The Mozilla Science Lab’s new team convened for the first time in Toronto this past week, and jousting and Red Sox games aside, began to lay in a course for where the Science Lab should go after its inaugural year. There were some fine wins in our first year, but with new staff on board, it’s time to reach further. In the coming weeks we’re going to be introducing you to the details of just what that looks like with a series of blog posts and content announcements, but for now I’d like to try and capture the spirit of the week’s conversation as a preview of what’s to come.

One of MSL’s big challenges is the huge net we want to cast. We won’t get where we want to go by serving one community or a narrow agenda; that’s why I called for your ideas and stories from open science last week, and want to build a space where we can all have those conversations freely and easily. And the community we want goes beyond conversation, too; we imagine an inclusive community that can easily share skills and technologies among its members, quickly and conveniently, and fold them in to their existing practices seamlessly. Creating the spaces, conversations and materials to support this mentorship and ease of exchange is a central goal of the Mozilla Science Lab, and we need your participation to make it happen.

The open web is an endeavor like nothing that has come before it; it has a rich conversation around it and the indispensable virtues of openness that Mozilla and others have pioneered over the last two decades. But science has centuries of tradition, and its own wisdom that has to inform our plans; we don’t have the same blank slate we did with the web itself. Make no mistake; the Science Lab seeks change. But reformation as a matter of principles alone won’t serve researchers as well as the change brought by empowering them with what the open web has to offer. I think the thing that brings the Mozilla Science Lab community together, is the enormous air of opportunity to offer something truly new to science via the open web; the change we seek will grow naturally from those opportunities, if we can find ways to really put them in the hands of all stakeholders. A community that generates and incubates these opportunities is key to what we’re working to build.

Over the next few weeks, somewhere between Codefest and MozFest, the team will be heads down producing content to help bring these goals into focus to share with you all – let us know what you’re hoping to see, and we can try and find a way to get there together. For now, the Toronto meeting has set our imaginations on building, teaching, and empowering a community that’s going to help science thrive on the open web. We hope you’ll join us.