Welcoming Paz to the OLS Team

Open science became a thing for me in 2017 when I met people who seemed to feel similarly to how I had felt for a long time about science, as practices and systems that needed radical change. It was about systemic change, even revolutionary change I hoped, but also about change that felt manageable, like producing open tools to do science. I dived right in, becoming part of a larger community of people wanting to transform science, wanting to deal with the very tricky questions of who decides; who decides who decides; and who decides who decides who decides :).

I worked on a project that questioned who gets to participate in scientific processes and in what capacity, who gets to be called “contributor”, and who gets to decide what the problems are in the first place. That project was called Vuela and we copied first and then modified an open source drone (Go Open Hardware!) with the help of many usual suspects (like researchers, open science enthusiasts) but also many very unusual suspects like adult immigrants who never went to university.

My formal academic background is in humanities and social sciences, so no surprise that issues of governance, power and inequity in knowledge creation and sharing are what motivate me the most. I applied to OLS precisely because these issues matter to them, and because they work directly towards creating communities that feel not only overwhelmed by the size of the expected transformation but also ready and capable of working collectively for the systemic change needed.