The latest platform news from sciety.org, the home of community preprint evaluation.
🚀 What's new?
Over the last couple of weeks, we've been making progress on our initial goals for the preprint discussion space. We're going to be documenting our research in the Sciety GitHub repository and providing an overview on this blog. Our early tasks are:
To identify risks and assumptions that might hinder adoption of a new or unfamiliar technology
Using some common frameworks and methodologies in product management, we have created a story map, which identifies a first valuable slice for delivery alongside an assumption map, which helps us understand key risks and where best to focus attention to mitigate risks and increase confidence. At this early stage, the majority of risk is around initial deployments, federation capabilities, and aligning the various technologies of ActivityPub, DocMaps, COAR Notify, and how Sciety indexes preprint peer evaluation activity.
Documentation on risks in usability, accessibility, desirability, viability
To investigate hosting and deployment options for a replicable Bonfire instance running on NixOS
A key goal for the project is to use Free and Open Source technology infrastructure to enable communities advocating for preprints to easily replicate the Sciety preprint discussion space for themselves.
To do this, we are exploring how NixOS can help us create a Bonfire setup that is easy to copy and run anywhere. NixOS lets us describe the entire system — including the software and settings — in a single configuration file, so it can be reliably reproduced on other machines without guesswork. After comparing cloud hosts, our first step was to try this out on Hetzner, a cloud provider that makes it simple to install NixOS in a few clicks. A later goal will be writing clear instructions so that anyone, even without deep technical skills, can set up their own version of the preprint discussion space using other providers if they prefer. This way, communities can run their own trusted and independent versions of the platform.
To initiate a sandbox environment
To enable the team at eLife/Sciety, who will be working on this project, to try out the OpenScience flavour of Bonfire and configure it to integrate with Sciety, an early goal was to host this on eLife infrastructure (AWS) and enable the team to create accounts and be assigned Admin roles to learn how Bonfire works. The team at Bonfire has been on-hand to provide consultation for this work and we have now enabled:
discussions.sciety.org
There are a few bugs to fix with image hosting and hurdles to overcome, but we've seen some great progress over the last couple of weeks.
🔭 What's next?
In the next couple of weeks, we'll be running initial feedback calls with people using discussions.sciety.org to gather feedback from people who commonly read and publish preprints. This will help us to understand where to focus our attention in designing the preprint experience and integration with Sciety.
If you are curious to learn more or keen to help shape what our preprint-focused social network will become, subscribe to our Product Newsletter or get in touch with Mark Williams, Product Manager. Please share this post with anyone you think may be interested.