The Mozilla Festival, “MozFest” will take place in London, UK – November 6 – 8 and the call for proposals is up and running. This year the Science Lab is hosting the “Open Science Track” and is looking for participants from around the world to join us to work on projects furthering open science. MozFest is where many of Mozilla’s best and most innovative ideas come from, bringing together over 1,500 inventors, hackers, creatives, researchers and more to share ideas and explore how we can forge the future of the web together and we’d love to have you help us shape the program.

For this year’s MozFest the Science Lab is looking for sessions that show how the Web can (/and is) transforming science, and help introduce the MozFest crowd to some of the folks and organizations leading the charge. MozFest is not your typical conference – sessions are designed to be participatory, hands on and collaborative.

For this year’s event, we’ll be soliciting proposals for two types of sessions:

• Sprint sessions (1 hour): Project-based, hands on, or discussion oriented. We’re looking for creative approaches and projects for youth, librarians, researchers and more. For an idea, check out last year’s sprint sessions or some of the projects from our last global sprint. Any and all are welcome.
• Training Sessions (2-3 hours): These run in parallel to the sprint sessions, and give us a chance to do a deeper dive on technologies such as GitHub, IPython Notebook / Jupyter, Open Data and more.

What makes for a good proposal

Preference is given to hands on, collaborative sessions in terms of not only the content but the groups involved and that bring together a diverse set of partners. Keep in mind, we’ll have an entire building full of educators, librarians, data experts from journalism to research, coders and more. Think about how you can craft a session idea that could appeal and utilize that collective brainpower.

Here are a few ideas to get the creative juices flowing:

• Getting started with Open Source: What does it mean to “Work Openly”? Help us unpack some of the social and technical aspects of Open Source, and explore ways to build contributorship in science.
• Open Data: Openness is key to advancing discovery. What role does data play and what cool things can we do with open data?
• Citizen science and engagement: From LHC@Home and Zooniverse to crowdfunding, how can we use the web to make research more accessible and use the wisdom of the crowd?
• Empowering community leaders: What form does mentorship take to further open practice in science? Help us build pathways for open leadership and community engagement to help lower barriers to entry and build momentum around open science.
• Training for Open Science: Hands-on training for data or tools to help us better enable the community to do more efficient, collaborative science and further the adoption of open research practice. Work with data or open source? Come help us hack on some entry level lesson material to teach some data tricks, explore exercises and run trainings that show the value of collaboration and code review.

We’re here to help

Have an idea you’d like to propose? Need some inspiration or a sounding board? We’ll be hosting two calls in August to give you a hand. These calls will be held on Tuesday August 11th and Tuesday August 25th @ 1pm EDT. We’ll be sharing some tips and session ideas for first-timers and answering any and all your questions. Please join us – we’re here to help !

We’d love your input to help make this year’s program the best yet.

Be sure to get your proposals in before August 31 @ 21:00 UTC. We’d love to have you join us for this year’s event !