The Mozilla Festival (or “MozFest” as we affectionately call it) is coming to London October 24-26, and planning is in full swing. This year we’ll be back with an entire track dedicated to “Science and the Web” and we want you to help us shape the program.
MozFest is where many of Mozilla’s best and most innovative ideas come from, bringing together over 1,000 inventors, hackers, creatives, researchers and more to share ideas and explore how we can forge the future of the web together.
For the “Science and the Web” track, we’re 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. This isn’t your average conference, where you present slides to a group. Preference is given to hands on and collaborative sessions (in terms of groups involved as well as the session content itself). Or, as we say “Less yack, more hack.” :)
Preference is also given for sessions that bring together a diverse set of partners, and keep in mind, we’ll have an entire building full of educators, librarians, data experts from journalism to research, coders and more. Think of how you can craft a session idea that could appeal and utilize that collective brainpower.
A few areas to explore to get the creative juices flowing:
- Furthering adoption of open research practices: What are the necessary pieces of the puzzle to move “open science” from concept into practice?
- Hacking digital scholarship: How can we use the web to push the limits of how we share knowledge in the sciences?
- Data sharing: Openness is key to advancing discovery. What role does data play and what cool things can we do with open data in research?
- 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?
- Tools for better open research: Come show off your open tool to help change the way we do science. Also explore how we can apply open technology to research problems and hack on prototypes with us.
- Hacking credit systems to incentivize open research: How can we use new forms of assigning credit to research to facilitate sharing, collaboration and interoperability? How can we better reward open research and career paths? What open technology can we apply?
- Code and data literacy: 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 also hoping to have a “prototyping lab” to continue work from our global sprint, working on resources and tools for open research. Have an idea you’d like to propose? Need some inspiration or a sounding board? Want to help us with planning for the track? Get in touch! We’d love your input to help make this year’s program the best yet. Also for more on last year’s event, check out these resources.
And be sure to get your proposals in before August 22. We hope to see you there.