The Mozilla Festival, or “MozFest” for short, will take place in London, UK – October 28-30 and the call for proposals is up and running. The Science Lab is hosting the Open Science space and is looking for participants from around the world to join us to learn about and work on projects furthering open science, open data and open practices around research and the Web. MozFest is where many of Mozilla’s best and most innovative ideas come from, bringing together over 1,700+ inventors, hackers, creatives, researcher, and more to share ideas and explore how we can forge the future of the web together. We’d love to have you help us shape the Open Science program.

For this year’s MozFest the Science Lab is looking for sessions that show how the Web can help researchers, developers, librarians explore, remix, and hack at the intersection of science, data and the Internet to learn how the Web is transforming research and discovery and to introduce the MozFest crowd to some of the folks and organizations leading the charge in this space.

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 the following session formats:

• Learning Lab – 60 minute session where the audience both learns and interacts with others. 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, June 02-03 2016. Any and all are welcome.
• Design or hack sprint – long workshop dedicated to hands-on making, hacking and producing ‘a thing’ – these run in parallel to the Learning Lab session, and give us a chance to do a deeper dive on technologies such as GitHub, IPython Notebook / Jupyter, Open Data and more.
• Fireside chat – 45 minute talk with time for questions and answers.
• Demo or Lightning talk – 5-15min showcase of completed work or product.

What makes for a good proposal ?

Sessions that are hands on, educational and encourage collaboration 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. Your creativity, expertise, and contribution to the open web will not only benefit the Mozfest community, it will enhance your leadership skills.

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 “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) sessions 10 AM EDT Thursdays in July to give you a hand. The first AMA will take place Thursday July 14. We’ll be answering any and all your questions. Please join us if you need a hand.

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

Be sure to get your proposals in before August 01 @ 21:00 UTC. We’d love to have you join us for this year’s event !