Category: OSC the Netherlands

The tradition of hosting a satellite event of the Open Science Festival took us to Groningen in October this year! Following the successful set up of last year’s Barcamp in Maastricht, this unconference brought together around 100 open science enthusiasts for a day of exchange, discussion and connection.

In contrast to the programme of the Open Science Festival, the content of the Barcamp sessions is decided on the day itself, based on suggestions by the people in the room. Well, the discussions had actually started a few days earlier on our Mattermost channel, where community members could already propose ideas to gather input and feedback.

_{All photos CC BY Lara Varat}

Despite various train delays, an enthusiastic group gathered in the morning and came up with a diverse set of session proposals. Twelve favorite ideas were selected for the first two breakout rounds. In the afternoon everyone had another chance to propose a session as the format was repeated with another two breakout rounds.

Each session had 45 minutes for the groups to dive into the various topics, including transparency priorities, dilemmas of open publication cultures, the UNL Open Science Strategy, promoting metadata standards and even how to argue with ‘closed’ colleagues. 

The aim of these session is for the community to start exploring a certain topic to continue collaborations after the event. While the Barcamp format limits the number of people that can attend, collaborations on the topic sessions that follow should be open for anyone who is interested. You can find all photos of the day and explore all session notes here and get involved in follow up actions.

Coffee, cake and lunch breaks were held at a central patio with a fountain in the UMCG. A hospital turned out to be a special location where visitors came walking by our information desk interested to hear about our event and jealous of our goodies (t-shirts and OSC-NL fanny packs).

The discussions started in the breakouts continued during the day, and even into the evening when we moved towards a nearby pizza place. Arranging pizza for large crowds is always a challenge, but even hungry vegans were happily munching their pizza’s at some point and Barcamp visitors started to mingle with folks arriving early for the Open Science Festival the next day.

Surely topics from the Barcamp made it into the discussions at the festival where panels, keynote speakers, workshops, posters and market places showcased all the great work on Open Science in the Netherlands. Next to the vastness of the festival, the Barcamp feels like our little cozy rebel space where we can bring a smaller portion of the community together to share visions, brainstorm and connect in an informal environment. We thank LCRDM for co- organising this day with OSC Groningen and OSC-NL, and we hope to keep this tradition going next year!

The results of the Open Science Sticker Contest are in! Over 100 people voted for almost 60 sticker designs and slogans, a massive thank you to all for having participated 🙏.

At the Open Science Festival Barcamp on October 23d and 24th in Groningen you can get your own favourite(s) and make Open Science stick everywhere! See for the winning designs the sticker contest page

Melanie Imming, OSC-NL Executive Team

For our volunteer-based Netherlands Network of Open Science Communities (OSC-NL), using Google Drive & Docs, together with Slack as a communication tool, was cheap and easy. We often need to work collectively and remote on all kinds of documents, and these tools are simply available and well-known.

However, the wish to migrate to a more open and just way of remote collective working was always felt by us. Therefore, when we received resources from the OpenScienceNL programme, we decided to spend some of my time as an OSC-NL Executive Team member on trying to get away from Big Tech.  

What did we do to get where we are now?

Firstly, we set up a small working group of OSC members. We communicated via a Signal group -called OS Nerding Out– that worked on requirements based on the needs for online channels to:

1. – interact with each other
2. – push news to local OSC managers
3. – work together on documents simultaneously
4. – store our work in the cloud

These requirements differed from data storage in the EU or Switzerland, a mature and open-source based solution, to something that most people are allowed to use on their university laptops (the latter turned out to be an impossible requirement in combination with the first two; this is definitely something to discuss with universities when talking about digital sovereignty).

A next step was to look for solutions that fit these requirements. This led to interesting discussions on how open certain open-source solutions actually are, and how beta a solution could be. For instance, we talked to SURF about taking part in their Nextcloud beta-project, but we needed a stable solution fast, so we decided to set up our own instance as soon as possible.

We decided we did not want to run the new set-up ourselves, simply because relying on volunteers is not very sustainable: we so often have seen online communities collapse because someone who took care of hosting it left. We also decided to go with relatively mature solutions. As you can imagine in a working group that is called OS Nerding Out, it took some strength and focus not to go for more edgy solutions 😊. A big thank you to all who participated in this working group is in place! 

We also decided that to keep things affordable, we needed hosting partners that would charge us based on our total usage instead of the amount of users. We anticipated a lot of users that are not there so regularly. That limited our choices a lot, but it saves us a lot of money now.

What do we have now?

We ended up with the combination of a Mattermost instance integrated with Nextcloud and Only Office, which all run on Elest.io in Germany. On Mattermost we communicate with each other in different channels, and on Nextcloud we store all our documents that are automatically opened in OnlyOffice, where we can collaborate in these in real time. In this first initial period this is only meant for members who are active on a national level, for instance members of a working group, the executive team or for knowledge exchange between the OSCs. It is not yet available for local OSCs to use internally. Once we have a better understanding of the usage and therefore the costs, we can look into this option for our local communities as well.

Having found a hosting partner still meant we had to configure quite a few things ourselves, in which Nami Sunami played an important role -so a special thank you to him! The overall support we need to give to our users now that things are up and running is not too time consuming.

Are we happy?

People can find everything in once place with our own look and feel. We now have 63 members in our main Mattermost group that we launched in June. New people come in every week. There we have a NEWS Channel to exchange news between local OSC managers and the national Executive Team, and we can set up channels to use during events that we organise such as the Open Science Barcamp in October. All members can set up channels and threads to talk about whatever they feel is important. Our OS Nerding Out Signal group has a new home there as well!

We are surprised by how easy we work together in our shared docs. We can also share info such as participants lists for events with those who need that information in real time, which we did not want to do before using Google Drive because of the GPDR.

The usage varies a lot; as expected the OSC-NL Executive Team uses the setup on a daily basis, others only visit every once in a while, which is fine. The fact that we now have one central space where people can find information or post a question is great. We see the amount of active users steadily going up as well.

Costs for now are around 60 euros a month, so we have to look into sustainability after our OSC NL Executive Team project ends in a few years. For now it is great to see that, together with the in-person national meetings for local Open Science Community managers we organise on a regular basis, the knowledge exchange between these communities is getting easier and easier. This is awesome! The fact that we have left Google and Slack behind makes it even better.

We are also in the process of setting up an open online toolkit with OSC/Open Science related information and examples in Codeberg, so there is more news about our online set up coming soon! If you also want to set up a configuration like this for a community, and you would want to know more about our specifics, please contact us via mattermost [at] oscnlchat.nl