 Well, for everyone watching, welcome and thank you for joining us for this plenary on the critical roles of grassroots initiatives and communities in increasing the adoption of open science practices. My name is Annie Tang. I'm the engagement lead at Invest in Open Infrastructure and the co-organizer of this conference and I'm just really excited to be facilitating this panel today. So a little bit about our thinking behind this panel and what it's going to cover. So the year of open science celebrates the benefits and successes of open science and inspire more scientists to adopt open science practices. Earlier today and also later on in the conference, we'll be hearing more about how policies, technical infrastructures, incentives, etc. are contributing to us these goals and to advancing open science. But we want to hold this space particularly to celebrate the important work of grassroots communities. Early driven bottom-up initiatives play a really critical role in increasing the adoption of open science practices by bringing together more diverse perspectives and ideas and empowering individuals to actively drive and lead cultural change in their communities. They're also really pivotal to normalizing open science practices in research and scholarship and by creating and maintaining the scaffolds for the community members to exchange knowledge, to problem-solve, and to learn together. I'm really, really excited to be joined by four amazing community leaders today. I am really inspired by their leadership and work in nurturing, cultivating communities in their respective domains. I'll be asking them to introduce themselves in a moment. And then after their introductions, I'll start us off with some questions that the panelists will discuss. And hopefully we will, with this discussion, will inspire additional questions and thoughts from you all. And in the final 20 minutes or so of this session, we'll open the floor for your questions. So if you do have a question in the meantime, please do use the Q&A function in your Zoom windows to ask them, and we'll relay them to the panelists later on. So without further ado, panelists, if we can go around the room and you can share with us who you are, where are you joining us from? The organization or initiative that you're representing today, and very briefly, how you got into open science grassroots community leadership and development. That's fantastic. So if I could start maybe with Jacob. Sure. Good evening. I'm Jacob Green from Hospital Plus Plus. Well, I'm normally in Baltimore, Maryland tonight. I'm in the Netherlands. How did I get into this area? I'm a background in distributed systems and complex systems and very interested in the ideas of community and my own communities in Baltimore and communities around the world and how we might use the power of together to solve some of the society's greater challenges. And it's been an interesting journey to get to get here. Thanks, Jacob. Nick. My name is Nick Halper. I'm from an organization called Neuromatch. I'm normally in Salt Lake City, but tonight I'm in Switzerland. I originally got into open science practices, I think because of the field that I came from or come from. Working in neuroscience, it's easy to see how the field really kind of focuses on or could benefit from collaborative effort. You have this like single complex system that all these people are studying and they can study in pieces or parts or they can combine their works, basically, and work together on it. And so for me, it was like inherently this sort of collaborative like open practices would be helpful in this field. And that's been demonstrated through other sort of top-down initiatives, whether it be the global brain initiative or other things like that. And so I really think it was sort of my field and background that brought me into it. Thank you, Nick. Brieke. Yeah, thanks, Emmy. So hello, everyone. My name is Brianna, but most people just call me Brie. I'm the community coordinator for the Gathering for Open Science Hardware Community, but we usually just call it the gosh community because that's our acronym and it's nice and short and easy. I am calling in from Melbourne, Australia today. So it's about 5.30 in the morning. So I'm a little bit sleepy, but definitely really excited to be here and chat with all of you and just a bit of history on how I kind of got involved in this stuff. Back in university, when I was an undergraduate student, I worked a lot with a citizen science student organization. And we were really trying to better figure out how we can use research to advocate for ourselves as undergraduate students. And from there, I really started thinking a lot more about public participation in science. And this led me down the course to get more involved in open science stuff and inevitably working with open source hardware, which has been really fun and really cool. And I don't have an engineering background, but I've learned so much from this community and it's been really fun. So yeah. Thank you so much. Last but not least, Daniela. Thank you. My name is Daniela Haderi, and I'm the eco-founder and director of Pre-Review, and I am sick. So this is my voice that I might be coughing here and there today. I am calling from Portland, Oregon and the United States, but I'm originally was born and grew up in Italy. And my background, I guess it's all my past, but it's still very much a present sometimes, but it's in neuroscience. And it kind of like, I came to the US for doing a PhD in neuroscience, and I really wanted to continue. I was very passionate. I always wanted to be a researcher in academia, but in 2016, I had the opportunity to attend OpenCon, which was a wonderful conference that I still wish that it came back to us and it exposed me as a kind of early career researcher to an incredible diverse and global community of practitioners or researchers, lots of librarians that I just really learned how to love. I didn't know librarians at the time, so it really opened up a community of people passionate about catalyzing change in the space of science. And so I saw a lot of possibility to improve and do real transformative change in the field that I loved. And when I came back, I really wanted to do something about it. And so I just learned about footprints and it really was really intrigued about the idea of an opportunity to provide comments to footprints and kind of transform the journal clubs that we were doing in my department from a let's show how smart we all are and why these papers should have not been published in CEL or NUTURE or to actually let's have a constructive discussion and provide feedback at a point in time in which still matters. And that was really kind of like the spark that kind of generated the idea behind Pre-Review and then kind of growing the organization with the rest of the team has been wonderful. So thank you for the opportunity to be here and to be with you all. Thank you so much. And do take water, please. Yeah, so thank you so much for introducing yourselves and a little bit the journey that you took to get here because this session is all about humans and our motivations and stories. So I'm gonna start off with our first question. Want to know a little bit more about the work that you do within your initiatives and organizations. How does your respective initiatives empower researchers to embrace and champion open science principles? Maybe Brie, we'll start with you. Awesome, yeah, so I, as I said before, I work with the GOSH community or the Gathering for Open Science Hardware community but I'm just gonna use GOSH for now because it's easier. And we're focused on increasing the adoption of open science hardware. And so we're really concerned with any tools or instruments that are being used for science. And so I like to think of microscopes, environmental sensors but also things like biological reagents as well. And we really wanna make these tools and these instruments open source. And I think in order to understand what open source hardware is, we kind of have to talk about closed source or proprietary hardware first. So proprietary hardware, it creates what we call black boxes and these are technologies that we can't understand because quite literally we can't open them up. And so we don't understand how these devices are being built. We can't fix these devices if they break. And we also can't modify these devices either. And the sort of closed nature of these devices, it inhibits what we can do because proprietary hardware is often really expensive. It leads to a highly concentrated market. It causes vendor lock-in and it really limits how rapidly we can reproduce devices. But on the other hand, open source hardware, it really opens up this box that I just described. And when I say that a piece of hardware is open source or open, I'm really just talking about the design files and the schematics of this actual device being shared using an open license. So open science hardware then, we're just taking this concept and just applying it to scientific instruments. And the impact that it can have on research and grassroots communities is really big because now anyone can use, study, modify, sell these devices. And it just comes with a bunch of benefits like furthering innovation, lowering costs and also importantly tearing down barriers to access. So in all of this, I know I just described what open source hardware was for a little bit, but the gosh community, our purpose in all of this is really to act as a network and a convening space where anyone who's contributing to open science hardware, whether they be engineers, researchers, policymakers, artists, whoever, they can come together and collaborate on projects and advocate for open science hardware. And my last thought here is I really view open science hardware as this mechanism for real and also meaningful collaboration between a whole kaleidoscope of people and communities from all across the world. So yeah. Thanks so much for that. Daniela, do you wanna go next? Sure, thank you. Yeah, so this is a great question. I guess I'll start with the mission. So as it's growing from that idea of like I did a SysCast for Prince and General Club and provide feedback, working together with the two other former researchers, Samantha Hingel and Monica Granados, we really thought like, what is the opportunity here? And we decided that the mission really needed to be around bringing more equity and openness to the scholarly peer review process. So in particularly, so we focus on peer review and specifically on preprint reviews because preprints give us as a community the opportunity to kind of shift away from that opaque and transactional and very often elite and exclusionary practices of research evaluation and move towards a more transparent and kinder and more inclusive and collaborative practice of improving each other work. And I also think that this adds the component of getting kind of back the power into the researchers of how do we share and evaluate each other works and how do we are recognized for that labor? We work in close collaborations with individuals and also with other organizations to develop tools and resources that are open science and open access and open source to enable preprint review for all. So we, our platform and our platform will review anyone with an orchid ID can review a preprint from 22 growing number, a growing number of preprint servers. We are preprint server agnostic. So as long as the preprint is a digital object identifier it can be reviewed on pre-review and these reviews themselves get a DOI and so they become part of the scholarly record. And as of recently, we also are able to have the reviews appear on the profile, the orchid profile of the reviewers that decide to review publicly. So the way that we try to empower researchers in this process is by both providing these kind of ways for them to get recognition. If they wish to do so, there are also ways to remain anonymous in a secure way respecting community values. But we also provide resources and we try at least to provide resources and value with training programs with opportunities to share and collaborate with other researchers in their field or the audition field. So our trainings focus on understanding how kind of structural and societal oppression in different spaces affects the peer review process all the way from the personal to the systemic level. And so really understanding what can we do as individual but when a time in which we're sitting down and reviewing a preprint to mitigate the effects of our personal beliefs that have come from being where we are in the world and all the way to how can we as people embedded in a system or an institution affect change, positive change in peer review through policy, through kind of conversations with other and experience sharing. So those trainings are really powerful and like kind of one of my favorite part of my job just interacting with other researchers. And then obviously the scalability of that is not as I guess like as immediate if we were just the only one providing training. So we've been focusing only always on sharing the resources and empowering others to deliver their own training. So right now we're going through a program of champions where we are working with 20 amazing community members that will be championing their work and bringing these adaptation of our work to their own communities. So yeah, I hope that covers all the question. Thanks so much, Daniela. Nick. Yeah, so Neuromatch is an organization really focuses on coordinating people together to collaboratively build educational materials as well as basically research experiences. And I'll kind of talk through both of those quickly but our focus has really been to bring together academic and industry researchers as well as graduate level educators to collaboratively build these open educational workbooks. And then we leverage those in a few different ways. They're allowed to be or they basically are redistributed out and use in classrooms all around the world. And then we also leverage them in our own training program so that students can come in and learn from these with live instruction, people following these like open source and collaboratively built materials. And so I would say that kind of coming to the root of your question, like how do we demonstrate open science practices or how are they sort of like fundamental to what we do? They really were built in and baked into the organization in how it was formed. That method of collaboratively building things and posting all of these open materials on GitHub or OSF and making them freely accessible and allowing people to basically change all these sort of like modular pieces of what a course or a workbook or a set of open educational resources looks like really was a sort of different way to do education. It was bringing a lot of these open science practices into education and learning materials. And so that like spirit of open science has really kind of like flowed through the organization into everything that we do. The data sets that we use in our courses all have to be open access and easily accessible. As we clean up those data sets, we host them on OSF and make them easily findable and usable. And then as we're actually teaching these courses because of the people who are involved in the practice that we have, we tend to reinforce these open science practices as well. As students publish micro publications as a result of their research experiences, we make those all open access, et cetera. And so I think we're by building it into how we operate we've been able to kind of build it into how we teach and the people that come out of our programs I think tend to be much more open science oriented as they go on and participate in the community. Thank you so much, Nick. That's really interesting. Jacob. Hi there. So as I said, my name is Jacob Green and I've been working at Ospo Plus Plus. It's an initiative to basically take the concept of open source, the large broad community of open source and see if we can't institutionalize open source into basically the offices of open source. It's a interesting way to think about building new offices like the office of the CTO, but it's the office of software and to go beyond the software to think of open source as both a noun in terms of the license, the IP, et cetera into the verb, which is community collaboration, et cetera to enable and install the culture of that collaboration into the office itself so that we have a green field situation to create offices at universities, at governments, at NGOs, in an industry that are enabled with a culture of collaboration and empowered with the tools through the medium of open data, open source, open science, open access in order to enable those collaborations. It's an interesting way of thinking about building digital infrastructure in terms of it actually being the offices of at various different institutions. We've had some success. It's been a lot of learnings. We're basically at the very nascent stages of this. Various different groups are experimenting in this area. But there's a, we held an event at the United Nations last June to start thinking about what it would take to design and build cooperative digital infrastructure that can be impactful. And that's the real word I wanna stress to the open science researchers in the audience, et cetera. We struggle a lot of times with the idea of how to have higher education and the research community have large scale impact. And I think we all are speaking a very common language in terms of cooperation about how to get there. For me, the exciting part in this is the prospects of being able to have large scale impact, not just through the cooperation of individuals, but the harnessing and the cooperation of institutions through multiple different sectors around the globe. So we might start thinking a little bit more holistically how we can have large quantum leaps in impact going forward. Thank you, Jacob. Yeah, I'm perhaps not surprised, but very inspired by the sort of resonance that we're hearing in terms of the work that you all are trying to enable and to increase the work that you're all doing to increase the adoption of open science practices and principles in your communities. We talked about, Jacob, I love what you said about, open as a verb, and that's really emphasizing the fact that openness is practice through, well, practice, right? It's like, it needs to be continually facilitated, continually executed and iterated over. And that's only possible with people. You mentioned your gaseous role in bringing together a kaleidoscope of people, and I think that's also very beautiful to think of the roles of communities in that sense. And so I think, yeah, what we're seeing, and hopefully the audience are with us at the moment, is that communities really are playing a critical role in not only enabling the practice of open and reinforcing it, but also in cultivating that cultural change and embedding these practices within the day-to-day of our operations, within and beyond what we do within research and community building. So that brings me nicely to the sort of second aspect that I'd love to get your thoughts on here. In terms of your experiences working with, building with your communities, what perspectives and solution do you think grassroot communities uniquely bring to the forefront of open science discourse? And if we can start with Daniela. Thank you. My best. Yeah, so this is a great question. And I, you know, the definition of grass roots itself. So grass roots, their movement and organizations is this beautiful way of using kind of collective action that within their local community and then use that to implement a change that ripples from local, regional, national and global levels. And so I, this idea of, you know, I guess for peer review it sounds like that peer review was founded by three early career researchers and women that were scientists still on the bench and saw in-preference and in open science and open scholarship more in general, this kind of irresistible opportunity to change the aspects of science and academia that we saw coming over and over in the way between what we're doing and our dream of being a scientist and research could be. And that was so irresistible that Google, three of us away from that track and really thinking about what are the things that we could do together with the community to kind of change these aspects. And the beauty, I think, of grass roots work is that and it's a challenge as well because now I think like now if I think about when was I last a researcher that was concerned about publishing, that was concerned about, you know, my creating a portfolio for my next job in academia, it's been a while. So I think that the opportunity and the challenge is that you opportunities that you can continue to learn if you continue to stay in better in the community you learn from the people that actually need and experiences that can inform you of how to best make the change. And therefore you can enable transformative change long lasting change in a much better way than working from up here, distancing yourself from, you know, who the community are impacted are. But the challenge is that again now, you know, in our team specifically, like now we don't have active researchers in our core team, but that challenge has been met with I think a beautiful way of allocating resources and time to beautiful. There's always going to be better ways to do it, but we really tried hard to create opportunities for research communities to interact and provide input to our work, feedback to our work and we try to make these opportunities kind of reward his opportunity with funding if we can. They're really kind of involving the community in shaping the role, might be shaping what the future of what we're doing is. So I think that if, you know, some people ask like, how are you ever going to scale some of the things that you're doing? And it's like, maybe some of those things actually don't need scaling. Some of those things could need to continue like the kind of tending of like communities that can kind of grow within their own. And so the way how he scales, maybe that's the answer. It's like through decentralized care. And that's really what like the dream that I have for peer review is, it's just like this, you know, these are the tools, these are some of the values that we have, do you share and what can you add to it and how can you shift it in a way that kind of best serves the needs of the community you're in. And the last thing that I want to say is that when I say researchers, it's actually something that most recently I have been, we have been questioning in terms of who, you know, we always question who is an expert to who decides who is a good peer reviewer versus who is not. And a lot of those kind of proxy for expertise are things that we want to fight against. So like prestige name. So a recognition in a more kind of elite way in academia. And we want to like think about more about growing like that expertise around dedication to contribution to proper interviews. And we have been in contact and we're beginning conversations with patients groups. So that are actually very interested in getting involved and providing feedback to research. And so I'm, and again, this is very preliminary but I'm really excited about next time this year exploring better ways of like how can even these groups groups of patients that are not researchers, right? But they have expertise. They have years of expertise. In fact, they have reached out personally to me some of them to us like, can I review on your platform? The answer is yes, but we don't have like an actual dedicated way to think about what are their needs what are some of their concerns to engage in this space. So really thinking about peer review and opening up this idea of who are the grassroots communities that we are trying to support. Thanks. Thanks, Daniela. I love the point you brought up around, you know communities grassroots initiative is roles of sort of questioning the status quo and assumption of who's included in conversation whose voices are being heard and bringing in additional folks who are not at the moment at the table. That's really, really important. Jacob, he's actually frozen internet in infrastructures sometimes. Well, if grassroots efforts, I think bring them in. Jacob, your internet is breaking up a little. Let's see. All right. I think how about Jacob, if we can come back to you in a second. Oh, can you hear us? I can. Okay, you're back. You're back for us. Let's see how this goes. Thank you very much. Thank you. Grassroots efforts, I think have an amazing power and amazing perspective on things. Being able to have an outsider's view on some of the research and ways to get things done I think is invaluable. I also think a lot of times grassroots efforts can be ephemeral. They don't have to always look for long-term sustainability options and that gives them a unique tool in being able to stand up, to get something accomplished and then shut down. There are a number of public policy interests that come to mind that I think grassroots efforts are more tapped into. And so bringing that knowledge and bringing that directly to researchers in a fast track kind of way even before the grant makers are aware of it has extreme potential. I think furthermore, in terms of the ability to have impact, I'm gonna drive that thing home again and again. I think a lot of grassroots efforts are uniquely positioned to challenge researchers to try to get more impact and to think about new and inventive ways to help to achieve some of that impact. I really think of the grassroots and the institutions and researchers as a bi-directional interface that a lot of culture can be passed and a lot of priority can be passed down that thing. At the end of the day, open science is a process, as we've said, of people. And so getting people more in contact with community, with grassroots efforts is empowering on all sides. Thank you so much. Yeah, I love that idea of communities. The grassroots initiative is being that interface between researchers or others sort of from the bottom up. And we'd love to explore that further in our next question as well in terms of how that bridges between how grassroots play a role in bridging between the researchers and outside communities to perhaps leadership and federal agencies, governments, et cetera. Brie, if you could share a little bit here, we'd love to hear. Yeah, thank you. So going back to kind of what Daniella was saying regarding redefining what constitutes a researcher, I found that really interesting and I just wanted to raise that up really quick because I do feel an important case that could also be made here is that more people can and should be involved in co-creating knowledge. And I think grassroots communities have shown that there is an immense amount of ways that research can be done and can happen. And furthermore, people that have local knowledge can contribute not only just data but also ideas, hardware design, software code, whatever really to a knowledge comments that anyone can access. And similar as well to what Jacob was saying, I really think it's important to view this flow of information and resources as being multi-directional as well. And so communities that are using Open Science hardware have been really pushing innovation and coming up with solutions that have a collective impact, not even within their respective communities but across the entire globe. And they're creating hardware that meets local needs but also becomes scalable and responsive at the same time. And I think there's a lot of excellent examples we can pull from of grassroots communities using Open Science hardware. And when I think in the space of collecting environmental data and even sometimes collecting this data in times of environmental crisis, I think of public lab in the United States. But there's also grassroots communities that are using open source technologies to share knowledge related to sustainable agricultural practices. The open agroecology lab in Argentina is doing exactly this. And even in space science as well, we have university students that are creating open source CUBE satellites. And these satellites are low cost and it enables students to carry out research outside of more well-resourced institutions. And so I think my closing thoughts would be that these communities are really changing how we approach science and the collaborative way in which we are creating and sharing these devices. It really redefines how we participate in scientific research and also knowledge creation. And it makes the practice more communal. That's all, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. The examples that you gave are so powerful in illustrating how grassroots initiatives can really allow us that space to test out alternative approaches to how we could typically consider research and science to be done and again, challenging some of that assumption but also bringing in new perspectives and practices into this rate, which really ultimately benefits not only how we research the research ecosystem but also the whole world, hopefully. Nick. Yeah, I think so many good things have been said already about this being a way to have people who are affected by the changes or by the work products be there to actually do the work and influence how it's done. I think it's really important. I think the new thing I'll try to add to this to add onto these is sort of the other function of community or rather the types of communities that can form in these grassroots initiatives. Sometimes when we, you know, every one of us is part of many different types of communities. We might be part of the neuroscience community or we might be part of the Harvard researchers community or we might be part of the community in Southern California and there's a geographic and there's these workplace and there's these domain boundaries but when you add on these grassroots initiatives you get these interest boundaries or these sort of like belief boundaries where people are bonding with each other. So now you get a group of people who believe that preprints and reviewing preprints is an important way to influence how science is done and rigor of science and things like that. You get people who are like solving hard problems in open source hardware and like what that actually looks like. These are like really interesting communities to form and they inherently cut across all those other communities that we saw. And so I think the term grassroots is really nice and again kind of self-defining here to say like there are all these little seeds basically that you're planting into all these other communities now where you're like giving root to these open science practices and principles and you're showing these people and these other communities what that can look like and how it can work. So inherently there's this like recruitment aspect and this like demonstration and example aspect. And so I think in some ways that that community is really valuable. And then on the sort of flip side of it is there's this community of practice element where it's like, oh, great. Now it might be hard to force yourself to publish open access papers only when you're sitting there alone at Harvard doing it but when you're doing it with a bunch of other people who also do that because that's the community you've bonded with it's much easier to practice that and you can see ways of practicing it. And so you have that community support which has been so demonstrated like it's been demonstrated so well how valuable that is and causing people to persist in some of these like good efforts. Fantastic. Yeah, that is such an important element of being in part of community is just the amount of even if just not feeling alone, right? Sometimes change is hard and it just makes it that much easier to be able to do it and troubleshoot it and discuss it with other people and to be able to persist. So switching gears a little bit we've talked quite a bit about what grassroots initiatives and communities are bringing to open science and the diverse perspectives not only but also the support element the sort of ability to be focusing on and exploring different ways to ensure that the research and science is being done in centering the needs of communities all around the world. What about in terms of complimenting some of the sort of more top-down if you will, institutional efforts in terms of the promotion of open science because we do know that they are important. We are again going to talk about a lot of them that already have talked about quite a few of them during this conference. So how do we see grassroots being able to compliment these sort of more top-down efforts in the promotion of open science? And I'm also gonna slot in the question that we have from the audience here as well How would you characterize the impact of the institutional rewards-based initiatives on the adoption of open science? How does that relate to maybe some of the work and participation that you have from your community members? We're gonna start with Jacob. Let me take the question in terms of how does a grassroots effort compliment institutions? And I think the evolution of OSPOS is an interesting case study to see community-based requests for an institutional interface, align with an institution's needs for figuring out how to do open science, open source, et cetera, to create an office where both grassroots and community have requested this and the institution helps to build it. A country journey in terms of cities particularly to look at what it's going to be and how some of the universities we're not there yet in terms of any stretch of the imagination, but we're starting to have the conversation and we're starting to explore what might be available, what might be possible. We started out with a thought experiment of building an OSPO with the city of Paris and at a university in the US at Johns Hopkins and trying to take code from the city of Paris and deploy it to communities in Baltimore via the help of the university interface as a kind of a pilot of two nodes of a network we're making the first phone call for cooperation through it and seeing how we might work together to complement each other and that interface that institutionality that both sides want can be expressed. Yeah, that is a very intriguing model indeed and would love to learn more about what you're learning in that process and yeah, pay attention to its progress as well. Pree, I wonder if you can add onto here. Yeah, sure. So speaking from the perspective of a community organizer, I think it's really important how all of these efforts are in conversation with one another. Like I said before, gosh is a convening space where people from different disciplines, domains and regions are coming to work together. An example that I can think of was in 2017 when we gathered as a community in Chile, we began working on the gosh roadmap and I want you to picture this room that is full of researchers, organizers, artists, policymakers, anyone you can think of this large room filled with people and they're just sitting around at tables sharing ideas with each other, throwing sticky notes of ideas onto a wall and just eventually coming to a consensus together on what would become our most impactful document as a community and that was our roadmap. And so this document which outlines the actions we need to take to make open science hardware ubiquitous, it was authored by 100 different people in the end because of the sort of process that was taking place to do that. And I mentioned this example because I think it's a really good example of how important it is the way that we hold space for these conversations to happen. And I think when we're working with something like open science hardware, it's especially important because these tools are increasing access to the technologies we need to do science and it leads to solutions that could be co-created between users, developers and researchers. And yeah, I think it's super important to support community-based initiatives alongside institutional ones because when grassroots communities are creating open source and low-cost tools, this also benefits researchers that are in institutions as well and vice versa. And one thing I've thought a lot about is the fact that it's really this collaborative approach that comes along with open science hardware that leads to change rather than the nature of the technology itself. So I didn't think about that quite a bit. And I think the question in the chat, I'll see if I can pull it up again, but it was around rewards and incentives and I just wanted to add a quick comment that I thought of. And there's been a lot of research done in the open source hardware space that has shown that open source hardware has like huge cost savings and a really high return on investment. And we view that as a really strong incentive for different funding bodies, federal agencies and universities to really be incentivized to use open science hardware. So that was just my comment on that question. And thank you. Thank you so much for that particular perspective as well. Like it's really, yeah, if only we can make these arguments louder and more clear to those who are budget holders and managing budgets at institutions and at funders as well. It does sound like it's a very valuable thing to not only invest in from the standpoint of cultivating an open culture, but also from a very economic standpoint. Nick. Yeah. I think this question, I'll answer this question in a sort of biased way because I believe, I sort of believe in this idea of like grassroots to tree tops initiatives. Like, I feel like I think things are most successful when they start out in grassroots form and then top down policy makers can like identify those things that were successful because they get to see the practices in action and then can like implement top down policies on them. That said, I think one of the ways these things can work to complement each other is through like incentive alignment. I think both sides, when they're implementing policies, they're demonstrating how they're trying to like change or manipulate incentives. And so more communication and more openness about what those incentives are and how to get them to sort of align between what top down other kind of like methods that top down policy makers are using and what sort of variables, basically grassroots communities are trying to influence would make them both more effective. And so I think when we talk about complimentary work, I think that's one kind of important thing to consider or do. Thank you so much for that. Yeah, there's a lot of, you know, that if it's every, both the top down players and the grassroots communities have different strengths that together seems to be able to enable them to sort of collaborate and utilize each of their respective resources and powers in the best ways possible to really advance what essentially is a shared vision in many cases. Danny, Daniela. Yeah, Danny, works great. Yeah, before I answer the question, I just thought I'd really highlight a lot of the things that we said that others has just this idea of, you know, we're all working in our, with our problem, quote unquote, right? And then like the problem solution, like peer review software, but it's like the, I think that was beautiful and it's been said already, but I kind of wanna like highlight it again, is that we're beyond this, what we're trying to do is like this kind of cultural change and in like the change in like towards, and it's been said already beautifully also by Jacob, but this idea of like really incentivizing collaboration as a practice. And I feel like, you know, not everybody has to collaborate, always to do things, but like this idea of like understanding that individualism doesn't always get us where we wanna be even in the Kansas Academy. And I'm thinking particularly about like my own experience, but I was always told that by being by myself was gonna reward me more. And I hope that together from grassroots and top down, we can work towards really valuing this and having that value in practice in policy changes. Anyway, I don't know if that made any sense, but it was just like something was forming in my head. But for this question particularly, I'm thinking about the preference. So the space when I in 2016 learned about preference for the first time, I think as a bio and just had come together like to maybe a couple of years before, I don't remember exactly what was funded by specifically in the biological sciences, where preference were really not known. And what seemed to have really changed the adoption was when preference started to be recognized as a valuable output of research output in bio sketches. So I think NIH and I don't remember exactly what that happened. I should review my Easter, maybe it was 2014, but I think that grassroots organizations really provide is again, like example and attending to the community. And then having that matched by policy that at least recommends or recognizes that work, it really makes a huge difference. I, for example, I believe we don't do this work because someone can go and show off that they have 25 reviews and therefore they're better than others, right? But we do wanna provide a way so that someone wants to be recognized for their work, they can. So we do put work into making sure that our infrastructure is connected with other key infrastructure in the space, that there are persistent identifiers. We do all of, we try to do all of the work and the metadata is there in order to be searched so that if policy makers maybe in five years are gonna say, no, I actually am going to evaluate or at least consider positively the fact that you have contributed to open blueprint review, that you have put your time and expertise into trying to constructively help someone else work. And of course now, you know, everybody feels like we do have constructiveness policy on print review, but I think it's just, it's more than just making another line on the CV for us. It's more about creating these kind of practices of collaboration and kindness that then can be spread to software, to any other practice in science. But then if there is a level of recognition that can be right there when the policy change happens, is definitely key. So I think that we need to work together on kind of and continue to work together on understanding what are the things that the policy makers are gonna need in order to actually say, I'm going to recognize that effort is being done. So, yeah. Yeah, thank you so much for highlighting that. I think, yeah, definitely there needs to be this, you know, there's value in having these conversations between both the sort of from the grassroots initiatives to the policy makers, both all the other way around in terms of striking that shared understanding of what are some of the needs that we're seeing from the grassroots communities based on their community work, but then also joining that with, you know, how the sort of top-down policy or funding even from an infrastructure angle, right? Where this could be facilitated and just made easier for people to sort of either be recognized more for their contributions in a more open manner or in other ways. Incentifies to practice more open. Fantastic. Again, switching gears a little bit. One thing to find out more about, you know, your experience and learn from your experience in terms of leading communities and helping develop these communities because that is a lot of work. What are some of the main challenges that you see facing grassroots open science communities in particular and how in your experience have they been or can they be addressed? Nick, why don't we start with you? Yeah, I think one of the main challenges is this sort of like fractaling, like this splitting apart where basically you get all these different groups or efforts for maybe focusing on trying to solve the same challenge or same thing. And in some cases that's valuable because you get to see a lot of different attempts or tries or methods of trying to solve a problem. But in some cases you end up in the situation where there's a little bit of like incentive to be the like starter or initiator or owner of that new thing. And so you end up with all these communities who are basically trying to solve a similar problem in a similar way, but they're competing for resources or they're operating differently. And in my experience, where I think one of the things where Neuromatch, for example, has had success is by providing a sort of like house or way for these people to work with each other and contribute their efforts to be like centrally recognized in one place, but not trying to declare ownership of that really ourselves but allowing that to just the contributors own their work and they're bringing them to this community is a way to help with that. I think another one is focusing on interoperability. And I mean this both in the sort of like typical software sense like my software needs to work with your software. But also just making work products and outputs that can be easily used and adopted by others or correctly sort of like feed into the pipeline or what pathway I guess you would call it of resources that are already out there. And so for example, I think it's really easy or tempting and you kind of see this happen for a lot of nonprofits or initiatives or movements in general is their scope just gradually creeps because they kind of want to own more of that like thing of the problem they're trying to solve. And I think a lot of groups would be a lot more effective but they could say, I specialize in this and I'm gonna refer you to this next thing or this next organization or this next tool for the service they offer. And there's various levels of success or practice of that in the broad open science community. But I think that's one of the challenges and I think we're seeing people begin to be able to solve that better now. And I think there's a lot of learnings to take from open software and doing so. Yeah, absolutely. That is such a crucial point there in terms of, how do we almost create a network within these different community or community of communities, if you will, right? To be able to support each other on a community scale and to be able to say, maybe someone else can help you with this and to sort of sustain each other that way. Also reminds me of I think Jacob's earlier point about whether or not communities needs to be sustained forever. And that self is a really interesting question. Daniela, if we can go to you next. I was gonna talk about interpretability because it's been already said, I'm gonna skip that part. However, I do really like that idea and I wanna, I think this, I look for a space in which we can do interpretative work within a discussed organization with shared values. But definitely a challenge that I have right now is the sustainability of the work or the team and the organization. So it's been interesting how, without having any training, basically you can go into fundraising. I kind of somehow it worked and there were some funders interested in the work that we were doing and we got this model where we went out, brought a grant, got funded for a year or two. And then it's like, again, so there's kind of problem sustainability. And maybe it's true, like if the problem is solved we don't need to live forever. But in order to continue the work that we're doing because we are seeing a growing impact, we do need a better sustainability model. And I think that we also own it to the fact that we value shared power. And so just having a model that uniquely poses one funder and to hold them in power for one or two years, I mean, it's great. But it's also not really in line with our values what we're trying to do. So I think trying to figure out models that allow also other organizations and communities to contribute in the way that they can and identifying what are the shared opportunities that those, that their contribution can give. So what are things that we can offer in, not just in exchange because it's like, this is transactional thing, but it's like these are some of the values and the work that we're doing. And this is an opportunity for you to contribute and also an opportunity for us to create a more close collaboration and understanding what are the shared goals. And what we're saying before, the question before, like aligning those values for, so that incentives kind of align more with the work that we're doing. So I really think this and hope that this is gonna move into the direction. And for that, we're actually gonna launch an organizational membership model and we're gonna have a design sprint where all organizations are welcome to come and help us figure out what does a model like that could look like for organization like peer review. So I'm really excited about getting that out. Thank you. Thank you for that. Yeah, there is, yeah, I love your thinking around, how we can enable, like build pathways for people to contribute, right? And again, this is something that's very, it's very, almost like we spent a lot of time thinking about that as community organizers, but also thinking about how do we enable other communities to come in and work on something together to some goal that it shares, so that we do each have value that we can gain out of this in this partnership and on the way figure out sort of that interoperability element as well, perhaps like, I hope that the funders in the audience is paying attention and thinking with us about how we can help not only strategize, but also resource that moving forward. Jacob. Can you repeat the question, Evie, for a second? Absolutely, yes, been a while. So wondering what are some of the main challenges that you think are facing grassroots open science communities and in your experience, how they can be addressed? Sure. The incentive structures have had a lot of challenges working with institutions in terms of aligning, especially in academia, aligning the incentive structures to cooperate. I know we've had recent commissions looking at how to encourage open science and the incentive structures for that. I think to get to the verb of open science and to get to that cooperation, it's going to take another round of incentive structures and looking at to enable that cooperation to occur. A lot of the researchers I've talked to, they love the idea of cooperation, but at the end of the day, there are certain incentive structures that are not always allowing them to do that, even if they want to. And so really looking at those incentive structures to how to cooperate with communities outside of your organization, outside of your field, between institutions is one of the greatest challenges. And I think one of the areas where we can have the most impact in that area. To that end, the idea, I think, of thinking about the culture shift that I'd like to try to introduce here is the idea of neighbors, to think about the physical locality of which researchers exist in. It is not just within their scientific communities, but to also think about the physical community that they exist in, to understand that from a neighbor perspective in terms of that bidirectionality of trying to help neighbor to neighbor, it kind of brings it down to a little bit more scale that one can understand as human beings. And I think that that culture shift to neighbors helps in the idea of collaboration. Collaborating in the abstract is sometimes tough. Collaborating when it's someone that I know who's right outside my doorstep, that's the basis that I've seen in local community organizing that sometimes transcends some of the more large-scale collaborations. Thank you so much. That's a really interesting concept. And I'm curious to hear for the audiences been following along how this concept of working, creating together with your neighbors, interacting with them, is what does that inspire in terms of how you think about collaboration, like what will help facilitate that as well if you have thoughts. Please feel free to leave us a question or comment in the Q&A panel. Brie, last one about me. Yeah, thanks again. Yes, I think everyone really brought up some good comments here. And I really also want to lift up what we were saying about creating a network of networks and community of communities. I think that's absolutely essential. And thank you, Nick, for bringing up the importance of interoperability again. I think even outside of the software realm that's really important. And related to incentives too, I do think as well that even when we look at incentive structures within open science funding, you know, in our case, the open science harbor movement has grown significantly in the past decade, but we still see it excluded from a lot of open science projects and practices. And a lot of the times to see a lot of the focus and a lot of the funding and open science initiatives that might go to outputs like publications or data rather than things like infrastructure, like hardware. And so I do think that this is an important thing to be addressed within those incentive structures within open science. And I really think one way that we can address these challenges is by creating policies and developing guidance for funding bodies, for researchers and for federal agencies that really prioritizes the incorporation of open science infrastructure, like hardware. And one last comment that I did wanna share related to this question is again, I'm gonna bring up this focus on meaningful but also equitable collaboration. When we do open science, it's important that we're avoiding the extractive research practices that historically has been an issue with institutions that are working with grassroots communities. And in my experiences, the open science hardware movement, this global movement that I've been working with has provided a lot of insights into how meaningful collaboration looks when we're working across regional and disciplinary boundaries. So yeah, that's all. That is a really, really important message. Just thanks for bringing that to the floor. Yeah, indeed, everyone has different privileges and powers and it's really important to be conscious of how we are utilizing them and how they're showing up in the work that we do with each other and also within and beyond the communities. All right, we are at 15 minutes to the end of the session. So I do wanna make sure that we leave some time for our audience's question. And yeah, so looking at our Q&A panel, there's a question on how do we think grassroots level input shape the initial stages of research conceptualization? How can researchers ensure that grassroots communities are not only involved but also empowered in the conceptualization faith of the research by contributing to a more equitable research process? Wondering if any of you would like to start us off? I mean, part of it feels like there are certain efforts that are basically a direct response to this question, right? So there's certain open science practices that encourage people to share conceptually, like currently conceptualized or infancy conceptualized research and get feedback on its process, how it should be done, what the topic is. I think there's a lot of different ways people are exploring this. And so I would basically say that there's a lot of communities out there trying to practice different aspects of this. We actually have, we gotten a grant recently to host a Civic Science Fellow in our organization and this person is actually studying this exact question. So their research topic is basically how do we like better train or teach people to involve community input into their earliest research conceptualization? Super fun question. But the answer when you go dig into all of the literature that's out there is there's lots of different ways that people have tried it and there's lots of different ways you could do it. You could get Civic Science or you could get Civic input on it. You could get Research or Community input on it. You could get feedback on your process. You could get feedback on your questions. You could source your research questions. There's lots of different ways to do it. And so kind of to that point of interoperability specialization that we talked about earlier, I would imagine there's lots of different groups, methods or things that you could kind of like reach out to or engage in as a researcher to influence conceptualization. And I think it'll depend a lot on your project, the communities you're part of, which thing you want help on or you feel like it could be influential to have help on in conceptualizing. Thank you so much for that, Nick. It's a beautiful example. Great. I think I might add to that as well. This question really made me think too of the importance of sharing as many aspects of the research process openly. And what I'm thinking specifically about tools, when tools are closed source, it imposes a lot of limitations. If you have a question and want to collect data and you can't do that because a tool is closed source, it immediately kind of stops you in your tracks. And we are licensing things openly. We can share them within, you know, this sort of global knowledge commons and it becomes the shared resource that one person can contribute to and then be used in a completely different context. So I think when it comes to kind of conceptualizing these initial stages, if we create the shared knowledge commons and put information and resources into it, then anyone is able to access it and it can become this multi-directional sort of flow of resources and info that I mentioned earlier. So yeah, that's my answer to that one. Thank you. I don't know. I just want to say that this question actually made me because my questions always bring us where we are headed. It made me think of the importance of bringing and also something that sorry Brie already said. So an importance of bringing the input and having not just the input but actually having the communities that are at stakes and to empower them into shape what their research is. So I'm thinking about obviously, like again, patients being able to be brought in at the early stage of their research because of the transition and thinking about a lot of research to this day gets published with the data that was, so they're called like vampire projects, like data that was taken from communities without their consent without their explicit understanding of what was going to happen with those samples and all of that research has gone through through multiple stages. So really understanding like, is there any input that came from the community in the design of this study at all? We've done some research with some work in the context of reproductive medicine and kind of antiracist practices in that context and it was very clear that there's a huge disconnect between what the scientists at a high level are doing or like in their laboratory are doing but they're working on real people and real policy suggestions that actually have a huge disconnect with the people that are going to affect. So I don't know how, so I'm not answering the question but I think with bringing more opportunities for groups of reviewers that are now the traditional expert that we're thinking about into bringing their input at earlier stages of the research development and we have projects that are going to come up soon to pilot some of these ideas all the way from the research kind of conceptualization level to the whatever final publication even as a mean but I think that those are going to create these opportunities but I don't know, I don't think it's going to be that soon but I want to believe that in the next 10, 20 years there's going to be more opportunities to do that via grassroots and we are also institutional support. Thanks, Denny. Yeah, it's about starting the conversation and bringing everyone through. Jacob. I love the concept of institutionalization. If you want, if we have a priority, if we have an institutional priority like getting more people involved in the conceptualization of the research and we want to make it a priority, build it into the office whose job it is to help build collaborations with community. Don't just give it as a mandate or a memo. Help give it staffing, give it resourcing and make it available in terms of an office in order for that office to then experiment, maintain those relationships, learn what works and doesn't work and then help the rest of the organization engage in that. So I'm all for institutionalizing in order to be able to help achieve policy outcomes. Absolutely. Yeah. They're sort of like operationalizing element and making sure that it is something not just we now have to do this because there is a policy, but also that it is given the care, the resources that it needs in order for it to move forward. It's really, really important as well. I'm trying to see, we probably have time to get to one more audience question, which I think this one is, it's sort of a little bit the elephant in the room in my opinion. But if I would be curious about how you're, how you're seeing your individual organization help motivate change in the incentive structure. So feel free to, you know, unmute and start us off. Jacob, I see you're ready. Oh, let me think about that one. How can we motivate change? Also plus plus has been, had some success in this, in being really small and having large impact by going and because of that, that smallness going and talking to people, going and talking to policymakers, going and talking to, as a small organization and with few people, you can talk to anyone. And through that, that way, you can really affect change in a lot of ways. Yeah, and that, and having the United Nations help you out and being able to work with the United Nations to be able to then get the message out much wider in terms of changing those incentive structures by really bringing it to the top and the forefront and trying to build it as a nexus where we come together to talk about how to change those incentive structures. Yeah, absolutely. Collaborating also across with sort of international bodies and organization as well to help bring the message to the fore. It's really important. Maybe this one's a little bit of a hot take, but I think sometimes you don't need to change incentive structures. These structures exist and sometimes what you can do is build a tool, build a method, build a system that aligns along those existing incentive structures. So two different communities might have different sets of incentives, but if you can build something that somehow satisfies both of their incentives or both of their needs, but also achieves the outcome that you want, then great, you've solved it without changing incentive structures. Maybe somebody views that as a changing of incentive structures because it results in a different outcome or something, so you're maximizing a different variable. I'm not sure, but I think in some cases it's not necessary to change them. For us, the way that we do change incentive structures or focus on changing incentive structures is really sort of like changing how or why people would contribute to open source materials, which is like the common problem of like open source questions in general, and has been a sort of challenge in open source education in general, which is like people basically just had to choose to do it out of the goodness of their hearts because generally people couldn't work on each other's materials very well. The open source education community has primarily been about resource sharing. So there's this database called Eric, for example, that's popular, where you basically like stick all your PDFs or your lesson plans, and then people can go like use them if they want, but everybody's using these custom learning management systems. You have to like download those and put them into your learning management system, and so it was really hard, and you couldn't like edit other people's contributions to that database, so it was hard. And so the way we sort of like changed incentive structures is to like, okay, why would you contribute to open source education materials is, oh, well, now you get a DOI for like doing contributing to open source education materials. They're like, you can modify them if people can modify them. And so you can contribute just a little snippet, but somebody can add on to it, and what you get back as a whole course plan, even though you only contributed a small lesson. And so now these sort of like aligned with researchers like need for publishing and need for like verifiable contributions. They aligned for educators needs where it's like they wanted to get back something from that community. They wanted to get back resources. They wanted people to modify their work and improve it over time. And so we were able to align incentives instead of changing them. The researchers still always had the incentive that they want credit for the work that they publish. The educators still always wanted to have somebody give critical feedback and help improve their lesson plans and to give them like pre-course materials and tutorials. And now they both get that, but it's done through this like new system. Thank you for that example. Yeah, yeah, indeed. A way to assist them in which you can actually align incentives, because the incentive structure is not a one-dimensional thing. There's many different sort of perspectives and desires, wishes, motivations within that and finding the ones that you could sort of align with as well and moving that to the priority and to the fore. And there's, yeah, please. I noticed that we only have a couple minutes so I'm going to try to be as brief as I can. Again, as I mentioned earlier, I think making sure there's incentives to fund things related to infrastructure like hardware and also the maintenance of this hardware is important. But I just want to also raise a comment as well that as a community, like I am not a research funder or a policymaker, we can work with these adjacent communities and we are communities that have many people with many voices and we have people who are working on policy and research funding. And similar to what Nick was saying about adapting to these structures, these people, they have the knowledge but they're also bound together by this shared interest and value in making open science hardware ubiquitous. So I think, especially for us in the gosh community, what is most important with us is working with adjacent communities and supporting other projects that can also benefit us as well and getting open science hardware in more places and lifting each other up. So that was my quick, like, one minute answer to that. Thanks, Ray. Dany, anything to add there? Last minute. I only want to say, I think that the way is by making them easy and resistant to the communities that you want. So I think to make it easy for that to be up to date by people with different reasons why they get there still prioritizing the needs and expectations of communities that we're focusing on, but like there are so many angles that people can come to the same goal and so that's like, we focus on like easiness and making it easy to be recognized and a really resistable community to join because it's so fun to work together and share with others. So I think it's important to work together and share with others and learn with one another. Thank you so much. Yeah, I mean there is a part of like natural instinct incentive for us to to want to work together and to work in a more open way and a more collaborative way and to rely on each other and to sustain each other and to be dependent on each other, right? And I think the communities and grassroots initiatives that are here joining us today, thank you so, so much for subspending the time with us, but you've also really, really highlighted how communities can be so, so powerful and enabling us to not only do our work together better, but to really make science and research a better enterprise if you will, a better environment and better better culture for us to all be part of and those who are, you know also not within that enterprise today it could be welcoming for them. So thank you so much to everyone for joining us today. I hope that this has been fruitful and interesting and inspiring for y'all to go and look up these communities join, maybe think about how you can contribute and be part of them and be excited about them and for everyone to, yeah, to spread the word and to tell everyone else about these wonderful opportunities and the work that they're doing as well. Thank you so much and thank you so much once again to Brie, Dani, Nick and Jacob for your time and for all of you for listening in and participating.