Recap: Open Science Shop & OpenFlexure Microscope Working Group Meeting (August 2024)
Agenda: Check-in on the manufacturer directory | Discussing the structure of future meetings.
Written by Jo Long for the Open Science Shop Newsletter
Each month, we share a summary of our most recent Open Science Shop & OpenFlexure Microscope Working Group (OSS-OFM WG) meeting as we continue to work together to enable distributed manufacturing of the OpenFlexure Microscope (OFM) on a global scale.
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!
Update on the vendor/manufacturer's directory
Following feedback on the creation of a Manufacturer's Directory in July's meeting, the marketing taskforce reported back on the development of a new Airtable database for manufacturers/vendors.
The database view was embedded onto a page on the Open Science Shop website, as shown in the link below:
At the meeting, the group discussed options for creating a more effective way of presenting the listings than the current simple database view on the Open Science Shop website. The Airtable platform does have some more elegant interface options; however, these are not free.
Julian volunteered to look into using the Airtable API to build a page on the OpenFlexure website. The group agreed that the listings would be more likely to be viewed on the OpenFlexure website, which already has a very active community of users and established web traffic.
Vendor Application Form
The marketing taskforce also developed an associated vendor application form that can be shared with the open science shop community to add more listings to the database. This new vendor application form asks potential manufacturers and vendors to provide the following:
- Business name, website, contact email, and (optional) business logo
- Business location (city, country) and shipping terms
- OpenFlexure Microscope product and services offered, product page, and product image
- Optional: Whether the business is contributing to the OFM project, e.g. financial or development
Once an application is manually approved, the listing will be automatically added to the vendor page.
Future Meetings & Facilitation Plans
We have been very fortunate to have had Brianna Johns organizing and facilitating the monthly OSS-OFM working group meetings. This year, Bri was awarded a Fulbright research award, which she will be starting this Fall. Bri will continue her work with open science hardware alongside the MothBox team. Congratulations Bri 🎉.
As this was her last meeting, the next item on the agenda was discussing the best path forward for continuing to organize OSS-OFM meetings. The group felt there was still an interest and need to work on shared goals around a distributed manufacturing network and discussed identifying tangible goals we could work on. Some points in the discussion included:
- Focusing on a vendor listing on the openflexure.org project website. This is a clear goal that would benefit both the OFM project team and manufacturers in the open science shop community
- This strategy could easily be expanded to other Open Science Shop projects beyond OFM
A member of the WG has volunteered to facilitate future OSS-OFM meetings on a trial basis for the next three months. The group will also seek a note-taker at each meeting, a role that could be rotated each week.
Summary & Next Steps
- Identified the OFM vendor/manufacturer listing on openflexure.org as a priority target goal
- The Open Science Shop will continue hosting these meetings for the next 3 months, with Anna facilitating on a trial basis. The next meeting is scheduled for September 2nd at 4 pm UTC
These monthly meetings serve as an opportunity to share updates from the various task forces and brainstorm actions the group can take next.
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.