 Yes, this might be if someone of you know us, we are still all open life science, but the program, the cohort program, we are calling it open seats now. And after a long community-based redesign or rebranding. There's going to be a blog about it soon, so you can check if you're interested in that. So can I get the help by going through slides so I can just check the notes. I'm not very good at memorizing anything, so I need to kind of, I'm not going to read, but I'm going to pretend I'm not reading. So my name is Bas and I work with OLS as a coordinator, program coordinator, and community researcher. And I'm based in Argentina in a small city, five hours from here to the south. So OLS is a non-profit and organization and it is designed to teach and train people. And I say people because we welcome researchers from all sorts of all disciplines. So the idea is to teach about techniques and processes that can allow them to become open science researchers and ambassadors as well. So the idea is that can learn how to share their research with the general public, other communities, and their own communities. We do this with open seats. So open seats is in concrete terms a 16 weeks long cohort training and personal mentorship program. If you join as a one researcher, you have one mentor for yourself, and if you join as a team, you still have one mentor, sometimes two mentors. So sometimes we have commentating a project. And so the idea with OLS is that, I mean, OLS dreams to see scientific research become much more truly global and being led by people that are often or have been historically marginalized and invisibleized. I'm not, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that well, sorry if I didn't. And being left out by the ivory tower of science. So we want to work with leaders or people that are introverted or extroverted leaders in diverse fields and that I want to see them working in equitable ways, in ways that would allow them, us in general, to consider seriously the effects, the side effects of scientific research in communities, in peoples, and the good effects and the bad effects as well. So we got to become conscious about that. So how can you become, or how can you participate in OLS or become part of the OLS community? That's a screenshot of a graduation. You see funny faces and stuff like that. And so you can, you can become part as a mentee, as a mentor, as a facilitator, as an expert. Often mentors have been mentees in the past. And so people experience different roles inside the community. And for example, if facilitators, for example, are the ones that really help have the cohort calls run smoothly and be effective and do all the little things that are so necessary for things to happen, to work well. And some of the advantages or benefits of joining OLS and we're actually really inviting you all to be part of it if you are not already. So I'm trying to sell something here, but let's see. Hopefully I'll do it. Anyways, so one benefit is to gain a better understanding of how to make research more accessible and cheaper even. For example, use an open science hardware if you ever use it. So we cover issues like open science hardware, which are not often mentioned. Learn different ways of doing this manipulation, different ways of sharing processes and the results of your processes with very different audiences. Understanding also similarities and difference between concepts like open access, open source, open hardware, the different open. And very importantly, and we emphasize this, or yes, we really emphasize this, that learning about the reasons why not to share your data and your research were not to. What are some of the reasons? Yeah, you would have to not do that. Privacy, safety issues. And another set of advantages is gaining and also we put a lot of emphasis on this interpersonal community building skills. A lot of what happens in OLS is to meet people, to talk to people, even if it's online. But yeah, we have these conferences and we meet in person. And I would think that all researchers are very social and extroverted, but maybe not. So the OLS is lack, help. So we try to help build that skills and that working skills. And lastly, having the chance to have a one-to-one mentorship experience that is very key to the program. And one of the things that people mention is very important. Having more direct feedback and permanent throughout the 16 weeks feedback on your project. And the projects can be already existing projects or new projects. It can be both. And some of the challenges that we often face, or we as a participant face, typical internet access power electricity and expensive supply chains when we get them electronic goods, headsets, webcams, stuff like that. An interrupted time and space to take a call to be on the call or choose work on your project. And the difficulty of prioritizing time to work on the project. Sign some and language barriers. You know, participating in the Slack or participating in the calls. The ones that speak English fluently, of course, have an easier time. Typical barrier. And then other political and economic situations in the countries, I don't know, crazy inflation. Argentina knows a little bit about it, but there are other countries that are going through similar stuff. So yeah, and Amy, no. Thanks, pass. I'm Amy. I'm here with my hat as a co director for open life science. So pass mentioned that, you know, these are some of the challenges that participants in the life science community and the open seas program face. I just want to add a note to say that, you know, we didn't learn all of this from day one. We learned by repeatedly working with our community to understand what they are facing and trying to be supportive and helpful where we can. So I want to talk a little bit about our micro grants program, which is a program that we offer to all of our mentees and also mentors since all less three. So we're now in all less seven, which is our seventh iteration of the program. That's within doing this for about two years. So we as pass was mentioning offer things like small electronics, mobile data to cover kind of that internet costs when you need to connect to a virtual call or just work on the project fuel, because, you know, some countries don't have stable power supplies. And so the fuel fuels the generator that gives you that additional supply when you need it. Same goes to the battery. Modem and router sometimes and childcare, because as past mentioned, one of the challenges is that not everyone have the privilege space and time to be able to participate in such program. I'm putting laptop and computers last. If you want to ask me about it, I can also do that, but because these are often relatively expensive items, we weren't in a position to offer them until quite recently. And we've been kind of thinking about working with the community and people who request them has been really, really kind of flexible, supportive and really want to make that happen as well. So we've offered these like a handful number of times, but yeah, so this is something special. Project seed funds, knowing that a lot of people go through the Open Seeds program after 16 weeks, they do have a project that they continue to want to expand. Maybe they want to go to a conference with some swag and talk about their work. Maybe they want to buy some compute to continue running their machine learning algorithms or whatever they need. And other things we've got, things like ring lights, because lighting is not terribly good in certain times of the day, night, other examples as well. So as I said, we've been doing this for five cohorts by this point. One thing that this is a little bit of data that we're trying to pull together, we've made 70 grants to date, I believe. And you can see that there's this increase across as we offer this sort of consistently through the cohorts. I would say that the increase in number of requests is for grants that we've got correlated with the increase in number of folks from the global south, especially joining the program. The smallest grant we offered is seven US dollars. I remember it's probably for some data. The largest one is about 1,200 and mean is 175. And what I want to say with this data is that you don't need a lot to offer support. Again, a lot really varies depending on who you are. But I think from my setting, from a global north setting, seven US dollars is not a lot of money. So yeah, we today have offered this across 19 countries and you can see that again, most of these folks are based in kind of the global majority. But also there are some cases in, for example, in the US, but diversity and inclusion is there's also intersectionality at play here. So just want to make that note. I'm looking at my phone because I literally an hour ago asked for a story from the community on, can you please tell me how the micro grant has influenced your participation in the program? I'm just looking for that story right now. And this Jeff Sia one of our mentee turned mentor and facilitator has said the micro grants that has helped me enormously. My online presence has increased by almost 200% thanks to the internet donation. It is also thanks to the micro support that he was able to prepare for his trip to the US last year as part of a full bright program. So this is one of the 70 cases that we've made here. One important thing is that these micro grants really need to be accessible if you're thinking about running such a program. This includes really a minimal application process because what last thing we want is to have pages and pages of paperwork before you can get a small amount of money. We also offer more flexible options such as paying for some of these things in advance knowing that not everyone has a huge bank of money sitting under the pillow or in the bank account. So we give them the cash upfront and they would return the documentation afterwards. We also knowing that some countries banks are not really functional or easy to access offer things like cash pickups or mobile money depending on what they need. And one thing that we've learned is to try and adjust our budgets for micro grants. So give the mentee kind of like say okay you've requested these items at this cost but come back to us if you do need more because you're undergoing inflation and the time that took between that offer and the purchasing has made a difference to what you need. So just to be flexible honestly is the main message here. The other thing that we do again going back to that point of like not everyone has the time to and the privilege of that time to be able to participate right. And this is a network of diverse individuals willing to offer their time is crucial infrastructure for the running of open life science and open seats. We are committed to paying contributors where we can. We do this in the form of an honorarium most of the time I would say this is a sort of a graphic from our one of our latest cohorts the amount that we kind of have given to mentors facilitators and speakers who contributed to the time and effort to the program. We have an honorarium policy that outlines kind of how much these type of roles what we typically offer. Again coming back to the point of flexibility not everyone is in the position to receive that honorarium so we are very conscious of for example figuring out okay if you know you are not able to take money in your bank account directly because of your other job or other things can we pay for a travel conference on your behalf. So these are some of the ways that we have explored kind of making sure that we are we can still pay contributors where we can. And just the last last slide before I hand it back over to pass with all of that there is a lot of infrastructure that goes into kind of making that happen. We worked quite heavily over the last couple of years on building up as a robust financial management system which means that we work very closely with our accountants thanks PEM who are very patient with us in terms of like oh receipts are not going to come immediately after you know the the expense have been made we will reconcile that at a later point for example expense management systems where you know there is a form that mentees can fill in in order to request a microgram and then how does that get processed and making sure that this is documented consistently so that any one of our team members can kind of look at that record and pick up the the process as we go budgeting as well in terms of like forecasting okay this is the amount that we have for microgram within this cohort you know can we offer more amount of flexibility that we have all these are kind of things that we're learning to do on the way but also a lot of time and a lot of trial and error I would say lots of software and digital infrastructure in terms of like handling all that data from banking information to kind of keeping track of requests and all these kind of things so all to say that there is a lot of labor of love and capacity building in terms of learning all of those skills across the team involved here but it's been a joyous process but but just want to acknowledge that that's also been a large part of of where we're spending our time back to pass yep yeah Amy has like 40 hours per day in her life okay so the last one the last slide is this is so what's next for us I mean we're for us and doing the open seed programs but now we have more funding which is very welcome it was provided by the nasa tops program and it's interesting because it's going to be for virtual cohort both in English and Spanish we will be doing this with metaosencia you probably because of laudas keynote and you know about it so very happy with the extra funding and that's going to be for three years of open science training and the content the curriculum was created by the community as well and the training materials are in that link with this this presentation is going to be available so you can check or you're going to also check in our twitter or our website or yeah so happy happy about that and happy to you do it in Spanish as well that's it thank you so much thank you pass and Amy for that great talk we have time for several questions we have about four minutes oh wait do we have time or do we have to move hold on let me look sorry you guys that's the end of day to you we we have time for one question if i want to apply to the program how should i do um very easy send me an email no i have a new cards never had them so i need to give them to someone um no no yeah the we're going to open the new the new cohort the new open seats the version number eight soon i should know the date i don't but then there's some details so we don't have a specific date yet but um it's going to be uh in you know probably tomorrow yeah yeah and so we have like three weeks and i mean we announced the new cohort we have three weeks in which people can send the application that is a form that is an online form they have to complete it's not too long um but it's like what is the problem you're trying to address with your project and who's going to participate and why open why you're interested in open or like the idea is to kind of know i mean to make to make sure that the person has some idea of what is open science and not necessarily the perfect idea because the program is for that as well so we have had applicants that are very knowledgeable about open science others that don't but have a good kind of a good gut feeling about it so and yeah so complete that application you send it and reviewers review it sorry about me and not us external reviewers but apart from the community and and then yeah and then you get accepted probably and then and then you start thank you so much can we get another round of applause please