We’re only half-way through the month, but March has been a very busy time for the Science Lab: we hosted our study group learning call on journal clubs, just wrapped our second annual Working Open Workshop, and have a host of opportunities in our fellowships and (new this year!) mini-grants program to announce in the coming weeks!

Bienvenue à Montréal

Inspired by the success of last year’s WOW in Berlin, and the mentorship program that ensued, we collaborated with Peter Grabitz, host of the Montreal Open Science and Reproducibility Meetup and a mentee from last year’s WOW Leadership Cohort to host a similar event in Montreal this year. Our WOW events are structured to catalyze project development in open science and open source, inviting project applicants from our Open Leadership Cohort to pair with mentors from our preceding WOW Leadership Cohort and build robust open science documentation for their projects in preparation for our annual Global Sprint (June 1-2, 2017).

On March 10-11, 2017, we hosted 45+ attendees from 7 countries, five Mozilla staffers-at-large, three Science Fellows for WOW –a flush 2-day event celebrating open science and global web collaboration.

We opened the event on Friday, March 10th, with morning mentorship training sessions for our 10 mentors, returning mentees from previous rounds of the Open Leadership Training Series, led by Abby Cabunoc-Mayes, followed by a Github workshop led by our fellows Danielle Robinson and Bruno Vieira to bring all mentors and mentees up-to-speed on the process of versioned collaboration. The evening mixer featured lightning talks from volunteers and local researchers on a broad range of open science topics: from frameworks for visualizing research findings, to suggestions for standardizing shared papers and metadata schema.

On Saturday, March 11th, we paired a series of short talks with work sessions on preparing and sustaining open projects, and hosted lunch-time birds-of-a-feather and afternoon elective discussions on focused themes like finding funding, collecting community metrics, developing design practices and incorporating assessment into research practice.

Read on:

• check out our event website, replete with talks, handouts, logistics
• browse our event postings for the kickoff and 2-day conference
• review our #mozwow conversation archive, attendee twitter list, or etherpad notes
• watch the activity on our repository issues, where attendees are adding their work post-WOW
• view our Flickr photos !

Special thanks to the Notman House and collaborators at the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at McGill University who hosted us for our event! We left impressed and inspired by the potential of this growing Leadership Cohort, and look forward to sharing updates on their projects leading up to the Global Sprint.

If you’d like to host a WOW in your city, get in touch: sciencelab@mozillafoundation.org. We’ll be following up with more details from our leadership cohort community on this month’s community call, Thursday April 13th; tune in to learn more!