Let’s Make Open Better, Together

4 Events focused on Issues of Social Justice and Openness at the Open Publishing Fest this week…

https://openpublishingfest.org/calendar.html#social_justice_and_openness

Image Pasted at 2020-5-24 15-30

How To Advocate in these Weird Times

Participants: Ginny Barbour, Eleanor Colla, Mandy Henk,

These past few weeks have seen our social, personal, and professional lives turned on their head. Virtually nobody has been untouched by the effects of COVID-19 on our lives and livelihoods. For anyone who advocates for open access or related issues, there has been an added twist: finally the rest of the world has caught up with what we have been talking about for years. Open knowledge has suddenly become the norm. Research papers are pouring onto open platforms, traditional publishers have prised open their paywalls, data is being shared widely and even the importance of good metadata and open licenses are being discussed.

So how do we ensure this new normal doesn’t fade away as the pandemic comes under control?

https://openpublishingfest.org/calendar.html#event-192

Beyond Diversity

Participants: Christina Dunbar-Hester, Shamika Goddard, Heeni Hoterene, Mandy Henke

Diversity has long been a goal for open projects, but too often we haven’t been successful building diverse communities. Maybe we’ve been aiming for the wrong thing—what if we decided to move beyond diversity and work towards a digital world grounded in justice and equity?

https://openpublishingfest.org/calendar.html#event-191

Protecting Cultural Knowledge

Participants: Morgan Tunzelmann, Crystal Chan

We will discuss ways to build cultural considerations into media and design choices. Attendees are welcome to share their own examples of publishing culturally sensitive materials in an open access environment, as we will allow time for discussion.

https://openpublishingfest.org/calendar.html#event-180

Labour Implications in Open Publishing

Participants: Phil Barker, Lorna Campbell, Billy Meinke-Lau, Pat Lockley

This session focuses on the topics of digital labor, social justice, and technology in relation to open publishing and Open Educational Resources (OER). It will take the form of a Twitter chat that will be seeded by questions and provocations.

Labor Implications in Open Publishing

https://openpublishingfest.org/calendar.html#event-172

More Fest Vids

Fest concept paper

the draft concept paper I put together for the fest before we started. Linked below and I’ve included the full text below also just in case..the linked version is prettier tho..

https://openpublishingfest.org/paper.html

————–

  • People are fatigued with video conferencing
  • People are up and down, down and out
  • We need to switch up the format. Let’s create a festival that is fun and have a “drop in, drop out” feel to it.
  • Cheer folks up, celebrate open.

Concept

A festival, not a conference. Takes place over two weeks in May (May 18-29). We take the idea (but not literally) of “tents” as venues within a festival. There are many tents and each is curated around a certain theme. These tents have rolling events, sometimes gaps, sometimes gapless. Many events occur across all tents simultaneously. The tents relate to themes — Open Content, Open Source Software, and Open Publishing Models. There may also be a “main stage”.

All events are curated by thematic teams of people we trust. Each event is online. The festival website maintains the program of events. The central website is going to be very much like a festival programme, pointing to various events on each day you may wish to browse.

Content Themes

Open Content, Open Source Software, and Open Publishing Models are the themes of the Open Publishing Awards. We may also have a “main stage”.

Within this we will invite a number of trusted people collaboratively curate these threads. We have so far hooked initial interest from Dan Rudmann (Punctum Books), Christine Fruin (Atla), Chris Hartgerink (Liberate Science), and John Chodacki (FORCE11/California Digital Library) as well as a few others.

The content within these 3 themes will cover a lot of scholarly communications projects and materials but it won’t be exclusively Schol Comms. We may want to specifically branch into several areas including the open publishing of blueprints for emergency COVID-19 hardware — and the issues around this eg https://safecast.org/2020/03/announcing‑the‑covid‑19‑testing‑map/, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as‑it‑happens‑thursday‑edition‑1.5502954/canadian‑doctor‑who‑works‑in‑gaza‑makes‑3d‑printed‑face‑shields‑for‑covid‑19‑1.5502964 as well as highlighting interesting publishing initiatives such as: https://coronavirustechhandbook.com/ and also the very interesting developments around publishers opening up their articles for covid-19 research: https://wellcome.ac.uk/press‑release/publishers‑make‑coronavirus‑covid‑19‑content‑freely‑available‑and‑reusable

Event Formats

Each event must take the form of one of the following:

  • panel discussion
  • fire side chat
  • demo

In addition we will have an opening and closing event (format tbd).

Streaming Formats + Tech

We will place no requirements on streaming tech, folks can use whatever they like, we will place an emphasis on giving us the recordings immediately after so we can keep an archive online for all events in almost-realtime.

Stand up a Mattermost instance. Low-fi (techwise) but good looking WordPress site, easy to update.

Scheduling

We will not require live events to be co-ordinated with timezones or timeslots. People that are contributing can choose a time that suits them as long as it is scheduled on the site before the festival starts. The site will look after converting timezones in the listings for display.

The Spice

Events to be augmented by performances.

Examples:

Puppeteers such as Hannah Clarke and Jon Coddington: https://silotheatre.tumblr.com/post/167022898348/qa‑puppet‑master‑jon‑coddington, http://www.puppetfiction.net/who.html, https://www.georgefm.co.nz/home/music/2019/11/watch‑fat‑freddy‑s‑drop‑return‑as‑marionettes‑in‑new‑video‑for.html

Jenny Ritchie and Immogen Stone, aerialists: https://www.jennyritchie.comhttps://www.imogenstone.co.nz/projects.html

TimesUp and Foam: http://www.timesup.org/overview/works https://fo.am/

Additional Ideas

Social Events, Kids Events, Festival Radio… tbd

Coko

Coko will be in the background for this. We are the founding org but we want to promote everyone in this space even our “competition”. We did this very well with the Open Publishing Awards (https://openpublishingawards.org/) and we want to take the same strategy with this.

Budget

Coko will cover initial costs.

Summary

This event will not only bring a lot of attention to some amazing open publishing projects but also get people engaged and help with both the ‘zoom fatigue’ and stir craziness we are all feeling. The end result will be a fun festival you can browse (either synchronously or asynchronously via the archive), and drop in and out of as you have time / attention.

Contact

adam@coko.foundation or chat at https://mattermost.openpublishingfest.org

Virtual Book Sprints

The amazing Book Sprints team…

While some organisations have really struggled to adapt to remote working during this time, we were actually fairly used to it and had good systems in place. Although we spent the last ten years running Sprints in real space in different places around the world, we were at the same time working remotely with our own production team. Connected across at least 7 different countries and timezones from to Nicaragua to New Zealand, our book designers, illustrators, copy editors and project managers have to coordinate well and turn around tasks very quickly. Our internal online collaboration is aided by a good mix of tools including the collaborative book production platform Editoria, the collaborative design application Figma and the the open source chat software Mattermost.

We now do Virtual Book Sprints

This written by a recent client to Book Sprints – Red Hat. The article documents their experience.

The key to success with this model is experienced and trusted facilitation, and excellent logistical support. Our Book Sprint facilitation team came through with flying colors.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-we-wrote-300-page-security-book-two-weeks-keith-basil/