Open Science Network
The Open Science Network was born in the winter of 2009 as a culmination of a number of concerns among researching students then working at the University of British Columbia. Interested in opening up and democratizing scientific research and questioning, and spurred on by the recently coined DIYbio movement, the OSN created events and meetings based around promoting the ideals of open science. The idea was to democratize science, to facilitate access to its knowledge and tools and to open it up to interdisciplinary inquiry. As a resource hub and network for different citizen scientists to find knowledge and equipment, it based itself out of a google group modelled after the principle DIYbio list. By 2010, it grew beyond UBC, added a meetup group and over the years was involved in a variety of workshops and art-science projects, in collaboration and dialogue with projects such as x-o-x-o-x.com, the Vancouver Hackspace, and the DIYbio community more generally. Most recently, the OSN has presented at the Mini Maker Faire and at Microsoft Vancouver on what open science is, and what practical steps can be taken to enable oneself in these regards. The OSN is a conceptual project of x-o-x-o-x.com that uses discourse and projects to practically imagine new spaces for the democratization of knowledge. In addition to being about promoting ideas, it is about enabling pragmatic applications of those ideas, and the steps that can be taken to do that. It is a hub of experimental knowledge, and the social uses thereof. opensciencenet.org
