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Oblique Thinking Hour on Group Concept Mapping

Over the last couple weeks, we held a two-part Oblique Thinking Hour series to play around with a method for discussing and synthesizing ideas in an open, collaborative way: Group Concept Mapping. 

The method is fairly simple, yet leads to rich and generative discussions. All participants complete a sentence from a prompted sentence stem (in our case, the stem was "When I think of digital infrastructure that empowers and enables, I think of __________."). Once we collected all the responses, each string of text was exported to a Miro Board. In week one, we sorted the responses into clusters together (i.e., we did the “human” process). 

In week two, Jonah used a combination of language processing tools and an LLM to auto-sort the responses into clusters (i.e., we did the "machine" process). We spent most of the second session discussing where the machine approach succeeded and failed, what we thought the reasoning was for the machine clustering, and the benefits and drawbacks of the two different approaches. 

We've summarized the sessions in a bit more detail on our blog – check it out and let us know what you think!

Short updates 

OM at CZI Open Science Grantee Meeting in Boston June 11-15th - Next month, the OM team will join other Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative Open Science grantees, community members, funders, and leaders in Boston for a few days of conversation and collaboration. We'll be on the lookout for members of the OSS community who are interested in shaping our work on open source software leadership via qualitative interviews, co-development of resources, and other forms of engagement. We'll also be hosting a workshop session to gather ideas for CZI’s Open Science Community Calls - more on that to come! Going to be there as well, or know someone we should talk to at the meeting? Let us know!

Dan’s Recap of a Digital Infrastructure Workshop - On Monday, Dan attended a workshop at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab titled "Reinventing Digital Infrastructure for Civic Empowerment." The group had diverse perspectives on digital infrastructure–some technical (e.g., how to collect and evaluate AI training datasets), some governmental (e.g., how to regulate a rapidly-evolving tech landscape to deal with issues such as misinformation), and some social (e.g., how to build infrastructures that foster healthy, constructive, and democratic conversations). 

It was encouraging to see people from all different backgrounds come together to work in open and collaborative ways, and Dan noticed several opportunities for the open science and open source communities to both contribute to and benefit from these types of conversations. We'll discuss that in our next newsletter… Digital infrastructures, openness, and collaboration have been top-of-mind for us lately, in both optimistic and pessimistic ways, so we'll have lots to ramble on about!

Everyday Open Source - Everyday Open Source is a project to stop and think about how major innovations came to be throughout history. How they probably had that playground energy of delight when building a fort, or collaborating on building something together. How ownership of ideas was the furthest thing from the minds of those creating, inventing, problem solving. Check it out on Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, or Twitter