On September 1st the Berlin university alliance project Open.make: toward open and FAIR hardware has officially started. Three labs that work together for the first time will collaborate and design a social and technical infrastructure, in order to foster open and FAIR hardware publication and recognition. In this post, we will describe how the idea was developped over a short period of time following the publication of a BUA call.

A two months process

Between January and February of this year, the open.make team was created, the project was developed and the application was written. In response to the a BUA call for open science and quality insurance, both Robert Mies (TU) and Julien Colomb (HU) wanted to work on an open hardware project. The embryonic idea of the latter was well complementing the more mature project of the former. With the support of their respective PIs, Prof. Jochem and Prof. Larkum, they started combining their objectives and knowledge. The addition of a practical approach via Tim Landgraf and his doctoral student Moritz Maxeiner’s (FU) expertise, gave a final touch to the project bringing in additional hihgly complementary resources.

Technology used

The project approach was debated in video conferences and asynchronously on the online drafts. Emails were used to organise meetings and search for external partners. These drafts were written using a markdown-based approach via a GitHub repository, which was synchronized with an hackmd.io document. The idea was to produced a well-formatted pdf file from that document using pandoc. Because the submission portal accepted only text (and not our nice pdf), we moved to googledoc for the last changes in the application text.

Personal experiences

Julien Colomb:

In December 2019, I got a reminder email from the open science officer of the Neurocure Cluster of Excellence about a BUA call for open science. I started thinking about a fitting project, as I found the granting scheme interesting. I thought that open hardware would be a good fit for the call and started to look for collaborators, connecting with people I knew from the field. Finally, an internet search for open hardware berlin got me to the open!next project homepage, and I contacted its project manager Robert Mies, with an embryonic idea. He was also planning to prepare an application for that call, and its plan was not very far from mine: it sounded like a perfect match (and it was). The rest was only nice discussions and hard work. Interestingly, it was only at the first internal project pre-kickoff meeting (at the TU Berlin, Institute for Machine Tools and Factory Management) that we met together in the flesh.

Robert Mies:

When the BUA published the call, we were fully stretched on prior commitments at the TU Berlin due to intensive work on the EU project OPENNEXT and preparations for grant writing for the Green deal deadline at the end of January. However, it was very close to our ongoing activities and we felt very tempted. A few days later, Lukas Winter from the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) called me to stress that it was a great opportunity to work together even though they could only act as an external partner as they were not eligible for funding. So, we both took part in a very helpful information session by the BUA and discussed different angles how to address this very specific and theoretic, yet application-oriented call.

The next question was about the right partners to create a small team around the concept, ideally from two other BUA partners to maximise our chances. As the year was ending, we deferred the search to the new year. By chance, Julien contacted us in January and it became clear very quickly that he had critical knowledge on open data publishing combined with a broader mindset for free and open source culture. This was an extremely pleasant surprise. Moreover, we quickly started talking about possible use cases and Julien mentioned a former supervisor called Tim Landgraf who had more recently become a junior professor at the FU Berlin – and was working on open hardware prototypes. He quickly contacted him and conversing together about the project idea and the open hardware policy at Tim’s lab, it turned out that we could all agree on very strongly aligned goals.

From there, we met on Zoom on Friday afternoon for an hour to align on the proposal writing. A central aspect was partnering. In the last years, Julien and I had both been following the online forum of the Gathering for Open Science Hardware, a natural ally for the project and started reaching out to them as well as other possible external partners. One other very important link was the already ongoing founding of a new spin-off association of the OPENNEXT project coordinated at TU Berlin, he Open Hardware Observatory e.V. Closely before the deadline, we also sent the abstract to the Dr Jürgen Christof, head of the university library at the TU Berlin and our partner Wikifactory. They all gave us a positive response and it made us confident that we were on the right track. In May, the BUA communicated the good news that our efforts had actually paid off.

What about the project content ?

Stay tuned for future blog post or read the application itself on the GitHub repository.