We recently posted about some organizational changes taking place within the Foundation and the Science Lab. It seemed like a good opportunity to review what we’ve been up to the first half of the year. Out of that review has come our 2016 Mid-Year Report. Here are a few highlights:
We designed and delivered new resources for skill building
Science Fellow Christie Bahlai leading a session at WOW
This February, the Science Lab took advantage of the hospitality offered us by friends and colleagues in Berlin and we hosted our first “Working Open Workshop” (WOW). We had over 40 participants from four continents join us for 2-days of training on how to work openly and engage with contributors and other collaborators. The curriculum has already been tweaked and used by others to host mini-WOWs.
We grew our community of leaders
On the heels of the WOW, we piloted a new mentorship model we called the Open Leadership Cohort. We mentored 32 participants from the Berlin workshop for four months, providing them project mentorship, support for local events, and more training to prepare their open projects for the Global Sprint.
In Nairobi for our final work week with our Fellows
Late this summer we “graduated” our first cohort of Mozilla Fellows for Science after their final work week in Nairobi. Our four Fellows worked with us over ten months teaching new researchers, developing online tools, presenting tech in a friendly way, and digging into the intricacies of privacy and sharing biomedical research data. We can’t wait to see what they do next!
We fostered global collaboration
In June, we celebrated our third and LARGEST Global Sprint. We had over 320 participants from more than 36 cities around the world. Along with the increased participation, we saw an increase in contributions as well, with over 330 pull requests made across all the projects in two days.
50 hours of Global Sprint activity by repository
If you want to read more details about any of the above or our other activities in the first six months of 2016, feel free to download the full report from Figshare or our new Reports repository, where you can review previous annual reports, as well. The mid-year report also provides information on our plans for the rest of this year and some thoughts on next year, such as new mentorship opportunities, reaching out to new communities, expanding the next Global Sprint, and releasing some new open data training resources.
We’d love for you to take a look and give us your thoughts on what we’ve done, what we are planning, and if there’s anything missing! Give us a shout on Twitter or drop us an email at sciencelab at mozillafoundation dot org.