Space Grabbers

Cairo | Measuring Open Science

KIPIMO, THE USABLE METRIC Where Assessment meets Excitement

High-Level Project Summary

In line with NASA’s Open Science goals, we developed a metric system that calculates the averages from feedback given by researchers in form of numbers that show the extent to which they have understood the science in NASA’s shared resources and the extent to which they hope to use it in future scientific work and research in exchange for related data and some exclusive documents about their research from NASA. These averages are fed as inputs into a formula which displays the effects and impact of open science. They are displayed as percentages of people who have understood and hope to use the science, out of the people who have read the data and interacted with the tools.

Link to Final Project

https://github.com/Space-Grabbers/nasa-earth

Link to Project "Demo"

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1quTTVjswA7zocD2ItfS_g_U3uj53HspP/edit#slide=id.p1

Detailed Project Description

This project focuses on presenting a metric that measures the effects and impact of NASA open science activities in line with two of the NASA open science goals which are:

1. To increase understanding and adoption of open science principles and techniques in our mission and research communities

2. To accelerate major scientific discoveries by supporting the adoption of open science.

During our research, we found out that there are already existing metrics for open science, but they were not widely used. We found out that the existing metrics hardly tackled the part where the publishers get to know whether the researchers have understood the science in the shared data, results and tools and whether they will use the content in other works and scientific discoveries. We found that there would hardly be any way to find out such information than asking the readers themselves. We also recognized the fact that many readers, even ourselves hate giving feedback online so we decided to make the feedback acquisition process as fast as possible (6 seconds or so) and also reward every researcher that helps us get this feedback with some NASA exclusive documents or recommendations of more documents that we think would facilitate them more in their research.

We figured out that a browser extension that displays a chatbot when clicked on, would be the more interactive way to capture feedback from the users in less than 7 seconds. The feedback would be asked in form of three assessment questions

Clicking on the extension icon pop-up brings up a chat box that compels the Researcher to interact with it in exchange for a reward in form of a NASA-exclusive document or exclusive recommendation about related research.

ChatBot appears only on the documents published by NASA on its different platforms. The extension icon first appears on major points of the documents like Photos and Equations and appears to the user as they scroll through the document but is not destructive.

This metric is more accurate since the researchers themselves gauge their level of understanding of the shared scientific tools and data and they share with us whether they will be able to use them in future. The metric is also built to be used widely because it compels the user to give feedback in exchange for a valuable reward in line with what they are researching about.

We hope to achieve a system that is very user-friendly, an extension that is not distractive as the researcher is reading the document, a system that uniquely identifies feedback from different researchers and ensures privacy of the captured feedback. We also hope to build a globe for visualization of the metrics such that the NASA open science evaluators would find it easy and exciting to evaluate the open science activities.

TOOLS THAT WE USED

We mostly used React, which is a framework based on JavaScript- to develop the system.
We wrote the system code in HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Java.
We used Visual Studio code as the Integrated Development environment.
We used Git Hub to store our code in a repository so as to work collaboratively.

HOW THE USER INTERFACE(DASHBOARD) THAT WILL SHOW THE DIFFERENT AVERAGES MEASURED AROUND THE WORLD LOOKS LIKE

OPEN SCIENCE PAGE

2 GLOBE VISUALIZER

Globe Link http://spacegrabbersnasa.s3-website.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/

3 DASHBOARD THAT DISPLAYS THE MEASURED AVERAGES

4 ABOUT PAGE

Space Agency Data

We used the documents –NASA Open science initiative, NASA’s transform to open science (TOPS) initiative and Open data to open science from the different resources that were provided to us to understand the challenge more and what was required of us. The data that was obtained from these documents was used by the team to come up with a metric that can measure the effectiveness and impact of NASA research on society. Links to these documents are in the References.

Hackathon Journey

The experience has been quite thrilling, fun, and educative at the same time. As a team, we got to learn more about teamwork, we learnt new terms and concepts like Open science and its activities, and the impact it would have when shared with society. We have also learnt more about NASA as an organization and all the great work they have done in the past in terms of discoveries, inventions and innovations. We have also enjoyed the experience of being part of a global community trying to solve challenges that could impact the world in ways we cannot imagine.

We have had little time to implement so much but have learnt an important lesson as well in that, that time is never enough but you’ve got to do what you can with the resources you have and sometimes, those resources turn out to be more than enough to do a lot.

We chose this challenge because it was the closest that took an approach to share science that is already known to the public and ensuring that it is effective and impactful. Uganda is one of the countries where Space and related subjects are still really in their infant stages its first satellite is going to be launched next month. We believe that this is a start for Uganda and similar countries all around the world to really benefit from such a generous act and all the Open science activities. This is why we were inspired to try and create a new metric to measure the effects of open science.

We would like to thank the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Makerere University for letting us know about this Hackathon, for their continued support and guidance throughout the whole hackathon process. We would also like to thank the Science, Technology and Innovation secretariat of the Republic of Uganda for their guidance during the Hackathon.