Sciety product news 18/06/2025

Mark Williams -

This week we kicked off work on our NLnet funded project to support a preprint focused social network with Bonfire, building on the great work that has already been undertaken by the Open Science Network community. This week has been about defining our goals, identifying key stakeholders, and mapping out the initial user story and tasks.

Project Hub on Miro


We've created a Sciety x Bonfire hub on Miro (link is currently invite only, whilst we explore opening it up) that outlines our intentions and builds on the MoU we established with NLnet. It includes:

  • Docs & Links – A central repository for key documents and resources, including the initial MoU and links to relevant projects and presentations about the work.
  • Our Outcomes/Goals – Derived from our initial MoU, this outlines what we want to achieve together.
  • Who’s Working On This and What Will They Mainly Be Doing? – A lightweight documentation to clarify who’s responsible, accountable, etc.
  • Comms – Links to our communication channels (Slack, Email, etc.). These will be our preferred methods until we launch the MVP, at which point communication will shift to the Bonfire tool.
  • Research Tasks – A list of research activities agreed for this phase, including exploring NixOS, creating a replicable deployment, understanding user needs, and configuring a preprint-focused flavour of Bonfire.
  • Known Unknowns & Risks – A space for documenting major risks as they emerge. This area is already evolving. This week, we've also documented our story map and outlined assumptions we’ll need to test in order to increase our confidence in the solution. Follow-up posts will explore how to assess risk and build confidence in product work, with examples from this project.
  • First Moves – A lightweight record of the next steps we’ve agreed to move us towards our goals. This may evolve into a more detailed task management approach, but for now, it’s designed to be lean and directional for the coming weeks.
  • Story Map - Our story map outlines the broad activities that someone using the preprint-focused implementation of Bonfire will undertake. It helps us understand what development work is required to support these activities. For each task, we’re identifying the assumptions we’re making about the viability, feasibility, usability, desirability, and ethical implications of the product or feature.

Next steps

Over the next few weeks, we'll be undertaking our 'First Moves', spinning up a test instance of the OpenScience flavour of bonfire, documenting the story map and assumption map and detailing this in blog posts. We'll also be considering what shape our preprint flavour will take and the flow between Sciety (which is publishing histories of the preprint and it's activity through DocMaps and COAR notify) and the Fediverse, where conversations will be taking place about preprints and preprint review.

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.