Over the last so-many years, I’ve worked to put together many alliances and consortia, starting with the Open Source Streaming Alliance I co-founded in Amsterdam in 2000 or so with Drazen Pantic, Robert Geus, Jaromil and others, through to helping establish the Substance Consortium recently.
So, it shouldn’t be surprising that I’m involved in a new initiative to develop a new group, this time around open source and open science. The group is called The Open Source Alliance for Open Science. It was previously called ‘Open Source Super Friends’, which I preferred, but you win some and you lose some.
We are putting on a first event in Portland in May. It is invitation-only but you can request an invite here. We also have $ to sponsor travel.
The alliance is put together to help form a network of good-faith practitioners who wish to learn from each other to build a healthy ecosystem of tools and approaches to solving all the crazy problems in open science. My interest is in the ‘publishing’ (sharing) side of this, but when you get down to it, open science is, at its core, really a sharing issue. Open science is, in a sense, a publishing (small ‘p’) issue.
So if this is of interest to you, please apply. If you get turned down, it is probably because we consider you to be from an organisation that is not a good-faith actor in this sector. All proprietary projects fit that description, but also there are some open source projects out there that fit that description. If you are an open source project and get turned down, then I recommend you look deep inside your soul… you are being kept out for a reason.
