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Open Science and Opportunities for Local Biomanufacturing in Africa : Mboalab's shared lessons on Bioreagents, Diagnostic kits and open-source devices for Medical Labs.
MboaLab Biotech is an open and collaborative space located in Yaoundé, Cameroon. It is a DiY Open bioeconomy research unit established in 2018 with the support of the Open Bioeconomy Lab and the Shuttleworth Foundation.
At its core, our work in Mboalab Biotech is focused on making biotechnology research and tools more accessible to labs around the world through scientific research and development and local production of reagents. We are committed to the development of open educational resources as well as simple and cost-effective protocols that can be applied in resource-limited laboratories. We also provide scientific research projects targeting local health issues, internships opportunities, and training sessions to young local scientists in order to equip them with molecular biology and DIY- Biology skills, and prepare them for employment. The lab currently runs a number of projects amongst which the open enzyme manufacturing project, open-source devices and Covid19 & Typhoid diagnostic tests. During the FlashForward event, we will share lessons learned from our experience in open science for local biomanufacturing. -
How are we promoting Creative Commons license with Ebooks in Tamil Language?
FreeTamilEbooks.com run by Kaniyam Foundation, Tamilnadu, India is a pioneer project in Tamil Language.
We collect content from authors, get them released in Creative Commons license, add cover images, we make them as ebooks in epub, mobi, PDF formats. All for free.
It has 650+ books, 200+ authors, 8 million+ downloads in 8 years.
Will explore on how it started and the ebook making process, so that it can be replicated for any language.
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Why prison philanthropy sucks
→ Kelsey Kauffman
US philanthropies have discovered prisons in the past few years, including Mellon, Zuckerberg, Ford, any many others. In doing so they consistently favor high priced, glamorous programs on the east and west coasts, pouring millions into just a few prisons out of the 3,000 in the US. Programs that compete for this money spend a small fortune themselves on writing grants and courting philanthropists. What models of philanthropy would work better? (hint: flash grants!)
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Your Heroic Journey: Resilience for Social Entrepreneurs
→ Hero Coalition Founder/CEO Chase Masterson, Chief Psychologist Dr. Janina Scarlet
When “saving the world” is on your to-do list, it’s a good idea to have a plan of action to save yourself. On our Hero’s Journeys, we often face the monsters of loneliness, burn-out, exhaustion, anxiety, depression, self-doubt, and fear. How can we develop resilience and self-compassion to see us through? Shuttleworth Flash Grant recipient Chase Masterson and psychologist/neuroscientist Dr. Janina Scarlet discuss research-based tools to prevent burn-out, practice self-care, and maximize your time and productivity while staying sane, especially in the age of covid. Join us!
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Running an amazing FLOSS project on free open source software (not proprietary)
→ Redon Skikuli
Amazing free open source projects, big tech communities and really smart people have worked hard and for decades to create collaboratively free software, open data and online privacy projects. Usually, members of these communities or big organisations are quite vocal about the importance and the value that their software represents. Unfortunately, some of these organizations decide not to have the same approach when it comes to their own digital infrastructure and that's in a way understandable. Everyone online is using something proprietary, which makes it really inconvenient to try to convince everyone to not use these big tech platforms. It's a chicken and egg problem right? There is another side though. In less than 30 minutes, we will showcase the importance of offering reliable infrastructure based on free open source tools and hopefully will convince you and your team to start migrating to FLOSS.
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Bring your own thoughts: The Wikimedia ecosystem and the open research landscape
→ Daniel Mietchen
Imagine a research ecosystem where activities are recorded in public by default, for everyone to see and engage. Now consider how it does or could interact with the open knowledge ecosystem around Wikipedia.
Let's explore this in a flipped session format, i.e. you peruse some optional seed materials - videos of existing monologues - before the session and we then use the session to engage in dialogue about the topic.
3 videos:
- Open research https://youtu.be/LwW1-X3glak (90s)
- Wikidata https://youtu.be/24DOvuZWaD0 (7 min)
- Wikimedia and open research https://youtu.be/SZH7JGawsrY (10 min)
The videoconference link will be shared via the etherpad.
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What does data obscure about the reality of systemic racism? A frank discussion about whiteness and how it limits our perspectives
→ Allison Harbin
We throw around the term “systemic racism” quite a lot, at times using it to excuse individual racism. We have all read the troubling statistics about institutional racism in research and education. But, what have we personally done about it? I argue that in reducing this reality to percentages, we risk glossing over the on-the-ground reality of how systemic racism negatively impacts both minorities as well as those with privilege. As a humanist, I approach a critique of data usage by arguing we must attach real people and their lived experiences to these numbers if we are serious about seeing a meaningful change in the world.
The discussion will go as follows:
First, I will begin the discussion by introducing these complex and sensitive terms, such as white privilege, white fragility, and colorblind racism. I will do so through a discussion of my own process of coming to terms with my own white privilege and the accompanying white fragility. (approximately 5 minutes)
Second, in order to demonstrate that data cannot account for lived realities, I will then read a short section of my forthcoming book about white teachers, what we don’t understand about our Black and brown students, and just how damaging our ignorance is to minors’ sense of self and determination. Rather than focusing on the widespread impact of systemic and individual racism, I show how this impacted one student in particular, and what they had to say about it. (15 minutes)
And lastly, I would like to open it up for a discussion about how we grapple with our own race, class, or gender privilege, why it is such a difficult self-reckoning few are willing to do, and hopefully illustrate the profound value of doing so, for yourself, and beyond. (20 minutes)
About me: I’m the author of Post-PhD the blog, originally began as a whistle blower to abuses of power and research exploitation in higher education, but has since expanded to address secondary education and its exploitation of POC. I also run the weekly newsletter NSFS: Not Safe for School, where I send a snark-filled dispatch that includes anti-racist reading recommendations, new Post-PhD alerts, and my personal musings on my journeys across the underbellies of both higher education and secondary education in the U.S.
I’m a former academic who studied intersectional feminism and anti-racist contemporary art for her doctorate. After my dramatic exodus from academia, I became a teacher in an urban high school in the U.S. that is overwhelmingly Black and brown. I’m currently on hiatus from teaching to finish my book, which is currently nearly finished (at least I hope so).
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The portrait of a hackerspace
Open Labs Albania is the first hackerspace in Albania dedicated to Free and Open Source Software, online privacy and public domain. It is a community based non-governmental and non-for-profit organization, active since 2012. Our community has grown and has been empowered through the organization of various events, from small gatherings of presenting open source technologies to large conferences, bringing together free libre open source technology users, developers, academics, governmental agencies and people who share the idea that software should be free and open for the local community and governments to develop.
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AI/ML for Democracy
→ Luke Jordan
Much valuable and necessary work is going into defending democracy from AI/ML capabilities deployed by large and unaccountable actors. Alongside that work, can we find ways to advance democracy using open AI/ML capabilities in the hands of ordinary people? Can small and/or fine-tuned text models help public defenders, can causal learning support ordinary participants in citizen assemblies, and/or can graph-based and predictive methods help movements overcome false positives and grow to robustly challenge power? Those are some of the use cases I'm exploring as part of a residency at the MIT Governance Lab for the next six months. I'll briefly present how the exploration is structured, some initial ideas just as illustrations and foils, and then seek to have a robust discussion on possibilities. This work is focused strongly on practice, and on the 80%+ of the democratic world that does not live in the EU or the US, and which will define the democratic future.
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Healthy Forests, Healthy People
→ Tara Tiger Brown
I'm a graduate student at UBC Faculty of Forestry, a certified forest medicine practitioner and a forest monk! You may have heard of forest bathing (shinrin-yoku) and its many benefits to your health and wellbeing. My research project will analyze the physical and environmental factors that Japan has established at their Forest Medicine bases and apply that criteria to some of British Columbia's ancient forests. The outcome that I hope for is to set up an open environmental monitoring dataset that correlates to optimal forest bathing experiences for your health and wellbeing.
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Alt-economies and gamified education: how we implemented social currency usage with kids in favelas as part of an educational game.
→ Flávia Macêdo, Karla Córdoba and Luiz Hadad
Educar+ is an educational NGO that supports kids in a favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. With the Flash Grant and the partnership with Muda Outras Economias - a booster network that seeks to encourage cultural, educational, and socio-environmental actions with the circulation of their own social currency - we implemented a self-directed gamified learning methodology that included the issuance of the social currency to reward kids for their engagement. During this event, Flávia Macêdo (Educar+), Karla Córdoba (Cambiatus), and Luiz Hadad (Muda) are going to discuss the relevance of granting access to alternative economies and education to vulnerable communities, as well as the challenges and opportunities of this ongoing project.
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Can Citizen Science & Audio Recordings Really Save the World?
→ Alasdair Davies & Jessie Oliver
In recent years, both citizen science and use of audio recordings to monitor nature have rapidly grown! We want to have an open conversation about the good, the bad, and the ugly of both. If you are curious to learn what citizen science is, or how people are using sound for wildlife conservation and planetary health purposes, we will give a brief introduction to both, so join us! If you are an expert in either or both of these topics, then we would love for you to dive in and share your experiences! We’ll be asking questions like: Where do you think we are in that hype curve? How can we empower people with new ways to sustain their local natural environments? What’s needed to make scalable solutions? If you have any burning questions feel free to send them ahead (via slack) or sing out on the day! If nobody feels chatty on the day, then we will have a wee geek out session with Alasdair Davies (Twitter: @Al2kA) sharing his experience with being part of the AudioMoth team, and Jessie Oliver (twitter: @JessieLOliver) will share her research about designing #citsci tech to engage people with calls of the wild and join the search for sneaky, endangered species like Australia’s Eastern bristlebirds.
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Facebook vs Murdoch: step right up to watch the world heavyweight championship prize fight in Australia.
→ Julia Reda, Peter Murray-Rust and Suelette Dreyfus
The Australian Govt’s new Media Code will force Facebook and Google to pay media outlets for news content in Australia. Both appear to have caved to government pressure created by the new legislation. In the process, FB unfriended Australia, blocking news for an entire continent last week in a behemoth standoff. 24 million confused people discovered the stark power of Big Tech to rule news in our lives as they had never seen it before.
Pushing Big Tech to the negotiating table to write annual cheques to Murdoch’s News Ltd is being hailed as The Big Victory for journalism and the public interest – but is it?
Come join us for an informal discussion with @Julia Reda, @Peter Murray-Rust, and @Suelette Dreyfus about the information ecosystem– who makes it, who can access it - and who really pays for it.
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Shuttleworth Foundation AMA
→ Helen Turvey and Karien Bezuidenhout
This is your opportunity to meet the Shuttleworth team: Helen, Karien and Jason. Come learn about how we work and gain insight into our approach to philanthropy, open and the social change ideas we support. This will be an AMA (ask me anything) session, so come with your questions and lets see what happens.
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Visualizing the global research ecosystem via Wikidata and Scholia
→ Daniel Mietchen
Research takes place in a sociotechnical ecosystem that connects researchers with the objects of study and the natural and cultural worlds around them.
Wikidata is a community-curated open knowledge base in which concepts covered in any Wikipedia — and beyond — can be described and annotated collaboratively.
This session is devoted to demoing Scholia, an open-source tool to visualize the global research ecosystem based on information in Wikidata about research fields, researchers, institutions, funders, databases, locations, publications, methodologies and related concepts.
The videoconference link will be shared via the etherpad. The slides are available via http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4552926
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Flash Grants - hacking philanthropy
→ Helen Turvey and Dan Blah
Flash Grants are (un)designed to recognise, support and encourage important work for social good - an attempt to start to move to a more decentralised, trust based form of philanthropy. Join Helen Turvey (Shuttleworth Foundation) and Dan Blah (Reset.tech) for a discussion about Flash Grants, and hopes for how we can do more.
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BOOKMARKED: Launching PREE Ink
→ Diana McCaulay, Isis Semaj-Hall, rest TBD
I'm Annie Paul and I edit an online digital magazine of writing out of Jamaica/Caribbean called PREE (preelit.com). We'll be doing a launch event for our first print anthology and sharing insights for writers on the best way to present their work when submitting to magazines, editors and/or competitions.
How do you make your story, poem or article stand out from the crowd? Are there any common mistakes writers make in sending their work out? A panel discussion with Diana McCaulay (Judge, The Commonwealth Short Story Prize); Kwame Dawes (editor-in-chief at Prairie Schooner magazine) and Luke Neima (deputy editor of Granta).
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Principles of Governing Open Source Commons
Open source culture is characterized by a DIY ethic: things happen when self-directed people make them happen. However, open source communities also struggle with common challenges of sustainability and decision-making; even successful open source projects face serious crises of maintenance and resource allocation. Fortunately, there are known principles of “institutional design” that can aid communities in developing systems of decision-making and accountability – which is to say, governance. Developed through the SustainOSS network, the “Open Source Governance Guide” is modeled on Elinor Ostrom’s principles of Governing the Commons. This session will consider the context and current state of the Open Source Governance Guide, soliciting feedback on its contents and considering ways in which these approaches to governance development might be useful to open source communities of all kinds.
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Opening access to COVID vaccines and health for all
→ Diarmaid McDonald, Achal Prabhala
A conversation about the vital role of patient-led activism in taking on the monopoly powers of big pharma, securing health for all, and beating COVID.
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Who gets to participate in open science projects?
→ Paz Bernaldo, Gustavo Pereyra Irujo
Often, those who get to participate in open science projects are those who are already part of scientific institutions and/or have related jobs, salaries, and assigned time and resources to get involved. As a consequence, a reproduction of structural exclusion and knowledge inequality takes place. This was one of our lessons learned as part of Vuela, an open source drone project, and one we are starting to further reflect on and write about in a publication. We invite you to participate in a discussion about strategies to mitigate and fight this hard to break phenomenon.
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What does it take for a black woman to be on Portuguese Wikipedia?
→ Érica Azzellini
This is a talk about notability criteria on Wikipedia, community relations, knowledge equity and the lack of reliable sources covering the lives of black women. It is also a talk about how women in Brazil and Portugal are setting different projects to discuss those issues and overcome the gap in other women's biographies on the lusophone Wikipedia. Many challenges ahead of us!
Let’s share our experiences! Watch it on YouTube (link TBD) and join me on Google Meet (https://meet.google.com/uqk-ngwc-kwj) for brainstorming strategies to bring marginalized narratives to Wikipedia’s sum of all knowledge.
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How to run your own open fest
→ Adam Hyde, Julien Taquet and Jason Hudson
A brief introduction to the Open Fest Software designed by Coko. How to use it, what the concepts are behind it.
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A journey on improving open-source tools for 2D animation
→ Konstantin Dmitriev
My name is Konstantin Dmitriev, I am from Gorno-Altaisk, Russia. My main interests are 2D animation/anime and libre/open-source software. So, my work is focused on development of open-source tools for 2D animation and applying any kind of open-source approaches in animation production (this includes copyleft licenses, open movies, crowdsourced content, etc.)
I am heading a small animation studio, where my team is making animated shorts using free software (https://morevnaproject.org/animated-shorts/). In the studio we are also doing weekly workshops for teenagers to help them learn to create animation using free software tools.
In 2013 I have received a Flash Grant, which I have used to improve the open-source 2D animation tool Synfig - https://www.synfig.org/. In my talk I would like to tell my story on how Flash Grant helped to improve open-source animation tools and what my team has been able to accomplish since then.
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Privacy and the Petrol Pump
→ Suelette Dreyfus
This is a Lightening chat about surveillance in everyday life and the way our lives are being redefined by not just cameras, but what is behind them.
Meeting ID: 951 1648 8769 Passcode: 1234
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Creative Resistance / Justice Resilience: Making Space for Collective Stories
→ Branda Miller
Together, we'll have a conversation to explore making space for collective stories from the grassroots up. I'd like to create a space to learn from Shuttleworth Flash Grantees about their tips and strategies, struggles and successes. How do you create a platform in your community to engage in dynamic, generative creative resistance? In what ways has your community used story-telling in inter-sectional struggles for justice? I hope to create a space to listen as much as informally share my own experiences at Media Sanctuary in North Troy, NY, where our mission is to “use art and participatory action to promote social and environmental justice and freedom of creative expression!"
Meeting ID: 858 2957 9793 Passcode: resistance
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The importance of source code: semiotics, algorithms and the rule of law.
→ Javier de la Cueva
We are battling against Spanish Government to obtain the source code of an application that is used to decide if a person has the right to obtain electricity grants. Their position is security by obscurity, which we believe is contrary to the rule of law. We have the right to know how an algorithm works in order not only to protect our rights, but to be able to make our own decisions.
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Advancing Surgical Simulation-Based Training Through Open-Source 3D Printing Technology
→ Julielynn Wong, MD, MPH, FACPM
5 billion people lack access to safe, timely, and affordable surgical care. 3D4MD is helping to design open-source, 3D printable, high fidelity, low-cost surgical simulation models to advance surgical education and care in the most challenging places to those who need it the most. We have used open-source software to design 3D printable cylinders of representative thicknesses, diameters, and porosities of common fracture sites of tibial bones. We have used open-source 3D printing software to select settings (i.e. perimeters, shell thickness, infill percentage, and pattern) to simulate the compact bone thickness and cancellous bone microarchitecture at common closed tibial fracture sites for high fidelity, low-cost, orthopedic surgery simulation training. We can use open-source software to segment representative tibial fractures from open-source, de-identified radiology imaging databases and create 3D printable high-fidelity, patient-based bone models for advanced orthopedic skills training. All our 3D printed models are designed to be made on affordable, open-source, open filament, and offline 3D printers that print biodegradable plastic that costs pennies a gram. Access to high-quality orthopedic care in low to middle income countries is limited by a lack of providers, resources, and training programs. Using open-source, high fidelity, low-cost 3D printed models to train medical officers and non-orthopedic surgeons to become confident and competent in performing tibial fracture fixation procedures would save limbs and lives in resource-constrained settings.
