Just over five years ago, Malvika, Bérénice, and I decided to apply for Mozilla Open Leaders X, to train people in open science and community management techniques.

Not long after that - early 2020 I think - I rememebr sitting in a cafe with Emmy, Malvika, and Mateusz, saying how I wished I could work full time on open science, perhaps as a consultant. It seemed like a beautiful dream.

I was still working at Cambridge, and squeezing extra bits of time from…. nowhere, really. Somehow we launched OLS-1 (and it was always OLS-1, we knew there’d be more) and did our whole beautiful plan whilst working. 2020 brought a pandemic to make it extra fun.

Then we did OLS-2 while working, and OLS-3. I definitely remember at that point wondering if there’d be a 4 because I was so. damned. tired. By this point I was at Wellcome, which was in the throes of re-organisation and probably should never have hired me, because they didn’t want the stuff I was passionate about, and I was slowly getting more miserable and snarky. We managed OLS-4, but we knew we had to get money and staff, or we’d burn our candles right down.

We did! Turns out we’re not too bad at writing compelling visions in grant applications, and I quit the job that was making me miserable. I’ll be fair: I also started on antidepressants, which made life so much better - but the job really wasn’t for me.

Three whole years now (2022, 2023, and 2024) I’ve been a full time (ish) open science person. My work is people work, and organisational logistics. The code for this blog is about as code-ey as I’ve gotten in years (EngD code notwithstanding). I’m not sure younger me who so DESPERATELY wanted to be a software engineer would have understood.

But it feels great.