We are mapping activities and progress in the last five years towards our recommendations for making Open Science Hardware ubiquitous by 2025. We need your contributions for two things:
Add any activity/resource/decision from the last five years that has advanced our recommendations for making Open Science Hardware ubiquitous by 2025 PLUS a link to more information if available!
Add your ideas or planned actions in the next three years that will directly contribute to the recommendations, Make sure to follow this with [Planned by YOUR NAME] or [Idea from YOUR NAME] so we know who to follow up with .
Tomorrow we’ll be coming up with a list of 3-5 actions that the GOSH Community should take in the next year to advance the roadmap - your ideas will be really useful and we will report back!
In the roadmap is there going to be any consideration for the fact that despite the best efforts of this community the 2025 goal of ubiquity needs to be revisited.
I don’t want to be negative, we have come a long long way. There is a DINSPEC defining open hardware, open hardware is mentioned by UNESCO. Our open hardware projects have improved, distributions has improved, the open tooling we use to get there has improved.
This being said, look around a science lab of someone not in our community. You will see no open hardware (except perhaps a 3D printer). Cores suppliers sell no open hardware, and for most instruments there are no open alternatives. Ubiquity is not achieved until this is not true, and we are not going to achieve all that in 3 years.
The pandemic really threw a spotlight on open hardware and open development. Many outside our community tried to create open hardware. This highlighted what many of us who have tried making complex instrumentation already knew: There is a huge bottleneck as the tools that we need to collaborate don’t are proprietary and the the cost is totally prohibitive. This really really hamstrings collaboration. It is not like software where teams across the globe can readily collaborate effectively.
I would be very much in favour of pushing back our goal of ubiquity to 2035 and asking ourselves about the current roadblocks. What stops collaboration? What stops production? What stops our institutions and funders supporting this work?
We have some examples that have proved principles. We know great open hardware can be made. But these examples it highlight challenges, and much of the engineering work has been on navigating these roadblocks rather than designing instruments. I think we need to address these challenges head on. Doing so will take time.
I haven’t added anything to the Google Doc as I am confused by what you would want me to do inside it.
This is exciting and I hope that GOSH 2022 is going really well!
I am also a little confused by your directives, are we recording all activities/resources/decisions that have advanced Open Science Hardware in the last 5 years or just advances we have personally contributed to?
Because I have a lot more to contribute to documentation than I have hands-on projects that directly advanced the state of the recommendation.
However in terms of looking for collaborations, NASA’s TOPS (Transform to Open Science) initiative is working on building a NASA-credentialed MOOC to teach the practices of Open Science research to a broad audience of professional and community scientists and I believe they are still doing a funded call for module contributors. GitHub - nasa/Transform-to-Open-Science: Transformation to Open Science
Perhaps if we had a NASA-backed module on how to create/document/license open hardware we would be able to reach more engineers and enthusiasts who will be excited to sign the pledge, join GOSH, start building and advance the recommendation!
I’ve been following the community calls since they started and I could probably find the right person to talk to about maybe teaching the Roadmap (or possibly one revised for community concerns) in the program. Let me know if I should reach out!
We would like to gather all actions that have been taken by anyone in the world which have advanced any of the recommendations - it doesn’t need to be things that you have personally done
Sorry that it wasn’t clear where to add items Julian, I’ve put “Add your item here” now and expanded the bullet points on all sections so hopefully that helps. Ideally this would have been a spreadsheet but we already had the google doc ready for another session. We’ll add the examples from the wall this morning and leave the doc open for more contributions in the coming days, before making a dashboard.
Thanks for summarising your thoughts on where we are at in terms of progress with ubiquity, that is really useful. The goal within the two hours we have for this session is not to define ubiquity - we thought about it but decided not to go down that route for this meeting and to keep moving forward with what is possible by 2025. Definitely it would be good to loop back on the points you’re making once the Gathering ends!
Add any activity/resource/decision from the last five years that has advanced our recommendations for making Open Science Hardware ubiquitous by 2025 PLUS a link to more information if available!
Add your ideas or planned actions in the next three years that will directly contribute to the recommendations, Make sure to follow this with [Planned by YOUR NAME] or [Idea from YOUR NAME] so we know who to follow up with 
.
Click here to add your contributions >>
