#About This file hosts the free-text parts of my application for OpenCon 2016 (the rest were basically multiple-choice questions or about personal information).
Maximum 280 characters (~40 words). It’s up to you what information to provide. Many people write something similar to their Twitter or Facebook bio.
An evolutionary biophysicist working on integrating research workflows with the Web, all along the research cycle.
Often thinks about how the research ecosystem would look like if it had a public version history and open licensing by default, and what we have to do to get there.
Why are you interested in Open Access, Open Education and/or Open Data and how does it relate to your work? If you are already involved in these issues, tell us how.
Maximum 1600 characters (~250 words). There are many reasons why Open is important. This question is asking specifically why Open is important to you. Please use your own words to describe your perspective and experience.
I got involved with Open because it addressed problems I had: lack of read access to the research literature, lack of permissions to tinker with software or to analyze data whose existence was advertised in those parts of the literature that I could read.
Once I dug deeper into the matter, I discovered open licenses that provide more than read access: the rights to reuse, revise, remix and redistribute, which are the basis for doing and building new things and thus very close to my mindset as a researcher and life-long learner. I feel empowered by such additional degrees of freedom and am now exercising them on a daily basis, e.g. by using FLOSS libraries when developing software, by building workflows around open data and by repurposing open research materials in educational contexts.
I also enjoy pondering about the generativity that is enabled by such freedoms. Having explored a range of different life forms as part of my research, I am quite conscious that their diversity is the result of a delicate interplay between their degrees of freedom and the restrictions placed upon them. When these restrictions are different - think deep sea vs. desert, day vs. night or fog vs. mosquito spraying - this is reflected in the observable biodiversity.
Translating this back to the research ecosystem, its freedoms and restrictions around sharing and doing new things with its basic elements - knowledge, ideas and methods - determine the diversity of potential research outcomes and thus the way in which research can help society move forward or appreciate how that worked in the past.
The biggest goal of OpenCon is to catalyze action. What ideas do you have for advancing Open Access, Open Education and/or Open Data, and how would you use your experience at OpenCon to have an impact?
Maximum 1600 characters (~250 words).
Open knowledge writ large has been the focus of my volunteer activities for more than a decade now.
For example, I am an active contributor to Wikipedia and its sister projects. Apart from the usual editing there, I am leading a project to automatically upload multimedia files from open-access articles into Wikimedia Commons. This project is currently being expanded to full texts, with Wikisource doubling as an open-access repository that enhances the verifiability of statements made in Wikipedia articles, and Wikidata emerging as an open bibliography of the cited scholarly literature.
I contributed to the Wikimedia Foundation's Open Access policy, co-founded an open-science journal (Research Ideas and Outcomes) and am engaged around digitally preserving our natural and cultural heritage. I am documenting many of my activities in the open, e.g. my talks (cf. https://git.io/vKZOa ) as well as my attempts to learn Python (cf. https://git.io/vKZOw ) or this very OpenCon application (cf. https://git.io/vKZOr ).
The personal interactions I have had at OpenCon, its satellites and similar events have contributed much to these activities: they inspired me, motivated me to go the next step, or even to retry. I hope for this to continue this year, and that I can give back a bit too.
Open knowledge has become an integral part of my professional activities as well, most notably in my current role at the NIH, which is focused on policy and technical aspects of biomedical data science (notes at https://git.io/vKZOK ) and included contributing to the design of the Open Science Prize.
For [Open Access Week, Open Education Week, Open Data Day], please explain how you participated and/or how you plan to participate.
Maximum 600 characters (~100 words).
I participated in the “synchro-blogging” on the occasion of Open Access Day 2008 (cf. http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/roundup-of-blog-posts-on-oa-day-part-3.html ) and contributed to every Open Access Week since, e.g. by blogging (cf. http://blogs.plos.org/yoursay/2012/10/23/reusing-revising-remixing-and-redistributing-research/ ), by starting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Access_Week or by participating in Wikimedia editathons or hackathons on the topic. I contributed similarly - though less frequently - to the other two events (as well as similar ones like Copyright week).
Use this box for any additional information you would like to share about yourself, projects you work on, or other information that could impact your attendance or participation at OpenCon 2016, if invited. Maximum 900 characters, ~150 words.
I think I have said enough in the other fields, but if you'd like to dig deeper, then https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Daniel_Mietchen/European_Commission_Open_Science_Policy_Platform or https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=%28openaccess%20OR%20openscience%20OR%20opendata%20OR%20oer%20OR%20opencon%29%20AND%20evomri would be good starting points.