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.