing, instead of face to face is a huge block in communications, right now we have a fantastic opportunity to learn how to approach with a virtual community, and I could keep going on and on, but agreeing again with amchagas, is best to do so in a different iteration. If there is any interest I can certainly be a part of it and support as much as I can.
Just to avoid us all piling on, me and @julianstirling talked privately and we were going to write something together, and that was going to take a few days because we both wanted some space. But i just don’t want people to keep beating this topic. We will both explain ourselves.
This post is to indicate that Lee and Julian talked privately, and agreed that we have similar concerns that we both feel passionate about and have agreed to understand each other better. We both found this topic hit us in similar ways that felt personal and upsetting.
Julian was reacting to the almost $1m that OSHWA raised from the Sloan Foundation, which is announced on Sloan’s grant page that it will allow the following:
“Up to eight award recipients will receive grants of between $50,000 and $100,000 to expand and augment their open source hardware documentation.”
He felt that some of the work presented doesn’t seem to align with this original announcement.
Lee’s frustrations are that the work of less-known academics (even at bigger universities) is often marginalized, and they struggle to gain visibility even when they do great work. Their work gets overshadowed by some of the things Julian is frustrated about, making their work even more invisible.
Lee wants to apologize for saying Julian was ill-intentioned and acting in bad faith, and Julian wants to apologise for not taking the time to be clear in his initial criticism that it was in no way meant to reflect on the individual work of all fellows, some of whom have done fantastic work that this thread was trying to highlight. We’ve both failed to communicate on a topic that we feel personally affected by.
Continuing the discussion we propose that we abandon this specific thread as it has become a bit messy. And that we start a couple of new ones.
One thread to talk about the work from the full slate of fellows, which includes early career academics, people with a variety of identities and backgrounds. This includes several certified Open Hardware projects, and guides for how to better produce Open Hardware in Academia in a variety of contexts to work towards overcoming some of this.
A second one to constructively discuss the fellowship program itself, and how it can be improved.
Hello @leeborg and @julianstirling I commend both of you for making amends and offering alternative ways to continue discussing matters we are all passionate about while remaining constructive. Bravo!
I’d also like to express my gratitude to @julianstirling and @leeborg for this communication and working things out empathetically and constructively. This is not easy and I have learned from your example. Thank you.
I am also grateful that we are lucky enough to be part of the GOSH community, where these conversations can take place.
Following concerns raised regarding the tone and content in this thread, the moderator team has reviewed it and concluded that there were no strict violations of the GOSH code of conduct.
However, we found some elements to be problematic, such as unnecessary prolonged focus on the intentions and conduct of an individual community member. As a result, the thread went off-topic from the original discussion. As per the GOSH guidelines for online communication, different topics should become separate threads to enable a more productive discussion.
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