Accessible and Reproducible Acoustic Ecology

[kswhitney]

Project Lead: @kswhitney

Mentor: @dilrukshi

Welcome to OL7, Cohort E! This issue will be used to track your project and progress during the program. Please use this checklist over the next few weeks as you start Open Leadership Training 🎉.

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Before Week 1 (Jan 31): Your first mentorship call

• Complete the OLF self-assessment (online, printable). If you're a group, each teammate should complete this assessment individually. This is here to help you set your own personal goals during the program. No need to share your results, but be ready to share your thoughts with your mentor.
• Make sure you know when and how you'll be meeting with your mentor.

Before Week 2 (Feb 7): First Cohort Call (Open by Design)

• Complete Assignment 'Write Your Vision or Mission Statement'. Leave a comment on this issue with your draft vision statement & be ready to share this on the call.
• Watch 'Mozilla & Working Open'.
• Check the Syllabus for notes and connection info for all the cohort calls.

Before Week 3 (Feb 14): Mentorship call

• Look up two other projects and comment on their issues with feedback on their vision statement.
• Complete your Open Canvas (instructions, canvas). Comment on this issue with a link to your canvas.
• Start your Roadmap. Comment on this issue with your draft Roadmap.

Before Week 4 (Feb 21): Cohort Call (Build for Understanding)

• Look up two other projects and comment on their issues with feedback on their open canvas.
• Pick an open license for the work you're doing during the program.
• Use your canvas to start writing a README, or landing page, for your project. Link to your README in a comment on this issue.

Week 5 and more

• Submit your project to Mozilla Pulse, add the tag #mozsprint

This issue is here to help you keep track of work as you start Open Leaders. Please refer to the OL7 Culture Track Syllabus for more detailed weekly notes and assignments past week 4.

[kristinellis]

@kswhitney Hey! I'm really excited to learn more about this project - eagerly awaiting updates! :) :)

[kswhitney]

Vision + Mission Statement (Feb 6) - I'm working with student and faculty collaborators to make open science accessible for people of all abilities, so that open science doesn't lose on bright and creative contributors from a lack of accessibility. I'm working open because the best knowledge creation (science or otherwise) is transparent and reproducible - and the meaning of open must include being open to ALL. Specifically, my project this spring 2019 as a Moz Open Leader Cohort 7 Culture Track E is designing a prototype, testing, and opening up to contributors and testers open source acoustic ecology workflows that are accessible to people of all hearing and vision abilities.
Update: the audio for this pilot is from Ranomafana National Park in Madagascar and was recorded as part of a collaborative project I am part of that is available for use in this project. The audio was recorded in February 2019, using AudioMoth autonomous acoustic recorders (open source hardware).

[kswhitney]

here's a link to my draft canvas! https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ybx7R9tK5igkUX9SPdbZufV6IKZk2sMV4d7xnQYZkJA/edit?usp=sharing

[kswhitney]

here's my case study!

**Case study: Accessible Acoustic Ecology
Making and sharing acoustic ecology projects and processes with open hardware and software that are accessible to people with vision and hearing disabilities

Open science isn’t open to all unless it’s accessible**

Project background
Acoustic ecology is a growing area of environmental research, in part due to exciting new open source hardware and software technologies. The tools are now more accessible, pricewise, to more people. But, like lots of science, open source acoustic ecology isn’t necessarily open to everyone yet - this project looks at developing, testing, sharing, and refining workflows for acoustic ecology projects using pilot audio data.

Dr. Kaitlin Stack Whitney is initiating this as an open project that aims to be accessible, but the creators of the tools and collaborators are from all over. She uses AudioMoth acoustic recorders, which come from Open Acoustic Devices in the UK. Her colleague down the road, Dr. Kristi Hannam of SUNY Geneseo, introduced her to AudioMoths. Her colleague, imaging scientist Dr. Tony Vodacek, brought open source acoustic recorders to Ranomafana National Park in Madagascar as part of a project in collaboration with the Seneca Park Zoo Society (AZA-accredited zoo in Rochester, NY) in February 2019. The pilot data (audio samples) for this project come from snippets of the audio Tony recorded there. There are several open source audio processing software options. Kaitlin uses Audacity - and also enjoys Raven Lite for visualizing audio spectrograms and waveforms. She collaborates with many scientists with different sensory disabilities (not naming anyone here without explicit permission) and wants to create lab practices (cultures!) and protocols that are accessible by design from the outset, rather than wait to ‘accommodate’ specific individuals (which can imply a deficit framework).

My OL7 culture track story
I heard of Open Leaders from Hao Ye, who completed a previous Moz Open Leaders cohort. I knew about Moz generally from my collaborator Christie Bahlai, who was a Mozilla Open Science fellow. She really opened my mind to the possibilities of doing fully open science as an early career person. For example, we currently work on a grant together - and as soon as the grant was awarded, she posted the whole grant application on GitHub! Open from the beginning, by design - I didn’t have any role models or supervisors when I was student doing that.

I joined the culture track because the overall goal of my project is work on making sure that disability access is being included in open science initiatives. I also wanted to be in the culture track because I figured there would be less focus on deliverables and more on process - how to make institutional change and set expectations for communities. As a new PI, I’m developing the rituals and practices and culture of my lab group - so culture track seemed like a great fit.

I expected to find a supportive mentor and supportive, brilliant community. I’ve really enjoyed all the people on all the calls!

My goals were to push myself to complete this pilot - and more importantly, to push myself to open a project from the beginning, not just share the data or code after. This was like a test of what that could look like - and how I could bring that back and be a model to my communities and other collaborators. I also wanted to be forced to get experience in GitHub, which I found intimidating previously.

Key accomplishments
I definitely achieved my goal of working in GitHub, and look forward to doing more on there. I did compile and draft all the materials to open this project from the beginning.

Key understandings
I learned a ton and am really grateful for so many examples while learning the concepts. I, like I think many people, consider open practices a good idea - but HOW to actually get there? Especially in terms of the day to day work of opening projects from the get go - including the planning to do so. The program really covered all that, and I am grateful to be able to revisit all these resources going forward to apply the framework to more projects and share with colleagues. For example, I had not written a code of conduct previously, and it was really helpful to turn it from ‘something that sounds like a good idea’ to ‘what actually should I put in it’ with guidance and examples and community.

The community to discuss the topics was the best part, even though it meant so many 8am calls! (That’s pre-kids’-dropoff-at-school-time, so it’s a major coup to pull off so many times, including twice during weeks that school was closed.) It was wonderful to talk through open culture challenges and opportunities far beyond “the ivory tower” or science. Given how critical community is, how to continue that? For me, it’s generally distributed / online, as I work on building more of that culture and community local to my project and work.

I want to be honest here, so I think it’s also important to add that one takeaway for me was that not everyone in open movements, even in the Open Leaders culture cohort or mentors/leadership, prioritizes disability access or necessarily views it as a necessary component of open. That means there’s a lot of work left to do. To share one small example, the first homework assignment included a YouTube video link that was not captioned by Mozilla (you could hit the “auto-captions” button). I notified the leadership that the auto-captions had errors and thus it was not an accessible video, asking them to please update the video. The first response was actually a no - I was told it would be labeled with a warning that it was inaccessible, rather than the captions fixed. I reminded the leadership that I was specifically in this program to work on accessibility in open culture, so this was important to me and I would update them myself if need be. I hope further engagement hopefully will lead to a holistic review of the materials and methods of the Open Leaders program, to ensure access in all assignments and meetings.

Next steps
The next step is inviting anyone and everyone to play around with the pilot audio and process! And finishing up the documents and protocols drafted in during the Open Leaders program and posting on GitHub.

Staying connected
I look forward to:
Continued participation in the OL program, potentially as a mentor to cheer on and support others to try to work on culture change.
Contributing to more open projects
Opening more of my work from the beginning!
Helping my trainees and colleagues access OL and other professional development opportunities in open leadership
Participating in a Global Sprint
Connecting with more open practitioners who want to ensure disability accessibility is part of open

Acknowledgments
Much thanks to colleagues who shared their insights as scientists with sensory disabilities and what they would like to see to make open science more accessible and inclusive (getting their permission before naming them here). This project wouldn’t be possible without people credited in the introduction - Dr. Kristi Hannam, Dr. Tony Vodacek, Tom Snyder and Seneca Park Zoo Society. Similarly, my leaps into open wouldn’t be possible without Dr. Hao Ye, Dr. Auriel Fournier, Dr. Christie Bahlai, Dr. Simon J Goring, Dr. Sam Zipper, and many others who let me learn from them through collaboration, conversation, and example. Much thanks to Dr. Katherine Crocker rightly pushes me to make sure that my work and advocacy for open data/science is anti-colonial, respects traditional ecological knowledge and multiple ways of knowing, and does not collect or open data on indigenous communities without community leadership and true collaboration.

CC-BY-4.0 by Kaitlin Stack Whitney
Last updated April 30, 2019