Funds from this grant support the Trailblazers Program, a new awards program administered led by Alicia Gibb Seidle at the Open Source Hardware Association that will identify, recognize, honor and support leaders who have launched innovative open source hardware projects on college and university campuses around the U.S.  Up to eight award recipients will receive grants of between $50,000 and $100,000 to expand and augment their open source hardware documentation.  In addition to providing support to promising projects, the awards will raise the profile of winners within the open hardware community, encourage documentation of best practices, and signal to university administrators of the value of open hardware projects to the academic community.  Additional funds will allow the winning cohort to assemble together twice in the 2022-223 academic year, enabling winning projects to network, share strategies and lessons learned, identify common values and needs, and begin to build the core of a community of practice among open source hardware practitioners working in academia. 

Virtual scholarly events usually involve some combination of videoconferencing and chat wrapped around a conference platform that manages the abstracts, papers, slides, and other material accompanying the live or recorded presentations. One such conference system is OpenReview, an open source software toolkit created by Andrew McCallum that has become the standard submission and review platform for many of the major academic conferences in artificial intelligence and adjacent fields.  User feedback about the platform over the past year has identified the importance of synchronous, realtime interaction at various phases of planning and holding events, interactions that are currently not well-supported by Open Review or its competitor platforms. Funds from this grant will allow McCallum to add synchronous discussion features to a set of points in the OpenReview conference workflow, from deliberations by reviewers and program committees to the actual talks given by presenters. Several event organizers are already lined up as testers and early adopters, from relatively small community workshops to the massive NeurIPS conference and the International Conference on Machine Learning.  All developed code will be made available in full on GitHub.

Open hardware refers to the licensing of the design specifications of a physical object in such a way that the described object can be created, modified, used, or distributed by anyone. Open hardware sensors or other instruments present an attractive opportunity to expand the frontiers of scientific research by dramatically lowering the costs of instrumentation. They also present an attractive opportunity large-scale federal infrastructure projects. This grant supports Alison Parker at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, who is leading an effort to bring open hardware approaches to scale through government agencies. Parker’s team will engage federal audiences through workshops and roundtable discussions to stress the opportunities that are presented in pre-production, co-creation, customization, and collaboration through open processes. The team will also produce white papers exploring flagship programs within the U.S. government related to low-cost and open hardware, strategies for integration of low-cost and open hardware into federal investment in science through procurement and grants, legal analyses of intellectual property as a barrier to integration of low-cost and open hardware, and topical policy issues.

One relatively niche but extremely important case of scientific collaboration is the “decadal survey”, the process by which some research disciplines reach consensus on field-level priorities for the next ten years. In disciplines where instruments and missions are highly capital-intensive, these decadal surveys play a critical role in guiding much spending and research funding across public and private sources. The decadal process generally plays out over several years through a series of local and then international convenings, and consensus is gradually reached through deliberative discussion, argument, coaxing, side conversations, and iterative production of documents until delivery of a final report. This grant supports Janet Vertesi and David Reinecke, two sociologists, who are studying how coronavirus-forced adoption of virtual meeting and collaboration technologies has affected the decadal survey processes of three fields: planetary science, heliophysics, and astrophysics. Using a combination of interviews, archival research, and ethnographic observation, Vertesi and Reinecke will document how pandemic-focused remote work changed the survey process in these three fields--what worked better and what worked worse—with an eye towards articulating how to improve online collaboration technologies in ways that increase the benefits and decrease the costs of using them for discipline-wide scientific collaboration.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated many technological shifts that have already been taking place, including the shift from in-person to online and hybrid (in-person and online) academic gatherings. Eliminating the need for travel reduces environmental impacts and the burden imposed on delegates, and videotelephony services have demonstrated that they can meet the basic needs required to bring a gathering online. But while videotelephony can handle presentations and Q&A sessions, it cannot recreate the serendipitous hallway conversations that can lead to new scientific collaborations, ideas, and discoveries.   This grant supports an investigation by Roger Schonfeld at Ithaka Harbors, doing business as Ithaka S+R, into the opportunities and drawbacks of online and hybrid academic gatherings. Schonfeld and his team will use a combination of research, interviews, and design thinking—a human-centered approach to innovation—to help approximately 15 academic societies plan better academic gatherings that are informed by what works well in online and hybrid gatherings. The team’s project will elucidate the new skills and technologies needed to foster the interactions that were easy to create with in-person gatherings, which they will then share with decision-makers to enable more sustainable, inclusive, and engaging options for scholarly communication.

Innovation in and adoption of open hardware practices for scientific instrumentation and apparatus are being held back by the lack of widely-accepted standards in the description and versioning of open hardware projects. Metadata standards, in particular, are essential infrastructure to enable discovery and collaboration. A typical open source hardware project can combine instructions for 3D-printed components to be built locally along with a heterogeneous range of premade components (with different degrees of quality control) from a number of suppliers, along with any number of software programs used to control the device. At the moment, much open source hardware is in the “you can find documentation on my website” stage of maturity, where documentation and assembly instructions are idiosyncratic to the individual creator, and collaboration beyond small, local teams is more or less impossible.This grant funds Andrew Lamb, the founder of the Internet of Production Alliance, in a project to establish five families of metadata standards for open hardware: Designs and Documentation; Machines and Tools; People and Skills; Materials and Components; and Contracts and Business Models. These five standards are at different stages of maturity and build on each other: the first two (Open Know-How and Open Know-Where) have already been developed and activity will primarily focus on broader adoption and maintenance; the next two will be actively developed and launched over the course of the two years; and the last will be scoped for future development.

The Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement (CSCCE) has quickly become the preeminent research and training center focused on promoting the essential role community managers play in the effective functioning of scientific communities and thus in the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge. Led by microbiologist Lou Woodley, CSCCE documents and disseminates best practices in scientific community management, designs online and in-person curricula, runs training seminars, and acts as an advocate among scientists for the professionalization and institutionalization of the community management role. Funds from this grant support the continued operation and expansion of the CSCCE, along with efforts to develop and implement a business sustainability plan that will allow the organization to continue providing services to the diverse community of an estimated 30,000 community managers inside STEM research organizations. Grant funds are being administered by Community Initiatives, Inc., acting as a fiscal sponsor for CSCCE.

This grant funds the continued development of the AI Model Share platform, a website and integrated open-source Python library where researchers can deploy and share versions of machine learning models they have created in their research, and which can then be subsequently downloaded, implemented, used, analyzed, and improved by other researchers. In addition to making new resources available to researchers of all kinds, AI Model Share’s careful attention to issues like requirements tracking, versions, and documentation is an important step towards creating standards, tools, and practices that will allow research using machine learning methods to be robustly replicated. Activities supported by grant funds include the beta launch of the platform, user training and feedback workshops, an expansion of the platform’s ability to submit, search for, and replicate stored AI models, and the development of a front end “portfolio page” interface for platform users.