Today is a bittersweet day at the Science Lab in that we’re welcoming a new team member and bidding farewell to another. (More on the new addition soon.) It’s an exciting and important time in our growth, as a program just over two years old – and I wanted to take a moment to thank a certain member of the team as he moves on to his next challenge.

Yep, today is our community manager Bill Mill’s last formal day as a Mozilla employee. He’ll be returning to his former research group at TRIUMF, where he’ll be weaving in the practices he helped thousands of others bring home to their labs, influencing the system from within as a research software developer.

Or, as he put it, “I think I can be more effective within the system,” spoken as a true community manager, still frustrated at the state of change within his field, and eager to attack it from a different angle. For those who know him, that’s Bill.

This post is one to celebrate his time with the Science Lab and thank him for his work this past year.

I first encountered Bill in early 2014 when he was a new Software Carpentry instructor, readying to help with his first bootcamp (as they there then called) in Vancouver. He and a colleague of ours, Angelina Fabbro, had been hacking on a project called “Interdisciplinary Programming”, a platform designed to crowdsource programming challenges from the sciences to the broader community. We reached out, asked if we could help with the platform, and struck up a collaboration.

A few months later, we made him an offer to join us as our first community manager, a role much more nuanced in its delivery than the name on the tin, involving training, engagement, and resource creation to help support learners and contributors.

And “Interdisciplinary Programming”? That became Collaborate – a core part of the Science Lab’s infrastructure, further built up by Bill and our lead developer Abby to be a GitHub-integrated project repository for the sciences.

Bill wore a number of hats during his first few months at Mozilla, stepping in as our education lead and head trainer to support our our learning work and Software Carpentry community. He single-handedly created the Study Group Handbook and a starter kit to support new community members looking to start a discussion about open science and open source at their insitutions, but lacking an accessible way to do it. He mentored project leads, contributors, and learners to help them get unstuck, working open, and primed to help their peers do the same.

Beyond that, Bill (along with Abby and Arliss) helped usher the Science Lab through a growth period, both in terms of staff and maturation, and we wouldn’t be where we are today without that core team.

Bill – we’ll miss your colorful, Hawaiian shirt collection (that rivals only that of Peter Norvig) and your enthusiasm on our team calls. But as bittersweet as it is to lose you as a formal team member, I know this is only the start of our work together to further open research practice.

Thank you for your energy, enthusiasm, creativity and help this past year. It’s been a privilege. TRIUMF had best get their GitHub repos and contrib files in order.