Okay, so basically we had this extra slot of time in our physical session.
Actually, we want to use that time to engage discussion with you, the audience, about this
open research track here at FOSDEM.
We are opening the stage for basically questions and discussions.
Just wanted to very briefly say a few words about how we ended up creating this space.
So basically, we've been with a few colleagues at Sains-Paul-Paris, for instance, doing a
few conferences here at FOSDEM in other dev rooms, using this FOSDEM conference as a venue
to actually talk about technical realizations we were doing in the lab.
And it was not so, it was a very good opportunity for us because it's not easy to do a scientific
publication about technical things, more specifically into the social sciences.
So after a few years of doing that, we thought that actually we could try to go a step further
on this by organizing this track which is definitely about open source software and research.
And so we had, as you've seen, we understand research with a very broad way.
Any kind of inquiry is, we think, interesting to discuss because the chair, a journalist
investigator, or we had an open factor, for instance, or a social scientist, or a natural
science scientist, all share kind of the same engagement with data and about inquiry.
So we created this room four years ago, actually at the time we were merged with another initiative
from two people from neuroscience, and it was nice also to have these different disciplines.
Of course, then the COVID came, so we succeeded into keeping the room online.
And now, so we have folks, a crew of five, six people.
We have two people who are online, Yo Yehudi and Celia Gruzon Daniel, who will actually
monitor from their home the online session, which will start in 20 minutes.
And basically we are a bunch of people working in academia, or not, or in the Open Knowledge
Foundation, and I am no more in academia myself.
And so the first thing I would like to say is like volunteers to help us out organizing
this space are more than welcome.
Basically the work of this starts in the autumn where we submit a proposal to force them to
organize this room again.
So each year we do that, we wait for the answer, and once we have it, we have to do a call
of proposal for something very, very classic about organizing a conference.
So reviewing papers, actually getting the papers in, so we actually contact people for
asking them to come to our conference.
And then as you've seen what we've been doing today, mining the door, putting signs on people
and that kind of stuff, which is fun.
And yeah, so I will finish with that, and maybe some other people won't say other things.
I will finish this with one thing, it's important for us to try to augment diversity of our group.
Gender but also disciplines, we like to open up as much more, well as much discipline as
we can.
So yeah.
Sorry, less diversity, so there is a question about, yes, yes, also less French people.
We tried that, we succeeded a little bit, but not that much.
So yes, please.
Matthew.
Yeah, I just wanted to say a few things, but basically the reason we need you is also
to increase this diversity in the papers submitted.
Because for instance, if you look at the gender balance, the committee is basically gender
balanced, but the submissions are completely dominated by males.
And also the deaf room in the beginning had one leg firmly into the hard sciences, but
then we've kind of drifted towards the social sciences, and it's not just us, it's also
the demand.
So, you know, we try to promote something, but it's kind of an equity balance game to
try to have this variety in the proposals in the first place, because of course we cannot,
if we don't have any proposition, for instance in hard science, we are not going to have
any.
So the audience, which is like, when if you submit papers or if you come into the committee
and then become a bridge to contact other people to submit papers, that's how we can
kind of ensure that it remains diverse.
It's not a lot of work to participate, also because we are many and we are probably going
to get even more people, and it's not a problem to be many, because like the real job beyond
managing the day is, as you said, to contact the people and then to review, but mostly
to contact them.
So please come in and join us about that, but we could also have this discussion about
what the scope of that should be, because I think that the figure of the tool maker
was kind of at the center of what we had in mind.
But as we see, it's not just about tools, it can also be about infrastructure in ways
that is not tool, like institutions, you know, I don't know, I'm thinking of the Journal
of Open Source Software that we had a few years back, think that infrastructure is not
just tools.
But now it's clear, it's not just the tool makers, let's say the infrastructure maker,
and what could it be, like, common and shape the profile of their room with us.
Can I, just to emphasize what you said, can I just share my little experience from this?
Go ahead, take the mic.
But just to emphasize what Mathieu said, this was my first time I forced them and as I told
you, I'm not a coder, so I was pretty scared about what I was going to say and share, etc.
So please do it, because why I came here was to share knowledge, of course, but to retrieve
some different experience from what I do every day and who the people are with whom I work
every day.
So thank you for this, and please submit papers.
Yeah.
Do you want the mic?
Yeah, yeah.
I think one challenge for the diversity aside of many other factors is there's also the
implicit assumption that there's sort of a good way to use open source software.
There were some talks, for example, that kind of, not in a bad way, but sort of said that
R is kind of tricky because, like, I think it's sort of more dead mainstream and I understand
that when I want to develop software, I would use it, but in statistics I use a lot of R,
but I also use a lot of Excel for help, and then people are like, oh no, that's a bad
tool, but a lot of people in their practice, particularly if they're not developers, would
combine a lot of different tools, and I think if they get the vibe that, hey, we also use
Excel, it's sort of a bad thing for their practice and people look at it strangely,
or even if it's like LibreOffice, which at least is open source, but it's like not the
death way, and I guess that vibe that people catch that would make also a lot of people
that would be very interesting for this community to also see how, like, it's done in the real
world in a very messy way, very often, makes them not like that, and if we could get to
a place where this would be legit and people would be curious and interested in those
non-perfect, chaotic, and not 100% open source ways, I think that would increase their versatility.
So just for the stream, the idea that a challenge to diversity could be that there are good ways
and bad ways to do open source, and I always say that I forgot the last part of your speech.
The Excel LibreOffice part is important.
He's going to come back later.
I'm sorry.
I'm so tired.
It was for the stream.
Yeah, that's what the point was, but I mean, you were very right that it's about us to
cultivate that.
Yeah, it comes back to me now.
It's really important to show how it's being done in the real world.
That's something that I think we all appreciate very much about the first-dimensional.
You don't see some people talking from a distance about how it's supposed to be.
You have real people who are from actually doing stuff, which also means that sometimes
they are not really good at communicating, and that's something that I really appreciate
because you hear the voices.
I think for them it's somehow a safe space for people who are not primarily good at communicating
contrary to academics, for instance, but who are really doing the stuff, and we can
hear them, and we can identify to them and realize that anyone can get involved in open
science and open source design.
We want very much to keep cultivating that.
That's why also we try to have a blend of people showing off the tools they've made,
but also people having a different kind of talk.
I don't know what the right balance is, but we want to preserve this voice.
I was a researcher at some point during my PhD, I was part of a training workshop led
by PhD students involved in training ourselves with best practices in mind and also to have
a grassroots initiative, which I think is kind of like a good example of what worked
in a particular field is this kind of like stories of what worked in a particular domain
with that be a thing interesting for this dev room.
So our stories that worked in a particular domain interesting for the dev room.
Well for me I think it totally is.
So the answer is yes, and I think we've somehow done that, but sometimes what it looks once
it's in the slides and here looks different, but that is very much the case.
I think we do not have a clear typology of the kind of talks we accept.
One very clear kind is the tool talk.
I've done something, I show you that to you.
Another kind would be experiment feedback.
So I'm not going to show my tool, but for instance I have engaged with that open source
stack and I've met issues, I'm going to talk about that.
This is a little bit of that kind somehow.
Do you think it will be pertinent to add more track dedicated to very short talks like lightning
talks, but dedicated to more?
Repeat the question.
So a question like would it be a good idea to organize very short lightning talks about
open research?
So actually we try to do that a little bit, like the three last talks were lightnings,
okay, lightnings 15 minutes, so it's not, but I think it's, yeah.
So we try, actually so the format lightning or not depends on what, on the time we have
and what the speaker wants.
So it basically is a tool.
If you don't know how it works, people propose if they want a lightning talk or a normal talk,
and then so we can also ask them to expand or reduce.
If we think it fits better, so we try to negotiate.
But it's kind of unpredictable how many lightning talks we're going to have.
So the proposals decide if there's enough for a track or not.
From the two last questions, there is one thing that's very important that's emerging.
So the form, the form of things should be in question.
And there is a sort of standardization associated with a conference.
And as we receive talk, we perceive diversity even in the form and our experiences, tools
or maybe talk, we do have a classifications.
But seeing things here, it's sort of standardized.
And maybe we should work together, so you're in this with us, on the form of things, on
maybe other forms of presentations.
We're not that constrained by the first them.
So that's one way we could work forward into.
But there are many things we could do.
And I am tired.
I do have a remark, I am part of the geospatial community, and on the two sides of the space.
And we have the same problems.
We have lots of developers who want to speak of their new things and the new stuff they
want to do, but we have a problem to have users who speak of old things, how they use
a tool and get new spaces and it's very difficult, and it's pretty hard to keep in touch with
it.
So I have a colleague, I asked her to come and present her tool, and she said, I don't
fit.
I'm a developer, it's not the kind of meeting for me, so maybe we can speak a little bit
and see if it's very open to everyone.
So the comment was that Nicola says that in the geospatial, they have this issue of having
users come because they don't feel welcome or they don't feel like they fit.
So I want to give the mic to Maya, because Maya was first, before she got in the community
for the room, she was presenting a talk here two years ago, I think, 2020, as a user.
So now you're in.
So what would you give as an advice to those guys?
Don't be scared, they're really nice.
I understand your colleague perfectly, especially coming from academia, which is also my case.
Maya is extremely segmented or taught to fear each other deeply, and so it can be really
scary to push those boundaries a little bit.
It can also be very rewarding.
So you said she did come in 2020, or she didn't come?
Okay.
Okay, so despite trying, there was no success yet.
Maybe if you show them this replay, it will change everything.
I've got a question for you, which is, so one of our ideas, our objective, this was also
to bring folks from academia here at the first day, so that they can actually benefit from
the other conference and all the day rooms.
So here's my questions, like, do you consider seeing talks in other day rooms and this one
here, yourselves?
Can you raise your hand if you do?
Yeah.
It's good?
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's difficult to see.
All the talks that we want to see, even though the offer is large.
But on conversely, who is here now, but who didn't come to the FOSDEM specifically for
that?
Okay.
Raise your hands.
So it works also the other way around.
Good.
Thank you.
Is it time?
No, not yet.
So we still have 10 minutes, and then we'll actually watch the stream here, if you want
to stay.
Quick question.
What is the acceptance rate here?
That's a very good question.
So the question is, what is the acceptance rate?
I don't know.
We haven't calculated it, but I think...
I would say that there is a part of the papers that are not good, I mean, they're out of focus
for the day room.
And what we can do, actually, we can re-route a paper to other day rooms, so it doesn't
matter much.
But also some people just submit to multiple day rooms for the same speech, right?
And it's okay, right?
The boundaries are not super open, but there are kind of buggy proposals.
What we would consider not acceptable would be, is that something that is clearly for
someone else, and we don't know why it's been submitted here, or something that has just
a title?
When that happens, we would kind of send an email, sometimes we don't even have an answer,
we don't know what happens.
So if you remove those, the ones that we actually refuse, I think is like one-third, one-quarter
maybe, with not too much.
So we are always...
It's been always working for us.
We need to have enough to fill the day if we want to have a full day, but not too much
that we have to refuse a lot of good talks.
But to be honest, we've been refusing good talks every year, just because there's not
enough room.
So basically, we decide about the balance when it's the case.
So when we have too many or not enough tool talks, we will try to adjust this way.
I can remember that one kind of talks that we tend to reject are talks about a tool that
have been developed somewhere in research, which is very specific, in a very specific
domain without any abstract, without any issues about what does the open source side of the
thing actually change anything in the story.
So having just a paper about a tool which is in research depends a lot on the quality
of the abstract, but it's not enough in a way.
Submitting is very...
The abstract to submit is like a few paragraphs long, so it's really easy to submit.
It's very easy to submit.
Please do.
Yes?
I did try to improve the younger sexual legalization, but for disclosure, I was a first member of
the Italian Catholic Student Association.
Okay.
It's a good idea.
So the question is, have we tried PhD associations, a session of PhD students, to email them,
to propose them to submit a talk?
No, we haven't.
No, we haven't, and we are not very good at communication.
Well, I'm bad, but they are good.
Yeah?
Yeah, I have to say, as an academic, I feel, well, as an academic and a developer, I feel
like there is a tendency for academic labs to have sort of a rotation of conferences
that they can send out, and it typically is difficult to get added to that as a new conference,
and especially if it's something that's sort of outside of the norm.
And so it's something that I do think...
I think most of the time that's not sort of intentional, it's just there's so much
else going on and people don't really think about it.
So I would second the suggestion of talking to PhD student associations and you're reaching
out to universities, especially universities that might have asked those, to say, hey,
this is an opportunity for interdisciplinary work, opportunity to talk to people who are
more technical, if you're less technical, or people who are more in other disciplines,
because that sort of stuff is in vogue right now as well.
So I think that once you're on the radar, it's going to be easier to get people, it's
just getting on the radar.
So the comment was that actually it's not easy for labs members to actually add one
more communication conference in the list of an already existing kind of standard publication
venue and above all, when this venue like here is really not standard, academically speaking.
But actually the interdisciplinarity of this room will be actually a good way to attract
not only PhD students and to make it clear for academia what this space is basically.
Okay, so that's a very good question, questions like who would in this room define him or
herself as a UX designer?
Can you raise your hand?
There's one there.
So not many, not many.
We're doing research into how usable research and science is, they were trying to figure
out usability and user design.
So the comment was are you aware that actually there is an open design dev room and so the
answer is yes, actually you will co-organize it.
And actually this room is here tomorrow morning, I think.
Afternoon, sorry.
And my personal comment on this is that actually in my career and what I've done in my experience,
UX is very common stone to go beyond the big, big issue of mixing qualitative and quantitative
approach on data as my talk tried to explain.
And that yes, we need designers and we have one here who talked about it and in our previous
lab that was very important, the media lab is a place where they try to do this mix.
We should try to not overlap, it's good this year, the years before and it's annoying I
think we have kind of the same public or partially.
So if we could, I don't know if we can do that, we should ask at least there or whatever.
It's better if we can maintain it separate.
Yeah, at the same time, yeah, we can do that, actually we could talk about what we do.
Right, one last comment is like if you want after the online session, we can have drinks
together in a place which is, tavernier, tavernier, tavernier, we are going to write
that on the board, tavernier is close to here and I'm going to set up the stream here and
so you can stay here and watch it with us if you want.
So it will be on me, we are going to stream the video and the interaction if you want
to ask questions to the speakers, you have to go through the chatroom on the first-day
website.
Thank you.