Recap: Open Science Shop & OpenFlexure Microscope Working Group Meeting (April 2024)
Written by Brianna Johns for the Open Science Shop Newsletter
We are back with another summary of our most recent Open Science Shop & OpenFlexure Working Group (OSS-OFM WG) meeting as we continue to work together to enable distributed manufacturing of the OpenFlexure Microscope on a global scale. This week's summary is short and sweet as the WG begins to shift gears and start working in small groups dedicated to certain tasks.
The Open Science Shop convenes these working group meetings on a monthly basis. Keep reading below to learn more about what happened at this month's meeting!
Affirming & initiating task forces
Prior to this meeting, group members established and clarified roles and responsibilities necessary to the working group. These clarified roles took the shape of the following ten different task forces:
- Sales & Marketing
- Finance & Funding
- Stakeholder Management & Network Building
- Distribution
- Manufacturing
- Supply Chain Management
- Customer Support
- Product Development
- Software Development
- New Product Review
During this month's meeting, group members affirmed this list of task forces and began planning how they could work in small groups to carry out actions related to each task force. Over the next few weeks, the various task forces will work together asynchronously before coming back together as a group next month. The goal for the next meeting is to check in on progress and determine whether the group would like to proceed with the task force model of organizing work.
Next Steps
The Open Science Shop will continue hosting these meetings every month. The next meeting is scheduled for May 7th at 8:30 pm UTC. The goal of the meeting is to review and affirm the working group's proposed structure of task forces.
Interested in bringing your open science hardware design to market? Connect with Open Science Shop
Open Science Shop's role is to facilitate connections between open science hardware project creators and a distributed manufacturing network. In addition to the OpenFlexure Microscope, we are also seeking to pilot distributed manufacturing initiatives with other designs. As mentioned at the beginning of this post, the format we are developing is a space where anyone in the open science hardware community can bring a Product Proposal to the group for consideration. If you are interested in collaborating with Open Science Shop to support bringing your open science hardware design to market, please let us know by submitting this form, and we will follow up with the next steps.