Open Science Hardware at GOSH 2018
Attending Gathering for Open Science Hardware (GOSH) in Shenzhen and what I learnt about the global Open Source Hardware movement.
Based on my work of supporting the maker movement in NIT Warangal through Innovation Garage [1], I was recently provided a full (travel + accommodation) scholarship to attend Gathering for Open Science Hardware (GOSH) in Shenzhen from 10 th-13 thOctober, 2018. This post is to share my learning about Open Science Hardware(OScH) movement and GOSH experience in general.
Understanding Open Science Hardware Through Examples
Example 1 Imagine that you buy a 3D printer for your makerspace. You set it up and members start downloading/preparing STL files to print 3D models of their prototypes (and some cool jewellery too!). One day the printer stops working. Being a community makerspace, you can’t afford to buy a new one altogether. But you and your friends have a maker mindset and are confident that you can fix the 3d printer instead of having to buy a new one. So cool! There is only one problem — the machine is ‘proprietary’ and there is no information available about how it has been designed and built. You are stuck.
Example 2 You are a university student and have been studying about brain-computer interactions. You approach your professor with the idea of a project that requires an EEG device to record subject’s brain activity during gameplay. The professor is impressed but the project gets stalled since the lab would not agree to purchase such a costly device for a single project.
Example 3 You love fitness bands but care about your privacy and fear that wearing a proprietary fitness band will put your data at risk. You would rather make your own fitness band if only the design details were openly available.
Example 4 You are an environment researcher who requires air pollution data of top 50 most populated cities in the world at different times of the day. However, your team is too small to record data at this scale and you decide to crowdsource the effort. Funding so many air quality monitors is not a viable option. You instead build a simple device using commonly available tools and document it in detail. Next, with the help of some international organizations, you reach out to high school students of these cities, remotely train them about how to build these monitors and are able to crowdsource data at a large scale. Not only that, you just made citizen scientists [2] out of high school kids of 50 cities! This is the power open source 😊
To quote GOSH roadmap Executive Summary -
To summarize, the ability to use, study, replicate, and improve scientific instrumentation is a central part of experimental science, and plays a crucial role in public life, research, and action. However, these activities are currently restricted by proprietary instrumentation, which is difficult and expensive to obtain and maintain, since they cannot be fully inspected, evaluated, or customized. This situation is fundamentally detrimental to the production of knowledge and its potential for creating equitable and sustainable solutions. The Open Science Hardware (OScH) community therefore seeks to bring together developers and users of scientific tools and research infrastructures to support the pursuit and growth of knowledge through global access to hardware for science. [3]
What Happened at GOSH 2018?
GOSH 2018 was organised at Openfiesta, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen. Our aim was to come up with a list of action items based on the following three pillars of OScH community :
Learn about itself, the contexts in which it currently operates, and the ways in which OScH impacts society.
Support individuals and forge partnerships to create the conditions under which OScH can flourish
Grow with respect to local differences, increasing the diversity, scale and impact of the OScH community.
I have summarized our discussion on each of these here. (Since it’s on the forum, you might be asked to join the forum to view it).
People from 40+ countries and multiple professional backgrounds (researchers, social scientists, artists, biologists, educators, entrepreneurs, hobbyists, etc.) came together for 4 days to discuss various issues related to open hardware like licensing, collaborations, educating, funding, citizen science, open science for UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and so much more. More details can be found in the GOSH 2018 community report [4]. I saw some of the best makers and projects ever at GOSH. You can find the entire list of attendees on GOSH website to see if there’s someone that you would like to connect with. [5]
Post GOSH 2018, we are looking to leverage and empower local communities with support from global resources ultimately leading to global impact (Think global, Act local). Following are some of the action items that we came up with for India (or Asia in general). Please feel free to connect if you are interested in pushing forward any of these agenda:
Organize AsiaOSH to drive the open hardware movement in Asia. (AfricaOSH is already happening this year in Tanzania!)
Collaborate and prepare a map with all makerspaces of Asia.
Identify low-cost alternatives for open hardware — map major suppliers, artisans and craftsmen of Your city (Hyderabad) to connect makers to suppliers.
Organize a Repair day in your locality/makerspace (where people bring their broken stuff and tools and are guided on how to fix them)
Collaborate with Indian universities to offer residential programs for Open Science community members working on important issues like soil, environment and climate.
Along with several brainstorming and unconference sessions, we also had several technical workshops — creating a particle accelerator, soil monitoring, air/water monitoring, cervix cancer detection, building DNA circuits, Microscopes, etc.
We visited some of the coolest places in Shenzhen including a PCB manufacturing company, world’s first and largest hardware accelerator HAX, the enormous Huaqiangbei market, a social dinner by Kickstarter, X-factory and Public Lab barn raising. Some of us presented about GOSH at the Makerfaire organized by Shenzhen government in which I got a chance to introduce students to open hardware movement and speak about our topic sessions and corresponding action items.
Life in Shenzhen
I reached Shenzhen via the ferry from Hong Kong to Port Shekou. I was amazed to see the sky-high buildings and clean roads on my drive to the hotel.The gathering was in Tsinghua University which enabled me to live university life once again. Shenzhen is a heavenly destination if you are either a hardware junkie or a street-food lover. Make sure to try their street food, Fish Hot Pot and Bubble Tea. Don’t be surprised if there’s meat inside some dessert.
And DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT miss out on visiting the Huaqiangbei (pronounced whua-chung-bee) market [6]. In fact, spare an entire day (or two days if you can) only for it. There is no electronic part that you can’t find here, if you know where to look. I realised what manufacturing at scale is only after I saw a complex with 100+ shops, all of which sold only one thing — iPhone and iPad cases.
If you do not understand Mandarin and think that you can manage with English, you are in for a big surprise as very few people speak English there. I logged in to a desktop to type a document and could not use MS Word because everything was written in Mandarin! The restaurant menus, station names, sign boards, your hotel address and anything readable will most probably be only in Mandarin. So, make Google Translate your friend and make sure to install a solid VPN before reaching Shenzhen because several apps like Google, Whatsapp and Facebook are banned in China (there are alternatives and you can easily find that information online[7]). However, Chinese people are much like Indians — very helpful and offer great hospitality and you will do just fine with hand gestures even if the internet fails you.
Overall, it was an enlightening experience where I met people from all walks of life and different parts of the world, all united by one purpose — To make it easy for everyone to build their own prototyping and research equipment and usher an era of collaborative and open development in hardware, just like it has happened in software.