Throughout the GOSH@10 series, we have featured stories of GOSH’s legacy and impact over the course of its first decade. To date, those stories have focused on people and projects. This month, we are taking a moment to appreciate the place where the work and the community come together: the GOSH Forum.
Interestingly – and uncoincidentally – the Forum has appeared in nearly every story we have shared through this series so far. Dara Obademi found his first GOSH opportunities through the Forum. Nicolás Méndez found the Collaborative Development Program on the Forum, and then used it to find collaborators and share the development of Open Lab Automata. Yan Kay Ho’s story examined the community stewardship that helps connections made through the Forum develop into lasting relationships across organizations. Across these stories, we can begin to recognize a pattern, with the Forum repeatedly emerging as a place where people find funding, technical support, and community.
This month’s newsletter featured another example of this very legacy, through the remarkable work of the Replicator Team at the University of Washington’s Machine Agency. Led by Principal Investigator Nadya Peek and supported by a National Science Foundation Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems grant, the team is painstakingly reproducing open hardware projects to understand how well they can be built from the documentation provided.
The team has used the Forum to document its attempts to build the MothBox Pro, the OpenFlexure microscope, and a wireless color sensor. Its posts record out-of-stock components, supplier comparisons, altered print settings, mismatched dimensions, and substitutions. GOSH community members, meanwhile, have stepped in to explain design choices, recommend sources, and troubleshoot problems. The resulting threads preserve the practical details of each replication alongside the community exchange through which problems are solved.
In a bit of a meta twist, the Forum also records GOSH’s ongoing work to preserve its own collective knowledge. In October 2021, a community member opened a discussion by asking, “How do we organise, archive, and communicate our collective knowledge?” He noted that the community’s knowledge was scattered across Forum discussions, WhatsApp groups, GitLab repositories, Google Docs, and the GOSH website, leaving much of it vulnerable to being lost.
Nearly five years later that very thread remains active, with the community members sharing archiving tools, shared libraries, wikis, publishing platforms, offline resources, and lessons from their own experience. Recently, these contributions have themselves been gathered into a wiki at the top of the thread such that what began as a discussion about preserving collective knowledge has become a durable resource in its own right.
Of course, open science hardware relies on people sharing what they learn – which components work, where to find them, how designs perform in new settings, and what other builders should know. For a decade and running, the GOSH Forum has served as infrastructure for that exchange and as a record of it. People arrive looking for funding, collaborators, or help with a build; their questions draw responses from community members who share opportunities, explain design decisions, recommend suppliers, and troubleshoot problems. Those exchanges sustain relationships across countries, disciplines, and projects while leaving behind a public record that others can search and extend.
This combination is unusual for a globally distributed community: a central gathering place where peer-to-peer exchange continues to generate and preserve practical knowledge. Its impact is cumulative. Every opportunity shared, collaboration formed, problem solved, and lesson documented strengthens the conditions under which open science hardware can be developed and reproduced. By sustaining this infrastructure for a decade, GOSH has extended the value of individual projects, grants, and collaborations beyond their original participants and timelines, strengthening the capacity to develop, replicate, and adapt open science hardware around the world.
