Hacking the Ivory Tower: Towards Lab Equipment as a Common Good
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:17
Oh, it works. So, welcome to Open Science,
00:21
and in particular Open Science hardware. How many scientists do we have in the room? Oh, like the majority. How familiar are you with the topic Open Science? You're aware of the importance of Open Science, I guess that's why you're here, and we're all visitors to Republica, so we know the relevance of the topic.
00:42
We are very happy to have four excellent panelists today on the stage to discuss Open Access, Open Science, Open Science hardware together, and that is Thomas, Herve, and Boa,
01:01
for once from Cameroon. Can you, the other way around, can you go back to the first slide? First? Yes. Then Jenny Malloy, from Cambridge, UK.
01:26
Tarek Omar, from Egypt. And as a local representative, Lucy Patterson, from Berlin.
01:41
So even with a small panel, with four people on it, it's still quite a diverse range of people, and I'm very happy to discuss with you. So, first slide please. So let's start with Thomas, can you please tell us what you do, and why you do it?
02:05
Okay, thank you, Jo. Currently I am a researcher here at the University of Laval, PhD student. Since 2015, I was involved in one project called Project Soi. It was run by the Canadian government
02:21
to document the obstacles to adoption of Open Science in French-speaking African countries. And one of the great output of this research was non-cognitive injustice that we document in our big books.
02:41
And this one, at the beginning of this one, we launched a big conversation in Africa, by African and from Africa to start, like a conversation about different understanding of the maker movement of Open Science
03:01
and that way in such a way that in order to give support from inside, to give an endogenous support about the movement in Africa. And in March, this year also, I launched my own space in Cameroon,
03:23
the Moa Lab, which is like the reification of my utopia, of my own understanding of the maker movement, how can it be reified in my own context, in my village. So that is what I'm doing, and so, okay.
03:43
Thank you. Okay, and Jenny from Cambridge, UK. So how did you get involved in Open Science and what are you currently working on? So I got involved in Open Science when I was an undergraduate, mostly because I saw open-source software
04:02
and particularly the collaborative practices of that as being useful for doing science. I'm quite a community-oriented person and so it chimed quite a lot with my own values and how I work. Now I'm a Shustaworth Fellow at the University of Cambridge and I'm researching pathways to an open, sustainable and equitable bioeconomy. So I'm a biologist by training
04:20
and this is really looking at kind of how we can harness biology through biotechnology to produce goods and kind of do economic activities using biology, moving on from agriculture and fermentation, which we know are very, very old technologies, to kind of new ways of doing things. But one of the barriers to doing that
04:41
is that significant capacity building is required to engage in that bioeconomic activity, particularly in low-resource environments. If you could move to the next slide, please. Thank you. So here you can see a lab space. It's a typical molecular biology lab. And so the real problem is that biology needs
05:00
physical tools, materials and reagents. I'm sure many of you in the room as attendees at Republica are very up to speed with digital sharing of knowledge, content, data. But when you move that into the space of research and tools in not only biology but also chemistry and other disciplines, managing a commons looks very different to managing a commons of software or digital information.
05:23
So the internet is incredible, but it isn't this, and it can't get you chemicals and vortex machines and polymerase chain reaction, thermosyclers for making copies of DNA. You need to actually physically have that equipment with you to do the biology. And so in that sense, part of my research
05:43
is focused on the idea that building a commons of lab equipment is not inherently a problem of openness in terms of the IP and licensing. That's important, but it's insufficient. And actually we have a growing pipeline of off-patent equipment, tools, biological reagents, and also born-open designs from organizations
06:01
like OpenPlant, who I have worked for for three or so years, which is a UK synthetic biology research center creating open tools for genetically engineering plants. So the openness is insufficient because it doesn't solve the problem of actually having the thing in front of you. And so part of my research is addressing
06:21
how do we make these open tools actually accessible and useful in the context of doing science. And this brings in a whole host of complexities around infrastructure, logistics, politics, commercial markets, and that's the context in which we have to build this commons. And so I'm interested in those types of questions. But that's not to say that intellectual property isn't important, and one other major point
06:42
that I'd like to bring to the table is really how do we position openness as a strategic choice for delivering the outcome of science that we want to see. And coming from well within an ivory tower, I see that the conversation just often doesn't include openness in that sense. And so I really want to shift the narrative,
07:01
particularly within institutions that can sometimes view patent protection as an outcome and an achievement and something to be celebrated in its own right. And so this relies, I think, on a community that are open to hacking the ivory tower from within and outside. And also sometimes demonstrating that the ivory tower doesn't need to be hacked, and we can just kind of do this stuff anyway.
07:22
And so the Gathering for Open Science Hardware is one such event that gathers that sort of community. And I've been a co-organizer of that since 2015. And we have over 350 researchers, technologists, engineers, policymakers on our forum. And we meet once a year in person.
07:40
This year we're going to Shenzhen in October. And so we developed a roadmap collaboratively with over 100 community contributors to make open hardware ubiquitous in science by 2025. You can check it out on the website. And we aim to learn as much as we can about the community, support the community, and scale the number and diversity of that community
08:01
of people developing and using open science hardware and its global distribution. And I guess just to finish, kind of the goal of a lot of the projects that I'm involved in, and particularly I would say the gosh of the Gathering and the roadmap is to try and move science towards communal accessible collaborative practices and away from some of the more kind of proprietary and individualistic practices that we see now
08:22
and demonstrate in what context that can have a really positive impact on the economy, on society. I'll end with that. Thank you very much. And now Tarek from Egypt. You're the founder of the Cairo Hackerspace. You're coming from the other direction. We're merging science and the hacker movement here.
08:40
And you're also very welcome to visit us at the Makerspace just outside. But especially with the contacts in Egypt and your experience as a hacker and maker, how do you relate to science? How did you find the scientific community and how do you think it can benefit from the hacker movement?
09:03
First, I'm not a scientist. I'm a software engineer. And since 2009, when we founded Cairo Hackerspace, our goal and our mission, I guess, was to teach people in Egypt and different cities in Egypt about what is a hackerspace.
09:21
And we wanted them to start hackerspaces because we saw that it makes sense in that region because of economical problems or other problems that maybe I don't know about. And sharing knowledge and the openness of a hackerspace would make sense in education of all its levels.
09:45
And then we started doing the Maker Express and we made a road trip to start expand and reach areas in Egypt that we never visited before. They never heard about this stuff before.
10:01
Since that time, during that time, since 2009, we try to make impact in education and we try to make impact with undergrad students to make them do better projects and be more efficient and be more creative
10:20
and convince them about the openness and the share of the knowledge so they can come up with better projects or better ideas or real effective innovations. Then last year, we saw that there is an area that we see it's very good in Egypt
10:43
but it still needs impact, which is science or research in general. Like technical research, I'm talking from a perspective of what would you do in a makerspace or a hackerspace. So we decided to make, to see, I mean, none of us is a scientist or a researcher
11:03
but we are trying right now still to see what is the problems or how to fix it or how to make the research, whether it's in the university or outside the institution, more effective and actually happen and reach everywhere in the world
11:22
and people can benefit from. So we are trying to make the hackerspace, as we make it more friendly to little kids and make it more habitable and enough space for college students, we wanna also give the opportunity and the chance to the community,
11:41
the research and the science community to start their own community inside the hackerspace, not Cairo hackerspace, science hackerspace or start hackerspace with this mentality to do research in this space. How we started it right now,
12:01
we are trying to get the basic tools and that we can put our hands on, whether we build it ourselves or we take a different approach of not building it from scratch but maybe try to find it cheap on eBay,
12:23
broken, try to fix it or even reverse engineered. So this is a little bit of hacking and maybe break some IP rules or patterns or whatever but we are taking it from our approach about we wanna make this research happen and we don't really take care of these rules
12:43
from in my country. So they'll tell they have this stuff like that patent and stuff to really respect it in the laws. Maybe we can just get something out by that time. So yeah, that's what we are doing right now regarding this and we hope it will make impact.
13:02
We haven't started yet. It's planned to the lab to open in the next month starting with basic tools and components for robotics and artificial intelligence research, all the rig and the tools that's needed for that. And we are looking to cooperate
13:20
with the people who have the needs to try to fix these problems and try to work together to build or hack or reverse engineer the tools that's needed in the space. Okay, thank you very much. And now let's go to the Berlin context since this is originally a Berlin conference going international, has been international
13:42
since the last couple of years. But as a local, Lucy, can you tell us about your work with Science Hack Day Berlin? Yeah, so I guess what we're doing with Science Hack Day Berlin is kind of pretty similar to what Tarek's doing but in the Berlin context.
14:03
So my background is in molecular biology. I come from an academic background but I kind of over the years found myself getting quite disillusioned with the way things were working inside the institution in some ways. And came into contact with this project called Science Hack Day in 2013.
14:24
It's a global concept actually that was initiated in 2010 from a designer called Ariel Waldman in San Francisco. And by now there are local chapters, local editions of Science Hack Day in cities all around the world. And it's an open source plan that anybody can take and use
14:41
and implement in their own context. So yeah, ours started in 2013. I was a participant, very nervous as a scientist, not really knowing what it meant. But had a fantastic experience, met some really interesting diverse people from different backgrounds, different disciplines
15:01
and then joined the organizing team the next year. So maybe I can have the next slide. Yeah, I just wanted to put together a few impressions of what it's like. It's a hackathon, one weekend, once a year. We've had five editions so far. We bring together around about 80 people and they're scientists of different disciplines,
15:22
designers, developers, artists and anyone who's kind of enthusiastic about science, making things, rapid prototyping, drinking clubmate and yeah, staying up late. So we, can we go back one? Thanks. Yeah, so it starts with some kind of lightning talks
15:45
and then we have pitches from the participants for the projects they wanna build. They form teams and then they hack over the weekend and present on a Sunday. And we give out prizes for different categories. And really, I think the outcome of it
16:02
is not so much the hacks that are made, which can be very weird. There's not, you can't really build anything that substantial over one weekend, but it's more about the experience of working together with people from different disciplines and different backgrounds under this weird, intense pressure and kind of through that,
16:23
getting to understand how the other people's minds work to a certain extent and seeing how different it can be to build things and create things in that context. And what it does, I think, is it builds this social community, this interdisciplinary community and it's kind of a transformative experience
16:43
where you realize how different it could be, how science could be something different to what you would experience inside a typical institution. And yeah, we're a volunteer team. We, all we ask is that if you join our hackathon, you make something that is science-y.
17:02
So it's an open brief. We're very, we don't have an accelerator program. We're not gonna like kind of kick off some new startups through this thing. We really very consciously kind of hold it open space for like you to express yourself, to kind of do weird things
17:21
or things that don't necessarily have commercial value. So there's, we have space for artistic hacks, for critical hacks, for random stuff, but also for civic projects, projects like that, maybe open source hardware, like we're talking about here
17:41
and also kind of frugal practices, doing science in a different way and for different motivations and different challenges than you would do inside an institution. Yeah, and the reason that we do this is, yeah, we're really trying, we believe in open science in the sort of broadest way.
18:02
We're trying to help create this knowledge society where everyone has access to science as knowledge, but also as a practice. And we see that academia doesn't necessarily have this on the agenda or not in the same way. There's a bunch of reasons why that doesn't really happen through academia.
18:20
So yeah, it's a small contribution to this whole world, but we're doing what we can. Thank you. And now, yeah, if we keep up the slides, also as an inspiration and as a reference to what each of the panelists just introduced about
18:40
or spoke about their work. Can we now have a brief, maybe reflection on what's the key challenges, but also the key opportunities that you see in your respective work? And maybe also trying to refer to the question, what can both communities learn from each other?
19:01
What is the common ground between the hacker movement and the scientific community? So yeah, what are we trying to learn now and what we, because I will relate to a thing
19:22
that we concentrated on for some time, which is, it's not related, but working with kids, like normal school education, it started by accident, and then we learned a lot from this experience that we understand
19:45
the meaning of what we are doing and how can we be in benefit for society. And when we saw the students relating to the subjects that they don't like and being excited
20:03
and coming up with new ideas and more interested in our place, in the hacker space or maker space than other people, we saw that we had to concentrate and learn more from this experience.
20:20
And then now, working in that field of technical research and sciences, we think that will teach us more about what we are doing and from a hacker or a maker perspective, I don't call myself a hacker or a maker,
20:41
but it will be challenging that we enjoy and I think that will be very beneficial for the community, for the scientific community, because if science entered or if you challenged hackers
21:03
in hacker spaces with these problems, you will get a lot of benefit in the community because of that, for example, 3D printing, 3D printing have been always proprietary, it have been always there, as it is right now. And it started developing and it became much, much better
21:24
and much, much cheaper when the company owned the patent, lost the patent, the patent basically expired. 3D printing, as you see it right here, like right now, have been in universities and companies since early 90s. This like the famous type, FDM,
21:42
the one you see most commonly, this have been there during the 90s. We even had it in Egypt during the 90s, in universities, but it was locked inside rooms. So when it was introduced to the hacker community, it growed so big and literally like some
22:02
of these companies that had these proprietary systems, they ended up right now literally stealing from the open source upgrades that the community made really, really, really fast. So I'm not talking like in that debate, but I'm just giving an example about something
22:22
that before, like maybe five years ago, even the people now that haven't seen a 3D printer, they won't even imagine it, like a printer that prints something, anything on your disk. So we are trying to get this competition inside the hackerspace community, like our community for now,
22:41
and we would love to see other hackerspaces to do that so we can have more challenges, like the 3D printer example, with other tools. I agree with you that not everything can be done, and even things can be done, it won't be perfect or won't be really beneficial for science right now
23:01
because maybe it's already advanced and we need more answers, better than what you would get from something that is DIY, but it's also following the research and development. So it will develop fast as the open-source 3D printer developed. And yeah, so that's the examples.
23:23
I keep telling myself to believe in what we want to do in Cairo Hackerspace so we can keep doing it and believe that we can actually make an impact. Lucy, do you, or, sorry, Boa, do you want to? Yes, in fact, in my view,
23:41
science done in academia should be devoted to the society and align with social needs of local population, but the way science is done in many universities in Africa, and particularly in Cameroon,
24:00
doesn't really facilitate this connection between society and university. So for me, science can learn from the hacker movement in many ways in terms of collaboration
24:22
because the hacker movement is directly related to the idea of commons, of openness, and horizontal collaboration without any barrier in terms of financial barrier, gender, geographical or hierarchical barriers.
24:42
So science has also to learn from the hacker movement in terms of community. The hacker movement is a grassroots movement. So in order to facilitate the connection between university and society, we should research, the institution should hear
25:06
the community before and try to solve problem for what the needs coming from the grassroots. So that is my point. Thank you very much. Lucy, from your experience from the science sector Berlin
25:21
and also the communities that you work with, probably throughout the year or that you interact with, as a further curating on the building of the program. And where do you see the challenges in the meeting of makers and scientists and maybe also one or two best practice examples?
25:44
Yeah, so there are tremendous opportunities, I think, like Tarek said, in terms of pushing the development of technologies inside science and innovation and that can definitely be inspired
26:01
by the kind of methodologies that we use inside the hacker movement and inside biohacking and DIY science in these communities. But I think there is a bit of a risk of just co-opting those methodologies that institutions will just take those
26:20
and kind of take the practical side, the pragmatic side of how you can release more innovation inside an institution or access innovation outside of the institution. Or have these really fun, interactive ways
26:41
of engaging with the public or with society and kind of communicating science. But if you just take those sides of what the hacker movement is and that's it, then you kind of miss part of the point of what it is that we're doing here. So I think the hacker movement is really,
27:02
it's about breaking down elites. It's about opening knowledge so that everyone in society has equal access to it. It's about building a commons together that we're all part of and that we all can use and also contribute back to. So if these hacker methodologies are just utilized
27:22
by those elite institutions without any kind of self-reflection about who has agency in this situation, then that can be, that you've missed the opportunity, basically, and the big opportunity here with DIY and with the hacker ethos is to really break down those hierarchies
27:42
and to scale science so that more people in different contexts, be it locally here in Berlin and from different backgrounds and different disciplines can be part of the scientific process or be it in other contexts in other countries where you just don't have the financial capacity
28:01
to build these, the kind of elite institutions that we have in the West. So yeah, it's, what we're trying to do is really to build a new culture, build a new way of doing science. And like Thomas said, really learning from how the hacker communities organize themselves.
28:24
So yeah, that's what I'd have to say. Oh, you wanted some specific examples? Yeah. You can also take that later, it's fine. As a last question, before we opening up for the audience also to pose questions and engage in the discussion, maybe to Jenny,
28:42
with the internet, since this is also an internet conference, so how do you see the internet provides for boosting the opportunities with open science in general, in particular for open science hardware and exchange of knowledge and also equipment for the global research community? Also again, referring to the goal that you have
29:02
with a roadmap for open science hardware to be ubiquitous by 2025. Well obviously it provides a huge opportunity to kind of reach out and make those connections all over the world, and so our forum spans every continent. I wouldn't say we've got the polls included,
29:21
but we certainly have a huge number of people who are actively asking questions and collaborating with each other, sharing digital designs. And I think one of the key kind of innovations that has arisen from a greater accessibility of digital fabrication equipment is the idea that you no longer require the same level
29:44
of craftsmanship as you previously did, because you can design it and then share it and make it, and that barrier to entry is really lowered. And so the internet is fantastic for that. I mean, you can put up your source code, you can put up your designs for hardware. To an extent, it enables collaboration
30:01
around those designs. People can fork projects, they can add improvements, but certainly in the gosh community, that isn't entirely true, because if you're going to improve a piece of hardware, you still actually need the hardware in front of you generally to do that. And so we have a collaborative project that arose out of gosh 2017, which is developing a single pixel camera platform,
30:23
which is basically allowing you to use one single pixel sensor, which could be a very advanced sensor, but you're just using one pixel, and you use fancy maths and software to basically produce a nice image using just one pixel. This is my limited understanding of how that technology works. But effectively, the way that's been done
30:40
is to create little kits that have been distributed around the world to different participants, and now they're interacting online. There's been some great filmed conversations on YouTube between people who actually understand bits of the project and people who don't, so we can kind of view that. So I think to an extent, it's absolutely transformative in allowing those kinds of collaborations to happen, but it definitely has a limitation.
31:02
And I think with hardware, with biological techniques, with these hands-on activities, there's an element of kind of tacit knowledge and sticky knowledge that is very difficult to transmit through the written words and even really through videos. And so I feel like spaces that Tarek and Thomas and Lucy are creating, those kind of in-person
31:20
communities of practice, are still very much necessary when we're talking about lab tools and equipment, and that's the reason that we continue to have in-person meetings around open science hardware, and it's not just a digital community. And I mean, in-person meetings are fantastic for other reasons, for kind of, you know, forming social bonds and meeting people, fantastic food. But I think that that's another divide,
31:42
and I'm fascinated at this kind of evolution of the transition between digital and physical, because we see it happening with 3D printing, but we also see it happening in biology, the transmission of DNA sequencing or DNA sequences and the growing capacity to synthesize DNA, to write DNA as well as read it,
32:01
means that, you know, in the future, you will be able to send a DNA sequence by email, and someone can effectively print it out at the other end. That's happening slowly. And so in both contexts, there's this kind of, yeah, digital, physical, cool stuff happening, but yet it still does require that physical element.
32:20
So yes, transformative, but it does have its limitations in this context. Are there aspects to add from the panel to this particular question, at this point? Otherwise, let's open up for you guys. Do you have specific questions that you want to ask, or also unspecific questions, for the matter?
32:42
Please join us. Alfred. So I would like to ask about two issues, particularly. The first one is about this computation
33:03
of the hackathon format. So we have now hackathons for everything, but that is not scalable in terms of creating a sustainable relationship, just this weekend events where people meet and do stuff that is volatile
33:21
and doesn't endure. So I think that there is a need to resist that computation by hacking the hackathon, start to be critical about this own format to create these long-lasting relationships. I would like to you explain about that. And the second one is about hacking publishing. Most of the time that we hack science,
33:42
we hack science, like trying to hack science inside science, like in the academia, in the lab, but the way that science is validated is not in that places. It's in publishing and patents and stuff like that. So what could be the step that connects this hacking science inside academy and labs
34:03
to hacking publishing and the places where the science is validated outside academia? Maybe I say something to the hacking the hackathon point. You're totally right, one weekend doesn't change anything.
34:21
What we do with Science Hack Day is we realize this and about three years ago, we also launched a meetup. So we have a regular meetup twice a month. We have a Stammtisch, which is a, for the non-German speakers, that's where you get together and discuss of an evening with some beers. And we also have a hack lab, which is like a one day hack, pretty low level
34:42
that we don't organize all kinds of catering and blah. So we thought that would be the answer to the problem. And it definitely keeps the community feeling alive and it's a place where people can always find us. But I don't think even that's enough to be honest. I think what we've realized is that
35:01
just creating a platform doesn't necessarily do it. You actually, if you want things to happen, then you need to make things happen. So I think personally, I'm interested in doing that now and actually kind of initiate, making sure that we initiate projects and putting the right support in place
35:21
for those projects to have a long life. So that also means getting access to funding for more sustained projects and that, so hacking funding is the big challenge actually at the moment. Yeah. I used to ask some hacker in western context,
35:43
why are you doing hackathon? What is the purpose of hackathon? For many of them, it's just for fun, you know? You're hacking just for fun. And that is the dangers of this kind of,
36:02
it goes many replicating the idea of hackathon without a specific goal, you know? But in other part, like in African context, particularly hackathon, people are doing thing to solve a particular problem.
36:21
So if you are together to try to find a solution is for a particular problem, it's not for fun. And so the basic is the idea is the goal of the organizer of such kind of events. So what do you want to solve?
36:40
Is it for fun or is it for local problem? About hacking the publishing, hacking science through publishing, something like that. In African university, particularly in my context in Cameroon, we are dealing with this kind of issue, you know, university are not part of this big concept,
37:04
this big publisher. So we don't have access to many review and open access in this way is very important for also. One way we are using to hack publishing,
37:23
like me in our association, APSOA or Project SOA, you are teaching people how to use Sci-Hop on people. And other thing, even it is not legal in your context, but it's okay for us,
37:41
we just need to get knowledge as a common. So we are teaching them how to use this kind of, how to hack, locate research or close research, you know. So that is what I'm content to.
38:03
Just about replying to your question and also what I said before, because this is, since we wanted to do this thing in the career hacker space about making it friendly to scientists, this is my first meetup with people from my background of science
38:20
and trying to make, to join the two communities. So I'm learning and I'm sharing my best experience and we will try. So what we learned from our past experience with different communities, we don't know if it will work with every community or not, is that we made, when we do hackathons or events
38:42
or hack days, our main target now became is starting a community from the event. So we make the event very good, something can come out of it, but our main target is like, hey, we want to start a community, whether it's inside the hacker space or make a group of people interested in a new topic.
39:03
So this topic, as far as I know, haven't been introduced in Egypt, open science or a community of scientists working outside the institution. So hopefully, and we spoke about making the open, the science hack day, we want to do it in career hacker space.
39:21
So we want to do it because we want to start this community in the hacker space with that hackathon. So that's what we are good about. The community will create the outcome, the impact, the feedback, everything. So that might apply too, also to this.
39:44
Yeah, so my final comment would be really on the open science hardware front, that absolutely dissemination and communication and publishing is super important. And there's a couple of things we've identified. One is that if you're in the ivory tower, if you're in academia, you get very little benefit
40:01
from taking the time to document your hardware. And so there are now two, at least two journals, Journal Open Hardware and Hardware X that will publish these designs. And so that's one way of essentially co-opting the current system of reward for publication to encourage people to do this. Also trying to create tools that make it easier to document stuff well because a major difficulty
40:23
in the open science hardware space that impacts people's perception of the quality of the hardware and their ability to build it is just the lack of good quality documentation that's available for many of these projects, particularly those that are at the more complex end of the spectrum, the type of things that you're interested in building. An instructable is often not sufficient
40:41
for a multi-part complex precision scientific instrument. And so how do we kind of develop that such that it is a little bit easier for the, it's hard whatever you do. Doing open science, whether you're making your data openly available or whether you're making your hardware openly available, it's extra time. And so anything that you can do to kind of reduce that burden.
41:01
In terms of hacking the broader system, I don't know, I don't have answers to that. But certainly in the hardware context, I think there's a couple of things we can do. And making sure that journals recognize the value of having that detailed documentation and not trying to squish your method section into two paragraphs, which is quite common.
41:21
Yeah, thank you all for your input and I really enjoyed the conversation. Actually my question was really exactly what you were just speaking about because I've had the privilege of being in many different maker spaces, hacker spaces where a lot of it was about digital fabrication and other things. And I'd never seen an open science lab
41:41
and I was thinking mainly about the hardware and about the challenges we face in our community with our maker space in Egypt and how at one point the equipment got so expensive but with a lot of open source designs people started making their own 3D printers much more practical. And so when I'm thinking on the science sense I see this picture behind us and I'm like,
42:00
wow, I mean, is this what's required or maybe not required but is this a goal? I mean, can you actually hack the hardware needed, this equipment that you were just talking about right now? It seems even more challenging in this sense and I wonder if you have anything to say about that. So I don't think it's any coincidence
42:20
that three out of four, well actually, four out of five of us I should say have a background in biology because actually the stuff we use is often quite simple. Not, you know, there are very fancy imaging techniques, microscopes, et cetera, et cetera but your work at a molecular biology lab most of that stuff basically picks up small amounts of liquid and dispenses it again
42:40
or heats stuff up and cools stuff down in particular ways. Now that stuff is not complicated but it's super expensive for no real technical reason and so there is obviously not everything is going to be accessible and obviously depends on kind of the quality of fabrication equipment that you have and your ability to calibrate things
43:01
but there's a lot of stuff, particularly biology context that can be done and I think that's why there's such a lot of interest in this kind of DIY bio-hacking because just the differential between what you can create for quite cheap on the DIY front and what it costs to actually buy it is quite huge and also I think biologists, this is like a whole new world for us.
43:22
So physicists and engineers, you tinker all the time. It's kind of like built in whereas biologists, you pick stuff out of a catalogue and then you kind of work with it often at least in a context where you have the money to do that and so I think particularly in terms of that earlier question of what can makers and scientists get from each other, I think just that lack of fear of technology and just kind of using what's available
43:42
and actually just making something and adapting it because you can do better science if you can design your equipment to fit your experiment rather than kind of fitting your experiment to the equipment that you happen to have lying around you and so I think that kind of element is quite important. So there's definitely limitations on what you can do. I don't know anyone that's building an electron microscope from scratch, for example
44:01
but there's a whole bunch of stuff. So I didn't really answer Joe's question about my inspiration for getting involved in this area. My PhD was on control of mosquitoes and we used to have mosquitoes that we had to feed on sheep's blood and we had to heat the blood up to 37 degrees C because that's the temperature of a human and they love biting humans.
44:20
So all this machine did was heat to 37 degrees C. It didn't even have a temperature dial. It was humidity proof admittedly but the base unit plus the feeders was not much short of 3,000 pounds. So the kind of, and that is a piece of equipment that would be potentially useful in a context of mosquito endemic regions
44:40
where they don't have 3,000 pounds to spend on a piece of equipment that just heats something to 37 degrees and so I think yeah, there's definite, there's real scope in these types of areas to do stuff and as long as you think through the testing and the calibration, you can get some really high quality results and then share that data so that other people can trust
45:00
that the instrument actually works and again, that's the kind of documentation problem. People will make stuff but it won't be tested against the commercial alternative or kind of have all of the data in the paper that would enable you as a scientist to say, is this good enough for my experiment and be able to make that judgment. I would like to ask you guys in the audience,
45:22
what's your personal experience with open science and do you have experiences that relate to what was presented here or also do you have other questions to the panelists but please engage with us. That's the whole point in the panel discussion.
45:41
Hello, thank you very much for all your great input here. I have to start my comment with a disclaimer. I'm working in a library and of disclaimer so now I'm asking you, when you're thinking about, we had this hacking,
46:01
sorry, hacking scientific publications and the word open access already showed up here and then the second point of building sustainable and long lasting relationships in a community, well, that's what we're doing in a library.
46:21
That's what we're trying to achieve. We, I don't know, just short, 200 scientific institutions in Germany just canceled their subscriptions to Elsevier, the biggest scientific publisher in the world and are trying to figure out how to make their journals open access.
46:42
So open access is a very huge thing for libraries and building communities is, yeah, libraries is a third, so-called third space, so a space outside of work and home and being a public space where you can spend time without spending money is a goal we as libraries have as well.
47:03
So all this said, do you have any cooperations with libraries being scientific or public or would that be something you could think about or why wouldn't that be so feasible?
47:24
I could say something to it, maybe you will. I'm ill-equipped because I have a vague anecdote but I think maybe in the US there is, at least in some parts of strategy where they combine makerspaces with libraries.
47:42
Yes, Jenny's not that good. And that's basically what I was going to say as well but certainly a kind of the makerspace level that is happening, so I could certainly see if you have that program going, why not integrate some of the science aspects into it as well? Yeah, I think really if we look ahead to the future we should have, if science is a commons
48:00
that everyone has access to, then it could be something that's provided at a municipal level and then what kind of infrastructure would you fit that into? And I think libraries are really, like you could think about different ways of doing it, like one argument would be that universities are more open to communities and universities provide these kinds of facilities
48:21
but I think libraries are also a really good potential option for providing access to these kinds of equipment, this kind of, yeah. I'm not sure that I got your question very well but for me libraries is a very important part
48:46
to hack science in university because the first problem about scientific publication is also to decolonize the minds of researchers.
49:00
Many researchers, particularly in the field of biology or hard science, really like to publish in journal with higher impact factor. So this parameter is embedded in their mind
49:22
and you know as a former biochemist because I have a background in biochemistry, in universities like when you want to publish a paper you have to publish either in natural or in SAVS but now things don't work like that
49:40
so libraries have to train researchers about these new trends of scholarly communication but librarians have a very big barrier, institutional barrier also because you can promote open access but universities still remain very traditional
50:04
and the very big support you need is from your institution. An institution can write a policy which can facilitate research to publish
50:22
on this kind of platform or to follow your training or your courses about scholarly communication. I think just from my side also I think we're tackling or we are talking about open science hardware and there's all these other open science angles to it
50:44
and what your approach is probably towards open methodology and then open data is its own huge community and of course they intertwine and overlap and I think people are already working in that direction so it's not that we have to call for it so much, it's just a matter of raising more awareness
51:04
of that's happening and that it's important and it's also bringing us back to where science supposed to be from the start. That's what we want as scientists, that's why we became scientists in the first place and also to make our results and achievements accessible and usable
51:21
and not hide it behind pay walls and the hackers help us with that. I just wanna add something about related to the hardware like many libraries now have maker spaces and it's a good opportunity because one of the challenges to start a maker space or a hacker space, whether it's like general
51:40
like Cairo hacker space or specifically for science, one of the many challenges is find the place itself, the space itself and the rent and so many things so I see the libraries can be a very good potential in having something like an open science maker space also in the cities or countries that they are available in many neighborhoods or closer to people
52:03
and already it will be maybe get funding or something like that, it will be easier for that place. It will also be good if it works as like a community driven which I mean, I don't know, I'm not saying it is or it's not. In the US right now, most libraries have maker program,
52:23
mostly it's targeted for school students and summer camps but they have the machines, they have the tools so I think it would be a good idea to also involve open science hardware when we have the big library of how to build the hardware and to do that maybe, that actually is a good idea,
52:44
it will be a very good opportunity to do that in an open space like a library. Can we go back a few slides at this point? And meanwhile, do you have comments, other questions?
53:03
We have time for one or two more. No worries. One more, yes. Thank you very much for your question
53:21
because if you are looking at this logo, MoaLab is the reification of my utopia, I cannot dissociate library to the maker movement, that is why in my logo, as you can see, the book is there in this side and related to electronic and the community near all age
53:40
so it's just my comments. Okay. So just a comment, I really liked what you said, Jenny, about like, biologists should start and fit their instruments to their experiments and not the other way around. Well, this is actually what got me involved
54:01
into open hardware but how could we convince our bosses, our professors to do that? I'm a PhD student and I think this is the most challenging part because before we started having a 3D printer, nobody has seen a 3D printer before
54:20
and sometimes the systems are quite old-fashioned and there are so many challenges in overcoming the barriers in the heads of professors and so on. Do you have good experience or good examples how it could work or what's your opinion on that?
54:41
Thank you. So I think demonstration is probably the way to go which is not that handy if you want to make the case for getting the 3D printer in the first place but I don't have specific experience of bringing around a single professor who was really thinking this is not a good idea and then it suddenly was but certainly I think it's slow progress
55:03
to persuade people that you can do stuff that's valuable with these types of things and I think often that's a tension between the maker movement and the scientific angle is that if it's viewed as being DIY, open source, 3D printed, there's a perception often and maybe it's a generational thing,
55:22
maybe it's an academic versus outside of academia thing, I don't know but for certain individuals it's certainly viewed as being not as good and so you kind of have to work doubly as hard to show that what you've created is both useful to your experiment and is in fact if not is equal to or at least you can show that it's good enough for what you're trying to do scientifically.
55:41
What we found when 3D printers have been used by biologists is that a lot of the time they're adapting bits of lab kit as a first off so kind of building connectors to add different imaging systems to microscopes for example is a very common usage and yeah, connecting different ways
56:00
of moving their biology through the pipeline, introducing automation and I think just there are things you can point to whereby having this attitude and approach brings a lot of time saving measures so PIs often think in terms of funding and money and publications and so anything that you can do to say well this will save me however many hours a week
56:23
for petting if we have this open source for petting robot for example or that now I can automate my slide imaging by moving them around, that's at least gonna save me two hours a week where I could be doing other science and I think a lot of the kind of positive response from biologists in particular to speak to that because I know them best
56:41
is this, the automation side is really exciting because a lot of it is very manual work and there's no real scientific reason why that should be a human if you can get a machine that does it as well. It frees you up to actually do the thinking parts and the experimental design and the data analysis and so yeah I guess my answer is numbers.
57:01
If you can work out how long you're spending a week doing something and say well this will save me X amount of time but you always have to weigh up against, it's kind of like the programmer's dilemma. Do I kind of do this and make a program that will automate it but the program's gonna take me two days to write or do I just do the thing anyway? If you're a biologist, doing it will almost certainly mean Excel so I'll put that but there's that kind of,
57:21
it's always, there's a pragmatism aspect as well that if you're building something because you enjoy building something and it's gonna take you ages and you're gonna get a marginal benefit at the end then that's really difficult to sell to somebody that's managing you. So I'm not sure if that's helping but yeah just kind of thinking through the benefits
57:40
to your own work and expressing those but ultimately there is, it happens across the kind of open science movement as well and commonly comes up in conversation about your, particularly if you're a PhD student, academia is set up such that you, your PI often has pretty much absolute power over what happens in their labs
58:01
and so yeah, there probably comes a point where you can't argue any further. Sometimes people will then just do it anyway and sort of demonstrate the results afterwards. So we basically just have to wait until the PIs are biomarkers themselves, right? Well that would be the,
58:20
conversion would be the ultimate route, yeah. But I think, I mean if you can do it and just demonstrate that it's useful for your work. As I say, I don't have any tips if you don't actually have the tools to do things but you can point to other projects. I mean there's some cool stuff out there that's been beneficial.
58:41
Do you want to add one, like we're out of time so this is it basically but maybe there's time for one more final statement. Like what's, is there something that you, at this point after the discussion, want to share with the audience?
59:02
Like what's your ultimate goal? I think that was up early on one slide. Like we can just open science hardware. Yeah, do you want to have a final statement basically? I think what Jenny said about
59:22
making the case for open source hardware inside academia is very, very true but I think we're also talking about a commons which extends outside academia. So how do we make, how do we incentivize that? How do we make that possible? And that's both incentivizing scientists
59:40
inside academia to support it but also growing capacity outside of institutions. So I think there is a lot of work we could do to open up new kinds of funding or new programs that would support capacity building inside community outside of these wealthy institutions but also finding.
01:00:00
new ways to incentivize mutually beneficial collaborations between academia and partners outside of those institutions. And the way that science is evaluated and funded at the moment in these institutions really doesn't make that possible. So this would be about maybe if you want to build collaborations
01:00:22
and they really need to be eye-level partnerships, so we need to have new funding mechanisms that allow co-design of research and support the growth of the capacity of those communities outside of those institutions.
01:00:41
Yeah, I absolutely agree. It's all about context, and in what context being open can be beneficial and for who. So as an individual, what are you trying to achieve through doing your science? What is your institution trying to achieve? Who are the beneficiaries and can openness kind of increase the benefit? That's one way of looking at things that I think is less examined.
01:01:03
And that kind of helps when you're weighing up against the pragmatism of doing it this way or doing it another way. And I think the final thought is that I hope that we can move towards kind of constructing that commons in such a way that it does reach across all of these dispersed groups.
01:01:21
And I think it's a really, really, really tough challenge to think through. But I think that research tools are absolutely critical to the open science conversation. And I'm really pleased that this panel is focused on that because it doesn't get brought up often enough that open data and open access has a very high profile in this space. But you can't get the data if you can't run the experiment.
01:01:41
And so particularly when we're talking about capacity building for research, the equipment and the reagents are absolutely key. I just want to say that I would love to see the science community grow in hackerspaces to the level that the engineers who build the proprietary patent tools go and join the hackerspaces and build the tools in the hackerspaces.
01:02:07
When we reach this level where we will actually have better tools than the proprietary ones, like what happened with 3D printers and many other things that I don't want to mention right now. It's because it's very complicated.
01:02:21
So thank you very much, Tarek, Jenny, Mboa and Lucy. And thank you all for coming here for your interest and for sharing your thoughts. And yes, let's keep on discussing this and enjoy the Republica.