This is the seventeenth post of a series of profiles on GOSH community members who were featured in the GOSH Community Events Framework. You can access the framework, along with this profile in its original format, on the GOSH website at https://openhardware.science/gosh-community-events-framework/.
By Marcela Basch, independent journalist, Argentina. Twitter: @marbasch
Pierre Padilla Huamantinco is a lecturer and researcher at the Department of Engineering from Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia.
With a background in Electronics Engineering and Biomedical Informatics in Global Health, he is co-coordinator at Health Innovation Lab from Institute of Tropical Medicine “Alexander von Humboldt’’. As a biohacking and DIY Bio enthusiast, he is the director of Biomakers Lab and the Peru coordinator of Syntechbio, a network of biohacker spaces in Latin America and The Caribbean.
Pierre collaborated with Andrés Ochoa in DIY Biology and open science biomedical hardware. He told him about the first TecnoX meeting, a regional interdisciplinary initiative to promote open and regionally appropriate technologies that started in Argentina in 2016, driven by Alejandro Nadra and Ignacio Sanchez. Through TecnoX he met the nascent Latin American biohacker community. The following year, Pierre attended the second GOSH meeting, in Santiago (Chile), where he shared the Gorgas project, an open source GPS tracker. In 2018, he participated in the third GOSH meeting, in China. With the Latin American GOSH community and TecnoX, he was part of the writing team of the GOSH residencies proposal (reGOSH).
reGOSH, residencies for Latin America
“During TecnoX 2018, in Valparaíso (Chile), we started drafting a proposal to organise a program of residencies decentralised in nodes, where each year one country would receive people, in order to stimulate thematic networks that help strengthen the current initiatives in the region, exchange knowledge and create and reinforce local and regional capacities,” explains Pierre. The proposal was submitted to the Ibero-American Programme for Science and Technology Development (CYTED) in the category of open science, and won a three-year funding to establish a Latin American network of open technologies. “This allowed us to afford mobility expenses, so that each network node could send two representatives to the residency,” explains Pierre.
The first residency took place in 2019 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The second was planned for March 2020 at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia Lima, Peru. “I formed the organising team for the activities with students, teachers and researchers from the university. My work in the first stage was to organise meetings to consolidate some of the country’s own guidelines, to reflect the needs of our context and, based on that, to propose specific topics for the residency,” explains Pierre. “We proposed to work in biomedicine, around communicable diseases, to develop diagnostic tools or low-cost instruments that could complement health centers that might need equipment. Public health was our driving force. I have been able to perceive some gaps in the Peruvian health system, and in some other countries in the region as well: care and capacities tend to be in urban areas, centralized in the capital. So we wanted, within the framework of this residency, to be able to work on open science hardware projects: flexible, modifiable, scalable hardware that can be used according to the interests of the user who wants to replicate them”.
COVID-19 changed the plans, so they had to rethink the activities and make them remote. Pierre led the organisation of a series of talks promoting open science hardware, in coordination with representatives of the other six nodes. “Part of my day-to-day work is to show that open science hardware is one more option among the many that exist today, in this case for students,” he summarizes. Now they are facing how to set up a residency remotely. “Perhaps with a virtual workshop, and then we’ll see which solutions are viable to implement in each node: perhaps they can access inputs and develop distributed work. We had to bet on digital platforms”.
Diversity
“One of the features of GOSH is diversity. There is an exhaustive search for representatives from different communities so that they can have a voice in the meeting, to share, to learn and to discuss,” Pierre emphasises. “And the other key feature is the spaces that are generated, in different modalities, where each of its members can contribute from their experience, no matter what their background is. Non-academic knowledge is not invalidated, such as indigenous ancestral knowledge, which comes from a process different from that of science,” he highlights. “It helps to have formats that don’t just stay at the pencil and paper level, but also involve getting your hands dirty. The combination of unconferences, hands-on workshops and keynotes allows us to express ourselves, share, learn and create new networks and links, which are increasingly important,” he says. “All this is framed in the values of GOSH, which can be seen in the Manifesto and the Roadmap: everything is already framed in a global community, but it’s about finding a balance to align it with local interests and needs in each place.”
The reGOSH team sought to maintain these values of diversity. “Sometimes this is neglected, and there are no non-urban or non-capital city people at the events. Avoiding this requires a lot of work, contemplating different profiles in the working groups. The most coherent thing to do is to invite people who can be bridges with these other areas to co-organise, so that the movement and the effort is decentralised,” he says. “It is a constant effort to try to identify these people, establish and maintain these links; for example, we relate to independent groups that use open hardware for education in Cusco and Arequipa. We thought about doing the residency outside Lima, but the challenge is in resources and facilities, because even though we are seeking to decentralise, only in Lima do we count on the university.”
Taking something home
“Another enriching element of GOSH is the documentation, which is information generated that remains for future members of the community and is useful to learn,” says Pierre. “It also generates in the participants a certain anxiety of wanting to participate in everything, and a fear of missing out on something. For us it was quite exciting to have that range of options to be able to learn something new, to return to our country with something that we can potentially apply in what we do in day-to-day life.”