Our next community call will take place this Thursday, February 12. The call is open to the public and will start at 11:00 am ET. Call in details can be found on the call etherpad (where you can also find notes and the agenda) and on the wiki. (If you have trouble with the toll-free number, try one of the numbers at the bottom of this post.)

The Science Lab meeting is our community call, taking place each month, highlighting recent developments and work of the community relevant to science and the web. Join us to hear more about current projects, find out how you can get involved, and hear from others about their work in and around open research.

This month, we’ll be hearing from participants on the upcoming Toronto Open Science Code Sprint, hosted by the Mozilla Science Lab. The lab’s own Abby Cabunoc and Arliss Collins have organized a coding sprint for March 7-8 at the Toronto Mozilla office for local projects and contributors to get together, meet one another and learn & work on some projects together. We’ll be hearing from Abby on Contributorship Badges for open science; Christopher Ing on Matplotdash, a Collaborate project seeking to build a monitoring dashboard for large scientific computational jobs; Sibyl Gao on WormBase, a successful collaboration and communication platform in the nematode genetics & biology community; Madeleine Bonsma on Pathogens & Disease Immunity, another Collaborate project that seeks to build a database of phage and bacteria genomes for studying how bacteria resist infection, and Max Franz on Cytoscape.js, a graph theory library in JavaScript. The Toronto Sprint promises to be an excellent opportunity to meet the community behind these projects and explore them together; we hope you’ll join us to learn how you can get involved, too!

Also on the call this Thursday, we’ll be hearing from Kathi Unglert on the UBC Earth & Ocean Science Study Group she is currently helping teach and run. Small study groups of friends and colleagues are a friendly, low-pressure way to share and practice skills in coding, data wrangling and community leadership; Kathi will tell us about her experiences organizing a study group on the ground at UBC, and give you some ideas on how you can start a group of your own at your own institution. We’ve already started assembling ideas and lessons here; we’d love to have you join the call, learn more, and contribute your own ideas to the project, too.

Have an update, blog post or event you’d like to share relevant to open science? Add it to the etherpad (see ‘Non Verbal Updates’, line ~80). It’s a great way to share what you’re working on and/or interested in with the community. Don’t be shy. Have a look at last month’s notes for an idea of what others contributed to the conversation.

Mark your calendars, tune in and help us spread the word – everyone is welcome. For call-in details and links to the etherpad, visit our wiki page. We hope you’ll join us.