We have a big deal.
We have a general fund for now.
We're talking about business, business,
business, technologies, and the infrastructure.
Sounds right.
How we would be if we was a different talk.
Okay, so my first time at FosterM,
so this has been amazing.
And I fully expected to be able to have a break
between presentation I saw this morning
and this could put together some more robust slides.
I ended up getting into a lot of conversations
and all right.
I've had no time.
So I've got a couple that are specific to this talk
and then I'm going to recycle some slides
from an earlier talk.
So apologies for that, but also great content.
I hope everyone has had a chance
to read this wall of text.
It's the only real wall of text that exists.
Does anyone know what this is about up here?
Already?
It's too long.
Take a second.
So as you finish, as you finish reading,
I'm not kidding.
Fantastic.
Some people do.
As you finish reading,
let's take back to 18.
I think it's 54.
There was an outbreak in Chicago.
Oh, it's either malaria or cholera,
something, just really.
It killed 6% of the population.
This is because Chicago at the time
was built kind of in a ditch from the surrounding area.
So water would get down into the city and just kind of pool there.
And as we all know, cities are generally filthy,
because humans, we are what we are.
And if there's water there, it's going to stay stagnant.
It's going to breed disease.
And well, it did.
And they killed, again, 6%.
That's a lot of people.
But being who they were at the time,
the people of Chicago got together and said,
hey, our infrastructure is not really good enough.
It's killing us.
So they went around and they literally rose the city.
Feet, like six, seven, eight feet.
One building at a time, one block at a time,
and put a sewer system in under the cities.
There were some wooden cities.
There are some wooden buildings that maybe weren't going to exist
in the new future.
And they took those and they put them to the outskirts.
They moved the buildings to the outskirts of the city.
But for the most part, all the masonry
was, again, blocks at a time.
Like full city blocks raised up on thousands of screws.
Like jacks.
And they would screw them in.
It was slowly raised the building.
And they installed sewer.
This is mind blowing to me.
They did it in a way, is this person's describing
that the public, they didn't shut anything down.
The public kept going to these stores while they were actively being raised.
And people didn't notice until one day,
they walk outside and hey, the windows are above my head.
And what's going on here?
So this is a picture of them actually doing that to one of these buildings.
And I've got to stress this.
This is in higher city blocks the way we envision them now.
The buildings were maybe a little smaller.
Five stories, six stories.
But it's thousands and thousands of pounds.
So if they can do that, there's no reason to think we can't do that
for the digital cities that we live in right now.
And one of those digital cities,
as I think is in desperate need of some jacking up
new infrastructure, is a scientific city.
The tools on which we operate might not enable the future of world,
which we would like to see when this open,
inclusive and accessible.
So maybe it's time we raise all the research we're doing.
Let it still continue.
But while it's continuing, build some new stuff under it.
And I think let's show off hands,
who's in like a working group or an interest group that's related to reproducibility
or any aspect of science, the scientific process.
Everyone.
So why hasn't this been fixed yet?
Like we're all talking about it.
We got to do it.
So me and some friends came up with the potential problem
is that we're all talking about it.
And maybe it's because a lot of us are from a research background
and we like to look into the problem and assess the problem
and say what the problem is and then suggest a solution.
And that's kind of where we stop.
Well, there's another group of society that like to start exactly where that stops.
They like to start with a potential solution and build it out and then see what happens
and they like to build very, very quickly.
So what we created an organization that tries to co-locate these two groups of people,
researchers and technologists.
And the crazy reality is there's a bunch of technologists that are already building
scientific infrastructure without having ever spoken to a researcher.
They're just like, yeah, this is what I think they need and they start building something
and then it's never used because they built the wrong thing.
If only they were in the same room or if there's research there saying,
could you please build this for me?
Could you please build that for me?
And it turns out when we started doing this, people started developing stuff
very quickly.
Because again, the current system doesn't necessarily work really well.
So it's not a big challenge to start building this stuff.
The actual building is a challenge but to identify what to build is not terribly difficult.
So I'm going to go through a couple of things that we're building very quickly.
And then I would really like to have a conversation about what folks think is necessary
to build a better sewer system so we stop dying to cholera or malaria.
All right, so public identification, DOIs.
We all know them.
We all have a love hate relationship with them, I imagine.
There are some problems with them.
Link rot, content drift, things like that.
The way they're maintained, the way they scale.
They're built for manuscripts for PDFs, which were developed in the early 90s
if I remember correctly, and it's currently 2025.
So when we're now seeing a lot of data and a lot of code that needs to get cited,
DOIs probably is not the best way to do all of that.
You shouldn't need to take your GitHub repo and go put it on Zenodo to get a DOI.
And then try, yes, I'm working on a project that's trying to connect research software
with the papers that use that research software.
And so we scrape repos for DOIs, and then go on Open Alex and try to determine which papers.
It's a mess.
Even if you have the DOI in the repo, there's just like not a practical solution.
So a new identifier needs to be made.
There are a lot of different solutions out there.
I'm familiar with one called RAIDs.
Well, we built our called DPIDs decentralized persistent identifiers.
They scale really well, and the really great thing is you can assign them to any artifact of research.
And then have kind of a top level DPID that talks about the entire research object.
And then within that object you have the granular DPIDs.
If you just want to cite the data, if you just want to cite the code,
if you just want to cite one function within the data, one line within that function,
you can do that.
If you want to cite a comment that someone left, you can cite that comment,
because we all know research is a conversation.
Not an output.
They're fantastic.
And they're not the only ones out there.
I want to stress that.
But this resulted the group that's building this.
I want to stress really quick.
Me and my friends who started this nonprofit, we are facilitators.
We do not build the stuff ourselves.
We help translate language because there is a language barrier between researchers and technologists.
And we help move stuff forward.
So the people who are building this, the team behind it,
is led by a researcher out of view.
I can't pronounce it, but it's in Amsterdam.
Fantastic economist.
And he's identified the problem.
Found some funding.
Found some developers who would help build this thing.
And in two years, this now exists.
There is also infrastructure that lets people publish everything.
Everything.
It's overwhelming.
It's a lot of spam.
But we'll get to that in a second.
So there is no gated publishing model anymore.
If you do research at any level, you don't need to publish the nature.
You don't need to go through the traditional publishing route.
You just put it out there.
You don't even need to get peer review.
The stuff that your life is doing is amazing.
And they lost their impact.
Different talk.
So now that technology exists to make publishing accessible.
Discover something.
Get it out there.
Let's see what happens after that.
Even if it's garbage.
Maybe it won't be garbage in 50 years.
And someone needs to be able to access it.
So I already talked about the granular citation.
That it happens when you can publish everything with this new type of identifier.
That lets you identify everything.
You can cite everything.
Makes it really simple.
Sometimes you don't want to cite the entire manuscript.
Because that's a full PDF.
It's really long.
Maybe we shouldn't use PDF anymore.
But again, another talk.
Automated metadata.
When you're publishing everything, it gives other tools.
More data on which we can build tools, which can inform other tools that can automate the metadata population process.
That would be great because I know that no one likes putting in the metadata that makes my life when I'm building that project.
So much easier.
If I know what your software is used for, I can put it in my another other tool.
In order to know that, you have to put the proper metadata behind your software.
And most people don't.
It's not fun.
Assessment tools.
Okay, so if you're publishing everything, literally everything.
How can we determine what is the garbage?
What is that one sentence that someone just published?
And what is an actual robust piece of research?
Well, you need a curation layer.
Part of that curation layer is going to be automated assessment tools.
That look for key identifiers of, hey, this is robust research.
I had methodology that is validated or verified by a bunch of people who are trusted in perhaps this thing that we might call a web of trust.
And because of that, we can elevate it to a layer where we can bring people into the equation and have them curate it from there.
And that those people come in with the community peer review, where the tools that we're helping build.
I love to bring the curation power or the journal power back to scientific communities.
So you can attest to the fact that a piece of research has opened data or even has data or has it's code available.
Things like that.
And then those attestations can be utilized again by the assessment tools to do that first pass over that big,
quite a mile of nonsense that is inevitably going to exist on an open repository.
In the same vein, these three tools, essentially, automated data assessment tools and community peer review infrastructure,
enable attestation containers for open source.
So if your repository is critical to climate research, which is one of the great conversations I was having earlier today, that kept me away from slides.
You can say, you can claim that, hey, my research is critical.
Or my software is critical to the climate research.
And then people can come in and attest simply.
Yes, no.
And the person who says yes and the person who says no, they have a record behind them that says, you should trust this person who said yes.
Or maybe you should wait for someone who's more trusted to say yes to this.
If you're going to say distribute funds to important climate research software.
And then the last thing that we're working together on is a conference that is built entirely on this new infrastructure.
So the publication submissions, the peer review, the acceptance, the attestations, all of it exists in one event.
We call it the Institute of Open Science Practices.
Our first one is in Denver at the end of February.
And we had 13, I think submission so far.
And they went through the process using some of these tools.
And the researchers are starting to use some of these tools.
And they're giving feedback and saying, please don't build this anymore.
We don't need it.
Or this is fantastic.
Please keep building it.
And more often it's the latter.
Because again, the whole point is when these tools were started to be built, a researcher was the one who started it.
It wasn't someone else.
So someone who needed a solution to a problem.
And then technologists came along and took it from there.
So if we're going to abstract this a little more, this is what we're trying to avoid.
So what the, the iOS, which is the org, is working on doing is merging academia with open source tech communities and local communities.
Because at the current rate, we're going to end up with an ecosystem where we just have rebuilt siloed institutions,
where we don't talk to local communities.
We don't talk, we just start developing stuff that we like.
That's kind of what open source is.
It's beautiful.
But there is a risk that we become an industrialized system of open source.
Where we, again, are not looking for the right purposes.
So what we're trying to do is eventually merge all of these things together.
And I'm not great at slides.
So this is supposed to all, like,
and great shiny light, you know, save your sort of stuff.
But that's the idea.
Because it really, the software that is built by the people here is used by everyone.
It's a public good.
It is the public is the core benefactor of everything that's built in technology.
And the public has to live with it, whether they like it or not.
So the public should be in the room when it comes to building technology.
And what siloed as to saying is, well, researchers should also be in the room when building.
Research technology because of the ones that are going to use it.
The ones that need it, the ones that know the problem so intimately.
So that's largely all I've got for you.
Happy to entertain questions or have a conversation.
Or anything for the many comments?
Yeah.
Hello.
I'm working, actually, for the software I teach,
which is one, we believe we are building one of the pillars of what you're talking about.
We're keeping all the software safe forever.
Software, software, software, software server.
All the software, software, set table easily for the long term,
which are a bunch of properties that you will require you to retire in BSArea.
And within we are working in life, for example,
so that the other software they have in our archive.
So, I mean, we should talk a little bit.
Yeah, absolutely.
I don't know if you're aware of the project, you open project like so far.
So far, I took project, just handling just addressing several aspects of what you are in these slides.
So, yeah, absolutely.
And this is a crazy thing we're discovering too.
A lot of people are building these repeated requests.
He's also building some of this technology.
A lot of, what something we're finding is a lot of people are building different solutions to different problems.
And there's a little awareness of who else is building something.
So, as we start doing these workshops, people come up and be like, oh, can we can walk?
We do this because we're also doing it.
And getting everyone in the room to build one final standard, I say,
tongue and cheek.
Oh, yeah.
But that's the idea.
So, we can work together to build a solution that ultimately works.
Because if we go back to this picture, like, this is thousands of people all turning
in a screw at the same time to raise a building.
You can't try to, and they had to go systematically through the city to raise one building at a time.
And I didn't say this.
They didn't break anything.
There was no structural damage done to any of the buildings during all of this.
It's insane.
So, we can't just be over here turning a screw and then someone else is over there going the other way.
And then we got to be in the same room working together building stuff.
And people are very excited to do that.
So, at some point, I suspect the problem here is quite simple to all agree on what we should do.
We're in this kind of example.
The problem we are trying to solve is less easy to describe than agree on on all the aspects.
So, I'll talk about it.
There's just a limitation of this image probably.
It would be interesting to see, because, yeah,
some stuff you just got to build something that works better than the other.
Question over here, and we'll have that.
It was a really great talk.
I just wanted to ask about the Ragniversiteation Identification Introduction.
Since Lanniversite can be pretty, you know,
we can have functions, objects, methods, comments, or something like that,
or you want to say data data in different formats.
So, we have any standards in place for that Ragniversiteation.
We want to be standard agnostic because of XKCD.
So, it's about building that infrastructure.
Are there any standards for the Ragniversiteation aspect, the tech they were building?
No, the idea is to build the sewer through which the mess can flow,
and not necessarily build a treatment plant or anything like that.
We just want to build the pipes and tubes that host the data and everything like that.
So, I was also going to mention sulfur heritage as kind of a net first work,
but it kind of made a bigger question.
When you have a list of things that you are trying to put together,
one thing.
There's often a choice between doing things that's kind of everything is integrated into one thing,
versus having lots of little pieces that open together.
And in some ways, it's been sounded to me like,
you're building all the pieces in or they all kept together,
as opposed to trying to find solutions and work for different pieces
that you can bring together where you're not,
or other people responsible for some of them.
So, I guess I'm just wondering kind of about that,
as a way of creating something that's kind of centralized versus decentralized approach,
which seems a little bit of a waste of kind of what your Ragniversite is.
Yeah, so, the centralized versus centralized,
it seems like there's a lot of stuff that is needs to be built from the ground up,
and a lot of stuff that could just mean an algorithmation of a lot of things that already exist,
and what's that sort of how are you taking that approach.
So, things like a repository of knowledge,
having multiple different databases doesn't seem practical,
so there should be a type of database or repository that just has all of research.
That seems practical to me, but at the same time that practical,
that's quite a challenge, but it seems to be working so far.
The, which one, assessment tools, automated assessment tools,
we're working with a group called Koara E-Rip to build this,
and that is likely going to be an algorithmation of a lot of assessment tools that already exist,
just put together in a simple application,
because of the same problem before,
a lot of people have built parts of this,
but they exist, spread out all over the place,
so we just need to bring them together.
So, there's both.
I think.
Yeah.
On this slide, actually, do you have something around permission working?
Yeah.
And obviously, the permission system right now has,
suffers from lots of bad stuff,
and doesn't protect your paper instruments.
Yep.
But, for instance, with paper meals or when I generated AI articles,
that's all about stuff, I can see how with this system,
it's not going to be even bigger problem.
Do you have ideas on how to separate meaningful science from everything else?
Do I have ideas on how to separate meaningful science from everything else
as it relates to the published everything layer?
What are you doing for dinner?
It's a very long conversation.
But, yes, there are people trying to solve this problem.
And the idea is as soon as you put a gate on something,
you've kind of blocked it off.
Like that gate will get abused eventually.
So, we want to build a gate-less system,
and then figure out how to deal with the mess afterwards.
And there are ways.
We think.
One of combining some of their community elevation tools work.
For example, it's fairly easy to make a website at this point,
but we all know the big popular good websites.
Why do we know that?
It just becomes, there are people who tell us what website to go to
because they respect that website and we respect them.
So we go to that website.
That sort of thing can be built out technically.
But that's a very bad analogy at the same time,
because it's a very complex problem.
Over there.
Oh, he totally shouldn't.
So, why do DPI-D is, why are they better than DOS?
So, DOS have a lot of legacy to them.
They are critical to the advancement of a career research
right now.
So there's no reason to stop using them.
DPI-D is scale much better than DOS.
We can produce practically an infinite amount of DPI-D is
for next to zero cost, and we is anyone.
You don't need permission to produce a DPI or anything like that.
You can have a nested DPI tree.
So you have that DPI of a full research object that also within
it contains a bunch of DPI-Ds with a full research object.
Then you have a bunch of DPI-Ds that exist for every granular
artifact under that.
Once a DPI-D is assigned to a digital artifact that's published on this digital repository,
it will always resolve to that digital artifact no matter what.
You will never get a 404 assuming that someone is still hosting that data somewhere.
You will never get a 404 and you will never get something completely unrelated to that,
which is the content drift problem.
There's a couple more, but if you want to get into the technicals,
I can connect you to the people who are building this.
I'm a humble facilitator, and they can explain it much more than I do.
Though I do pick up a lot by being in the same room.
That's the only thing.
Happy to connect.
Yeah.
Thank you.