Open Science Fellowship: Impressions from the Closing Event

o2c2-Team at Closing Event (Foto: Georg Fischer, CC-BY)

Eight month – 20 fellows and projects – 20 different interpretations of openness.

As team member and contributor of the O2C2 book project, I participated in the closing event hosted by Wikimedia Deutschland. After two days of lively discussions in formal and informal settings, I can pin down some key impressions: 

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Open for review: Open Science & Education

Community Review (Foto: Dave Parker, CC-BY)

After months of writing and wrangling, we are very happy to open up the first draft chapter of our textbook for open community review: “Open Education & Science“. From now on, we invite scholars and practitioners interested in these two closely related topics to comment on the first version of our manuscript. While working on further chapters, we will engage regularly with these comments and follow suggestions where they seem to fit the overall goal of our project. We understand this process as highly experimental: We have no idea if and how many people are interested in contributing to this textbook-in-progress. Also, we haven’t entirely figured out a routine on how to deal with comments and how to engage with commentators. Hopefully we know more about this in a few weeks time.

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New team member: Hanna-Sophie Bollmann

Hanna-Sophie Bollmann

Hanna-Sophie Bollmann (Foto: Josip Jukic CC BY)

A warm ‘Hello’ to everyone following our blog. I am Hanna-Sophie Bollmann (@sophie_bollmann) and joined the team of Organizing Openness as a student assistant on the first of January 2018. I am currently studying International Relations at TU Dresden but spent my last semester abroad at Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá, Colombia.

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Visiting the “Open Science Lab”: My three takeaways

Pseudo-Selfie (Lambert, Maximilian, Ina) (Foto: @hauschke, CC BY)

Open science transgresses disciplinary boundaries. In theory, openness is an organizing principle that can be applied to every academic discipline. In practice, scientific processes and cultures vary greatly between disciplines (lab vs. desk, conference paper vs. monograph) and so do the points at which openness can replace closedness. Within the open science landscape, there are some institutions that try to develop generally applicable practices of openness. One of these institutions is the Open Science Lab (OSL) at Technical Information Library in Hannover (TIB). Continue reading

Opening Up the Project: Kick-off Meeting in Vienna

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Kick-off-Selfie (Foto: Maximilian Heimstädt, CC BY)

Today, we held our inaugural project meeting in Vienna. For both of us this is our first textbook project, so our day started with a more general discussion on alternative propaedeutical structures of a textbook. After having skimmed some textbooks we use in our own teaching (e.g., Exploring Strategy), we decided to follow a modular rather than a linear approach as you can see in our basic structure (see Textbook-in-Progress).

Our textbook project is inspired by the master-level course “4Open: Open Organizations and Organizing Openess” that Leonhard had developed at the University of Innsbruck. We discussed his experiences and learnings from teaching this course (two times so far) and eventually decided to write an introductory chapter on openness as a paradigm, followed by six chapters with theoretical concepts related to openness, and another six chapters on empirical phenomena. Continue reading

Hello World!

We start this blog with at least three aims in mind:

Documentation: Working from two different geographical locations – Innsbruck in Austria and Witten in Germany – we use this blog as a log-file to keep track of our progress. We will document key decisions, reflect on problems we encounter, and first and foremost the content of the textbook itself (see “Textbok-in-Progress”).

Communication: This textbook should not just be about the process of organizing openness, but should also be an experiment in open organizing in itself. Through this blog we want to engage in conversation with students, scholars and practitioners early on. We hope to collect feedback and new ideas.

Access: Open Educational Resources should be accessible by anyone for any purpose and at no cost. Through this blog, anyone will be able to easily access and download the textbook in different formats (e.g. ODF, PDF).  As we progress, we also want to make additional materials like slides, training questions, and videos available via this blog