KJCMDMCJMSDZ Working Group

[dwblair]

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About this wiki

This wiki + comment thread relates to projects, links, materials, and resources and events on Open Education, Open Access, and Open Research, Open Government, and related topics. We might narrow or expand the focus as we go along.

Please feel free to add content, comments, and questions to the comment thread that follows this wiki. You'll need to sign up for github (free). We can then add you as an "owner", so you can also edit the content of this wiki. The idea is to generate ideas via the comment thread below in a quick, chronologically-sorted manner, then periodically summarize our ideas and results in the wiki here, wikipedia-style.

(Note: all of this content can be exported (easily, we hope) to another wiki / repository later, if we prefer.)

Working documents

• Public Labs Summary Document v1
• Mining Project Material / Proposal draft 1
• Mining Project Outline Draft 2

  Links / Resources related to Open Education, Research, Access, Goverment ...

• Open Education Resources
• Flat World Knowledge -- publisher of free and open textbooks
• Moocs-- massive open online course
• SPARC -- the scholarly publishing and academic resources coalition
• Ushahidi
• The Open Government Partnership -- video
• Amherst Media: community media projects; building servers and OS applications that community media organizations (community access channels, low power radio stations etc ) can use to distribute content and engage online audiences; interview with Craig Sinclair on youtube
• Drupal's Open Media Project
• The Open Media Foundation
• The project I Paid a Bribe in India continues evolving
• The J-Pal group at MIT and world leaders in impact evaluation. These are the guys who hacked the digital cameras and asked rural teachers in India to take a picture with their kids every morning, bringing down teachers' abstenteesim and improving kids' achievements. More about that project here
• The Air Quality Air from Wicked Device is a close type of solution we could get ideas from. However, it requires an ethernet connection and it costs $150. We need to move from here to cheaper and using a SIM card to transmit data.
• Leif Percifield at Don´t Flush Me is doing also very relevant stuff for us.
• These people at CitizenSensor are also working on DIY technology for environmental monitoring and include the component of transmitting data and making it public
• More on low cost environmental sensors and public use of data
• NYTimes: "Human advancement can be aided by curbing everyday losses like the millions of avoidable deaths from indoor smoke and tainted water, and by increasing resilience in the face of predictable calamities like earthquakes and drought." From a 10/19/2012 article, "In Teeming India, Water Crisis Means Dry Pipes and Foul Sludge"

  Knowledge Commons research and pratice

• Prof. Samir Brahmachari -- Open Source drug discovery in video -- video
• Joel Moker, history of the "knowledge commons"
• Prof Browyn Hall (UC Berkeley), "Environmental Change, Patents and Development"; video
• Robin Mansell, "Promoting Open Access to Digital Knowledge Resources". video
• A collection of papers on "knoweldge commons" research and practice

  PLOTS -- The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science

• main site
• google group
• Spectrometer -- overview; usage (including mercury in soil)
• DIY Spectrometry KIT / Kickstarter page
• Thermal flashlight (useful for testing home insulation): tool post
• PLOTS @ Chile: http://publiclaboratory.org/place/santiago-chile
• H2S sensing: overview, description
• Balloon Mapping
• How it’s funded: http://publiclaboratory.org/wiki/how-public-lab-funded
• Tool development timeline

  Upcoming Events

• Open Access Week -- October 22 - 28, 2012
• Open Education Week -- March 5-10, 2013
• LEAFFEST

  Projects / Ideas

• A web portal for open hardware design in various languages [Kevin, others]
• Crowdsourced monitorying of lead, mercury and cyanide in gold mining. In case you need more convincing evidence about the dangers of gold mining
• Underwater oceanography using open-source tools (already started this project on PVOS, here.
• A new, local hackerspace on the UMass Amherst campus

[jccarden]

Hi everyone, let´s see if i can get this going, i´m not that experienced with wikis.

So here are two concrete ideas i started thinking after yesterday´s fun meeting:

1. We test if Kevin´s web portal + solar heater can be popularized in Chile, and we evaluate the impact this could have in reducing inhaling smoke, reducing pollution and reducing pressure on local forests that supply firewood. The strategy would inclue trying that the portal Kevin wants to build really grows among the population and they themselves get to build their own solar heaters -we just tell them that they can build them if they want; in another treatment we can do this with extra help by engaging maybe schools and kids we work with to see the videos, get the materials and build the heaters; and in yet another treatment we could try some more explicit and expensive incentives like providing the materials and training to build them, or even the heaters already working. we then evaluate over time temperatures, firewood use and expenditures, emissions, etc. Guess who will design the thermometers and readers for these? we would learn how much this can grow by itself and how much it needs some extra boosts from outside.
2. We test if crowdsourcing of citizens monitoring of mercury and cyanide in gold mining can reduce the use and presence of these toxic materials in waterstreams and the air around mines. We sample 100 mines in Colombia, half will get the DIY instruments for reading and transmitting and we feed a ushahidi-like portal with the data. we monitor over 1-2 years the levels of the contaminants among others and evaluate if making this information public could make the mine managers more accountable. We could also test as in the previous idea if people would be willing to build the measurement instruments themselves as opposed to us building them and providing them, etc.

[dwblair]

Juan Camilo -- great ideas!

For me, two of the most powerful ideas that emerged from our meeting yesterday were

• How important it is to evaluate the impact of these various open software / hardware / infrastructure tools, with respect to some metric that e.g. measures how well they promote the welfare of the population that ends up using them. There are often unintended consequences to certain initiatives, and a lot of energy and enthusiasm can end up being misdirected if "makers", developers, and crowd-sourcing projects don't follow up their initiative with some assessment of impact and consequences.
• How dependent the adoption of a new tool is upon culture and context. The examples discussed re: bribery, stoves, and home insulation have got me thinking about how important an understanding of the particular population for which a tool is intended can be for the success of a project. A lot of resources are spent on the development of tools that, in the mind of their designers, ought to "take off" and have a powerful, positive impact on a given population / issue ... but it's important to think hard at the outset of an initiative about the projected process of the adoption and use of a given tool / technique.

With respect to the project ideas: fantastic:

(1) Web Portal:

• Would the same assessments (smoke inhalation, reduction of pollution, deforestation) be useful in evaluating the impact of e.g. electric stoves? How does one disentangle the effects due to a solar heater initiative from other cultural trends (i.e. the adoption of electric stoves, as well)?
• PVOS, PLOTS, and even a few geek friends of mine would love to set up the kernel for an open sourced thermostat + solar heater design, help with coding the hardware repository, etc.
• Perhaps Marilyn also has resources in mind already for an open hardware online repository?
• In a subsequent comment in this thread, maybe you can even draft a version of the various treatments you mention

(2) Crowdsourced mercury and cyanide sensing:

• The PLOTS DIY Spectrometer design (I showed you that video last night) could be of use here -- it's open source, ready to go, and only requires a smart phone, a chunk of a CD, and some cardboard. They already have an online database of spectra that would allow for the identification of e.g. mercury in soil, following this tutorial at Make magazine. The tool / technique is explicitly intended to be built, maintained, and improved by people without much initial science background. Also check out the relevant links in the wiki above under the "PLOTS" heading. Again, I'd love to see / work on a draft of an outline / timeline of this project.

[dwblair]

Kevin and I had a great discussion re: open source hardware business models and IP last night. Some highlights / questions that came up for me (sorry, Kevin, if I'm getting much of this wrong):

• Open source hardware business models that involve selling assembled hardware with a free design (so that you can build it yourself if you wish) are very profitable in the U.S. But the culture in the U.S. includes a strong DIY subculture, as well as a significant "open source" movement. Even if closed, mass-produced hardware would be cheaper when outsourced, there is a large enough customer base that wants a "DIY, open" flavor to their hardware here to support a hardware designer through the selling of assembled kits.
• In other parts of the world, where e.g. an open-source water pump hardware kit would be very useful, there may be no viable business model. If the design is free (there is no patent, to allow for a designer making money through licensing), and there is no strong "DIY, open" culture, the customers might simply want to buy the cheapest hardware available. In a poor country, the cheapest hardware available is even more strongly preferred. It's hard to see how open hardware business models work in a poor country, at least for me. But this is exactly where this open source approach could really help. Can we envision a model / is there a model out there that allows for open hardware to flourish in a poor country?
• One important goal, I'm gathering, is to find ways of making it easier for various communities to share ideas as freely as possible, minimizing the "friction" to which Charlie has referred earlier. Accordingly, maybe we should reach out to e.g. the business school, and those who are very much pro-patenting ideas, to see what their concerns are, where they're coming from? We'd be even more likely to develop frameworks that minimize friction that way ...
• No matter what, one thing seems clear: not all researchers or students seem to be as aware as they should be of what the rules re: open source and IP are. Not only would it be useful for everyone to know (to minimize friction) -- but informing people that they have the option to open source any tools they develop might even spark them to come up with new ideas that they wouldn't otherwise (because they feel that there is a large legal and financial mountain to ascend before any of their ideas would make any difference in the world.) So education on this issue might free up current ideas, as well as spark new ones, once people see that they can easily broadcast their ideas online, to the larger community. At least, that's how it has been working for me ...

[dwblair]

New article (from last week) in the journal Science: "DIY Tools Save Scientists Thousands of Dollars" (link to the journal article is included at the end of the linked article here)

[pablocarderam]

Here's an example of another front of DIY-opensource movement that's been gaining coverage: http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/thomashoward/blog/2012/09/19/the-1st-public-biobrick-exploring-public-access-to-the-tools-of-synthetic-biology/ Synthetic biology is still in its infancy, but it's about to get to the point of hackability. The idea is to make useful "biological machines" based on lego-like genetic "biobricks". The people at the London Hackspace and UCL are teaming up to build the first truly public biobrick, which will make bacteria able to remove mercury from the environment.

[dwblair]

Pablo -- this is fantastic. The "Knowledge Commons" group on campus is interested in promoting open biology, open chemistry, etc ... looks like the Exeter group already has a lot of momentum, and resources we can look at in order to promote this idea.

Plus, it's a super cool looking technology -- woah!

[dwblair]

Juan Camilo -- Great link. The group that was profiled in the NYTimes article is very active on the Public Laboratory google group -- I've been chatting with Ariel Levi Simmons of Safecast about H2S monitoring technologies. Small world!

[dwblair]

I just updated the wiki above with a link to a new outline of the project proposal, here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sD4ctQbbwwMIfU5jeR1X3fXBkpTw2Rjew2OmBjNn0ok/edit

[jccarden]

hi don, can you authorize my access with jccarden@gmail.commailto:jccarden@gmail.com? thanks jc

De: dwblair [mailto:notifications@github.com] Enviado el: jueves, 15 de noviembre de 2012 09:07 p.m. Para: Pioneer-Valley-Open-Science/pioneer-valley-open-science.github.com CC: Juan Camilo Cardenas Campo Asunto: Re: [pioneer-valley-open-science.github.com] KJCMDMCJMSDZ Working Group (#37)

I just updated the wiki above with a link to a new outline of the project proposal, here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sD4ctQbbwwMIfU5jeR1X3fXBkpTw2Rjew2OmBjNn0ok/edit

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/Pioneer-Valley-Open-Science/pioneer-valley-open-science.github.com/issues/37#issuecomment-10434093.

[dwblair]

I think I just sent you (and the others) an invite? Let me know if that worked for you!

On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 9:09 PM, jccarden notifications@github.com wrote:

hi don, can you authorize my access with jccarden@gmail.com<mailto: jccarden@gmail.com>? thanks jc

De: dwblair [mailto:notifications@github.com] Enviado el: jueves, 15 de noviembre de 2012 09:07 p.m. Para: Pioneer-Valley-Open-Science/pioneer-valley-open-science.github.com CC: Juan Camilo Cardenas Campo Asunto: Re: [pioneer-valley-open-science.github.com] KJCMDMCJMSDZ Working Group (#37)

I just updated the wiki above with a link to a new outline of the project proposal, here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sD4ctQbbwwMIfU5jeR1X3fXBkpTw2Rjew2OmBjNn0ok/edit

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub< https://github.com/Pioneer-Valley-Open-Science/pioneer-valley-open-science.github.com/issues/37#issuecomment-10434093>.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/Pioneer-Valley-Open-Science/pioneer-valley-open-science.github.com/issues/37#issuecomment-10434134.

voice / SMS: +1-651-252-4765 skype: dwingateb

[jccarden]

did work, thanks! jc

De: dwblair [mailto:notifications@github.com] Enviado el: jueves, 15 de noviembre de 2012 09:13 p.m. Para: Pioneer-Valley-Open-Science/pioneer-valley-open-science.github.com CC: Juan Camilo Cardenas Campo Asunto: Re: [pioneer-valley-open-science.github.com] KJCMDMCJMSDZ Working Group (#37)

I think I just sent you (and the others) an invite? Let me know if that worked for you!

On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 9:09 PM, jccarden notifications@github.com wrote:

hi don, can you authorize my access with jccarden@gmail.com<mailto: jccarden@gmail.com>? thanks jc

De: dwblair [mailto:notifications@github.com] Enviado el: jueves, 15 de noviembre de 2012 09:07 p.m. Para: Pioneer-Valley-Open-Science/pioneer-valley-open-science.github.com CC: Juan Camilo Cardenas Campo Asunto: Re: [pioneer-valley-open-science.github.com] KJCMDMCJMSDZ Working Group (#37)

I just updated the wiki above with a link to a new outline of the project proposal, here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sD4ctQbbwwMIfU5jeR1X3fXBkpTw2Rjew2OmBjNn0ok/edit

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub< https://github.com/Pioneer-Valley-Open-Science/pioneer-valley-open-science.github.com/issues/37#issuecomment-10434093>.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/Pioneer-Valley-Open-Science/pioneer-valley-open-science.github.com/issues/37#issuecomment-10434134.

voice / SMS: +1-651-252-4765 skype: dwingateb

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/Pioneer-Valley-Open-Science/pioneer-valley-open-science.github.com/issues/37#issuecomment-10434228.