Dear all,
I have seen this opportunity: Open Science.
I see a potential to apply for the organisation of an expert gathering on open source hardware publication. I do not have the capacity to lead this at the moment, but would be happy to help. This might be a good follow up of sosha 2023, also related to View of Business Models for Open Source Hardware Repositories and the fact that the journal of open hardware is now diamond open access (Journal of Open Hardware).
I’d suggest broadening the scope slightly from “publishing” to also capture their " Improving Data Infrastructure", as I feel that we have all found that not only is it hard to “publish” the complete design so that it can be replicated, but also holding the data in a way that ongoing scientific collaboration can happen is as much (if not more) of a challenge.
I think that getting our data infrastructure right is a precursor to having all the data in place for consistent publishing that enables high quality replication. I am also sure that others disagree, hence why I agree we want to do one of the “expert gatherings”
Expert Gatherings (Working Groups): The second activity supports expert gatherings for areas within open science that face significant challenges but lack clear next steps. These meeting grants will enable diverse groups of experts to gather, discuss challenges, network, and brainstorm potential solutions. Outputs from these meetings may later qualify for prototype grants under this category. Meeting grants are designed to cover participant support and will be $20-100K.
I know that @Lionel and @Matt.Beddows are starting to push forward with their very modular approach to hardware documentation and eventually publishing/distribution. This dovetails somewhat with the work that @eric @jmwright @drayde and I are doing with NLNet on Open Hardware Manuals. And other GitBuilding work that on publishing that your grant was kind enough to fund 
I have also been in discussion with @amchagas about how we could fund some sort of academia focussed open hardware event again. We had SOSHA 2023 and Open Hardware from Academia in 2020.
[I also have thoughts on the paper you linked to, but I made a new thread for that! Business Models for Open Source Hardware Repositories]
Is this the sort of thing that could be used to help fund a GOSH 2025?
I’d assume that we would struggle to turn funding for a specific expert gathering tasked to work towards a specific solution into funding for what has to be a very general conference for a incredibly diverse community.
Our recent work on understanding strategies for developing Open Science Hardware in Africa shows that a dynamic approach to designing tools that meet the pressing needs of social innovation is essential. In addition, we can develop a strategy with regional hubs across the continent.
Do you think the idea of developing social innovation laboratories using open hardware fits in with this grant? The idea would be to experiment with the creation of these labs, whose mission would be to identify pressing local needs, translate them into scientific projects for developing open hardware, and act as focal points for the continuous production of data.