Community
GOSH is an international community of artists, makers, hackers, scientists, designers, organizers, educators, and entrepreneurs working to make open source science hardware (OScH) widespread across the globe. There are also several regional and self-organized OScH communities, such as AfricaOSH, Great Lakes GOSH, and reGOSH (which is based in Latin America). Read more about these communities here!
Community Council
The GOSH Community Council oversees or delegates all tasks, questions and issues related to governance of the GOSH community, and coordinates the allocation of community funds to activities like regional events and collaborative hardware development programs.
GOSH Community Council elections are held annually. Those elected to the Community Council are referred to as Community Council Members. Generally, GOSH Community Council membership persists for 2-year terms, with the exception of several 1-year terms seated in the first election, enabling a staggering of terms year over year.
2022-2023 GOSH Community Council Members
Frank Landon Bentum
I’m Frank, the Executive Manager and Community Coordinator for the Africa Open Science Hardware Community. My passion lies in using technology to address local challenges and drive innovation, particularly in Africa. Open-source hardware excites me, and I see tremendous potential for its applications in Africa. I am keen on harnessing community-based systems to foster innovation and tackle local issues. Feel free to explore the exciting EU project (African European Maker Innovation Ecosystem (mAkE))we’re currently involved in, where we focus on makerspaces as digital innovation hubs for local manufacturing in Africa and Europe at makeafricaeu.org.
Harold Tay
I’m a mechanical engineer by training, but I’ve branched into software and electronics and have worked in systems programming, scientific programming, and underwater acoustics and underwater robotics. Now I mostly do passive acoustic monitoring equipment for ecologists. I’m based in Singapore.
I view open science hardware as a tool to advance understanding using the scientific method. Just as reasoning that cannot be challenged leads to incorrect conclusions, science hardware that cannot be examined can have only bad outcomes.
I like that GOSH is a good mix of academics, engineers, and blue sky experimentalists. Probably I would be considered a libertarian-leaning, hacker-sympathetic engineer.
Laura Olalde
I am an artist, educator and independent researcher and I am part of GOSH community since 2017, year in which I attended for the first time to a GOSH Global Meeting in Chile. Much of my artistic research has been framed since the last decade under the sciart co-production modality together with molecular biologists and social scientists, in an independent and self- managed way, which motivated my interest in building open hardware devices to facilitate access to our practices. For this reason I joined the GOSH community with great enthusiasm and embraced their vision of making scientific hardware ubiquitous by 2025 and facilitating the appropriation of open technologies to the community. Having assisted the GOSH community as a documentation team coordinator during the 2018 GOSH Global Meetings in Shenzhen, China, and most recently in Panama (2022), I am honored to be an elected member since 2021 of the GOSH Community Council. I am part of the reGOSH Buenos Aires, Argentina node where I currently live and I am open to generate networks of collaborations on a regional and global scale.
Liz Barry
I’m Liz Barry (she/her), serving my second of two terms as GOSH Community Councilor. On the Council, I work on governance topics such as the Constitution. In open science hardware circles, I’m most known as a co-founder of Public Lab, have been involved with open science since 2009, and am signatory #164 on the GOSH manifesto. Currently, I’m Head of Partnerships at the Computational Democracy Project, where we bring open source data science to deliberative democracy through Pol.is. When I was first starting out, I spent years listening to strangers on sidewalks with a Talk To Me sign and then throwing parties for everyone I met to meet each other. Helping people self-organize around questions at scale is a hallmark of my professional practice. Here’s a link to my candidate statement on the GOSH Forum: https://forum.openhardware.science/t/candidate-statement-liz-barry/2872/2. I look forward to hearing from you! My name on the forum is @lizbarry.
Pen-Yuan Hsing
As a multidisciplinary researcher passionate about the role of science in society and civic engagement, Pen-Yuan Hsing co-founded a growing citizen science project for ecological monitoring and is a frequent advocate for free culture and open science (and edited a guide to open source code for scientists). Being one of the first to receive official certification from the Creative Commons on open licensing, Pen uses his 15+ years of science outreach experience to organise public engagement events from a beginner Arduino workshop to a seminar discussing problems with the current copyright system.
Pen serves the research and open science community not just through GOSH, but also in an advisory capacity to organisations such as NASA
or UNESCO on open science policy.
Going forward, Pen hopes to work with others (you!) to creatively expand the circle of liberty for knowledge and creativity.
Pierre Padilla-Huamantinco
Pierre Padilla Huamantinco received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and an M.S. degree in Biomedical Informatics in Global Health. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in Biological and Medical Engineering and is a Graduate Researcher at Wenzel Lab from the Institute for Biological and Medical Engineering. He has been participating in open science hardware communities since 2014. His main contributions and collaborations with the global community have been: A DIY-BIO guide for setting up biohacking spaces (available in four languages) and the proposal of reGOSH (the Latin American venue for open-source technologies). His research interest includes microbiome analysis using open hardware and microfluidics.
Eng. Valerian Linus Sanga
Eng. Valerian Linus Sanga is the Co-Founder and CEO of Bongo Tech & Research Labs (formerly STICLab; The first Tanzanian Makerspace), which is a beacon of technological innovation in Tanzania. He is also a Co-Founder & CEO of Tanzania Open Science Hardware (TanzaniaOSH – the NGO which aims at promoting the use and adoption of open Sciences, Hardware, and Technologies in realizing sustainable solutions to the local problems), the Executive Board Member of AfricaOSH and the Community Council Member of GOSH.
Valerian is a Tech & innovation enthusiast with critical thinking and thought independence, holding over 9 years’ experience, and the designer of an Open-Source motor board controller (sangaboard: https://gitlab.com/sangavalerian/sangaboard) for OFM Microscopes. His interests fall within Distributed Recycling and Additive Manufacturing (DRAM), Open Source Appropriate Technology (OSAT) and Electronics Designing & Development as well as programming.
With a background in Computer Engineering and Renewable Energy Development, Valerian seeks to see engineering and Open Source Technologies are well used to impact the lives of the community sustainably and positively, through creating practical and tangible solutions, which are both innovative and well-being centric as well as locally adaptable, culturally relevant, technologically feasible, economically viable and environmentally sustainable.
Contact the GOSH council here. Read more about the 2022 GOSH Community Council Election here.
You can find out more about the Community Governance Working Group that set up the Community Council structure here.
Council Domains
In 2020, the GOSH Community Governance Working Group established a list of domains overseen by the GOSH Council. In 2022, GOSH council members met to further refine these domains and decide on council members to lead them. You can see each of these domains, and the council members responsible for leading them, below.
- Management (programming) led by Pierre and Harold: Design community input processes for funding; and managing grants/program management once funding has been secured for the community.
- Management (listening) led by Pen and Liz: Creating consultation process(es) for managing big decisions.
- Management (admin) led by Liz and Pen: Take care of official documents like the GOSH Manifesto, upcoming Constitution, etc.
- Community Support led by community coordinator with support from Laura: Community management, handling infrastructure issues and requests from the community; maintaining brand/logo/assets.
- Communications led by Laura and Valerian with support from the community coordinator: Website, email addresses, external communications, social media, newsletter, Element chat group(s), etc.
- Gatherings/Events led by Valerian, Harold and Laura: Organise future global and local Gatherings.
- Roadmap led by Roadmap working group
- Funding: led by Community Council Board Seat for OSHF (Pen)
Community Coordinator
The GOSH Community Coordinator works with the GOSH Community Council and the wider community to support them in organising activities such as Global GOSH Gatherings, writing sprints, collaborative development projects, and regional events. They play a crucial role in supporting the GOSH community to reach new audiences and providing an enriching and dynamic environment for existing projects and community members. The Community Coordinator also serves as the Election Secretary during the annual GOSH Community Council elections. The Community Coordinator is contracted by the Open Science Hardware Foundation (OSHF), a US-based 501c3 nonprofit and is supported by a grant from the Alfred P Sloan Foundation.
The current Community Coordinator is Bri Johns. Click here to contact them.
Organisations supporting GOSH
GOSH community activities and events have been fiscally sponsored and hosted by a number of organisations over the years. There is currently one organisation (OSHF) with a specific focus on supporting the GOSH community built into its mission and more may emerge in the future.
Open Science Hardware Foundation (OSHF): US-based 501c3 Nonprofit
In 2020, OSHF (formerly known as GOSH Inc.) was established to open up new possibilities for the community, like administering funding, fiscally sponsoring open hardware and related community projects, hosting community initiatives that need a legal entity, and more. See this post for more information on the 501c3 nonprofit.
The current 501c3 non-profit board members are:
Shannon Dosemagen
Jenny Molloy
Pen-Yuan Hsing [Community Council Board Seat]