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snguyen edited this page Aug 13, 2020 · 12 revisions

OSHI Documentation Research Protocol

This is an outline of the research project protocol focused on open source hardware (OSH), documentation, and stakeholders’ experiences. The outlined sections below will identify basic information about the study for researchers, collaborators, reviewers, and funders to understand and engage with the research and findings, if interested.

This outline is based on the PESD case study protocol template.

Title : (subject to change)

  • Development, Documentation, & Engagement of Open Source Hardware
  • OSH Rescue Efforts: Documenting tangible solutions
  • How does OSH harden? Comparing documentation between time bound projects

Researcher Roles & Responsibilities:

  • Nic Weber, PI - Direct and guide the researcher(s) on developing and executing methods, prototypes, and protocols. Support data collection, analysis and reporting, as needed.
  • Sarah Nguyen, Researcher - Conduct literature review, develop and execute research protocol, gather data, evaluate findings, report results academic and community-related publications, and other research related duties, as needed.

Case Objective: Open source hardware (OSH) has become increasingly affordable, accessible, and relevant due to online source sharing platforms and on-demand manufacturing of computational components (circuit boards), as well as the rise of DIY makers responding to the shortage of PPE during the COVID-19 pandemic. OSH is no longer just for hobbyists building phone chargers but a means to make up for the shortage of medical supplies. This can range from masks to prevent the aerosol spread of the virus, to ventilators for those experiencing extreme symptoms under coronavirus symptoms. In the true fashion of OSH community efforts, scientists, engineers, and makers attempt to develop and disseminate OSH PPE that they've created in a short time period. NSF has funded a number of software projects in order to "safeguard patient data during COVID-19 research" (Milliard, 2020), but what has been done to standardize or optimize the vast information (true or false) about PPE hardware during COVID-19 research.

In their paper "What is the source of OSH" the authors make a case that documentation is critical to and evidence of some form of openness in the development of hardware 'sources'. The empirical basis of this article depends on gathering documentation produced by 132 different OSH products - those that are outside the traditional bounds of OSH studies (not DIY or electronics based). The documentation argument is convincing and interesting - it takes seriously differences in 'source' of software and hardware. There is - in my view - an interesting way to pick up this thread of OSH and build upon existing work in STS and CSCW which focuses on the types and roles of documentation created in techno-scientific projects. So - taking this focus on documentation into the OSH world of Covid-19 related hardware, we could for example try to understand how documentation was consulted, created, and made accessible by volunteers. A good reference for this kind of work in CSCW is https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10606-018-9333-1

OSH provides open, cooperatively-created information that is free for anyone to use, modify, and reuse, but news information encounters that "The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free" (Robinson, 2020). What makes OSH reliable in the midst of open source medical devices that they are accepted as true versus news (an equally influential device on life and society), which is more susceptible to extrapolation, used/taken out of context, relayed as misinformation?

(Potential) Partner organizations: University of Washington Information School (iSchool), Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA), Helpful Engineering, and University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public (CIP)

Case Background: who makes up the case??

Research methods that will be employed are

  • Literature review and environmental scan
  • Documentation harvesting and analysis
  • Interviews
  • Semi-informal in-depth interviews with documentors
  • Activity-based focus group interviews with documentation users
  • Citation and engagement data harvesting and analysis

Potential research questions that will be addressed are as follows

  • RQ1: How are OSH documentation classified? What are the formats, types, genre, style, roles?
  • RQ2: Who are the human or computer actors in OSH documentation and what are their roles?
  • RQ3: What are the production and maintenance practices for OSH documentation? What are the required skills, barriers, and motivations to (not) documenting? What parts of the documentation harden within the creators?
  • RQ4: How accessible are the documentations? How reliable, trustworthy, and quality are they? What parts of the documentation harden within the users and potential contributors?
  • RQ5: How have OSH documentation spread? Who has cited the documentation and how have users engaged with the documentation? How has the documentation informed public concerns on OSH used as PPE?
  • RQ6: How can OSH documentation be preserved for future users, contributors, modifiers, distributors, and future pandemics?

The audience for this research include

  • Open source hardware engineers and makers
  • Researchers who advocate for the open source movement or practice open science
  • CSCW and STS researchers
  • Researchers, engineers, and medical workers interested in engaging with open source PPE

what are their current data practices??

what are the presumed challenges to sharing / reusing / archiving data, etc??

Units

Sample Design and Procedures: The population of this study will mirror the three-part research protocol. This includes:

  • Online non-academic publications, grey literature, and scholarly articles for the environmental scan. The content (scholarly and non-scholarly) must be published after November 2019, when the COVID-19 outbreak was first announced. This study is focused on OSH-related content created and/or used in response to the pandemic.
  • Documentation and data files related to COVID-19 OSH projects for the document analysis. This study is focused on what type of OSH documentation and data files are made accessible in time-sensitive vs. non-time-sensitive cases. How does this compare to OSHWA Certification and what makes these components reliable? Data will be gathered through select search terms and database and search engine searching, conducted by the researcher(s).
  • Researchers, engineers, scientists, and makers who have contributed to developing, building, and/or using OSH-related to address the COVID-19 pandemic will participate in semi-structured in-depth interviews in order for researchers to understand their practices around documentation of select OSH-related COVID-19 PPE. Data will include personally identifiable information and transcript responses from the interviews.
    • The intended sample size will depend on the number of available documented COVID-19 OSH projects. If relevant, the participants will reflect quota sampling of OSH device type or another factor uncovered from the document analysis phase. Participants will be recruited through direct contact and/or engaged for recruitment by reaching out through the OSHWA community network.
  • Researchers, engineers, scientists, and makers who are likely to use OSH documentation to fabricate OSH-related COVID-19 PPE will participate in activity-based focus group interviews. Data will include personally identifiable information and transcript responses from the interviews.
    • See above for intended sample size and recruitment strategy.
  • [INSERT data for Citation and engagement analysis phase]

Data Collection Method:

  • Literature used for the environmental scan will be tracked and recorded using the shared OSHI Zotero Library.
  • Documenation data will be harvested from XXXX, OCR'd for text analysis, stored in XXXX, and analyzed using XXXX
  • Interview data will be stored in XXXX. Participants will submit basic identifying information through an online web form, which will also include the consent form. Both the raw data nd encrypted data will be stored in XXXX. Audio, video, and transcripts of each interview will be recorded using XXXX and all components will be stored in XXXX.
  • Citation and engagement data will be harvest from XXXX (platforms), and held in open file formats, and stored in XXXX.

Interview Table:

Participant Codes:

Participant Profile:

CI Scenarios:

Plan for Analysis:

Data Management: We have a strong commitment to secure, private, reproducible, and open science. We will share developed protocols openly on GitHub.com and the Open Science Framework (OSF), including links to our protocols, data, and code with any publications. Data collected from OSH project repositories and interviews will be deposited to University of Washington's Qualitative Data Repository (QDR) instance and OSF.Interview data with personally identifiable information will be encrypted. All code for analyses and plotting will be tracked in a Git repository primarily hosted on GitHub and mirrored on GitLab, to promote wide dissemination and engagement with our research materials. Each release of the code will be archived in Zenodo. README files will be provided for both our data and our code, to maximize the potential for reuse and understanding after the project is completed.

Schedule of completion:

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