When Suleiman Abdulsalam first encountered GOSH in 2022, he brought with him unusual expertise in how communities govern themselves – how they make decisions together, distribute resources fairly, and maintain autonomy as they grow. He hadn’t come through the hardware side of open science, but that hardly mattered. It turns out Suleiman’s expertise was perfectly paired with GOSH’s evolution.
Suleiman is originally from Nigeria, with an academic background as interdisciplinary as it is ambitious. He completed a masters in Collective Intelligence from Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Morocco – the first program of its kind – followed by a Master of Global Affairs with a sustainability focus from Notre Dame, and is now pursuing a PhD in Planning, Governance and Globalization (Urban Environmental Design and Planning Major) at Virginia Tech. The unifying theme in his work is a passion for understanding how communities organize themselves to share power, distribute resources, and make decisions together without losing autonomy and local knowledge.
That question sits at the heart of what makes GOSH unique. Open hardware communities depend on trust, on shared values, and on governance structures that reflect the people they serve. When Suleiman was invited by the GOSH Community Council to help lead sections of the community constitution in 2023, he was perfectly positioned with the precise training the work required. Drawing on co-creation frameworks developed at MIT, he helped to translate community values into governance structures that could actually hold, and that might enable collective progress while protecting GOSH’s participatory commitment. “I brought those ideas from my program into what I was doing with GOSH,” he says, “and I really enjoyed it, particularly given the fact that I was working with other committed members.”
This reciprocity is itself a reflection of what good governance can make possible. Through his work on the constitution, Suleiman helped ensure that the structures guiding GOSH would continue to reflect the principle that it is the community itself that should remain the primary author of its direction, priorities, and future.
This commitment to participatory governance is one of the things that has allowed GOSH to endure and evolve over the past decade. While the development of open science hardware is of course critical to GOSH, a broader contribution of the community can be found in its every-day demonstration of what it takes to build and sustain a global network grounded in shared stewardship. Through helping to translate community values into governance practices, Suleiman’s contribution reflects something larger about GOSH itself: a belief that the people who make the community what it is should remain the ones who determine what it becomes.
