Mozilla Science Lab Week in Review, February 2-8

Shoutouts

Many thanks to Kathi Unglert for contributing our first Study Group lesson. Check it out and share your lessons on coding, data wrangling and community leadership with us there!

In & Around the Lab

The Science Lab opened a call for discussion & contributions this week to its new Study Group project. Getting together with a familiar group of friends and colleagues every few weeks to take up a new idea is a great way to share skills and learn from each other; we’d like to explore ways to facilitate those discussions, and we’re starting by collecting example lessons and material from the community. If you have a short lesson (even just some rough notes!) on anything in open science, whether it’s coding, data science, open practice, community building or a social media primer for scientists, send us a pull request or open an issue – we’d love to include your ideas and share them with the wider community.

Outside the Lab

President Obama’s fiscal year 2016 budget has reaffirmed the US’ commitment to open data, seeking to “open up Government-generated assets, including data and the results of federally funded research and development—such as intellectual property and scientific knowledge—to the public” (pp 74); read more in Heather Joseph‘s article from SPARC.

Don’t miss Carl Boettiger‘s recent paper on the use of Docker to support reusable and reproducible scientific code in rapidly changing development environments; containerization promises to be an integral practical element in reproducible scientific code, and Carl’s exploration is both practical & insightful.

Near-Term Forecast

Kaitlin Thaney & Bill Mills are heading to Australia for the Research Bazaar Conference – an event at University of Melbourne on open research technology. We’ll be running trainings as well as talking to researchers and lab heads from across Australia and New Zealand about open science. We’ll also be announcing our first Science Lab Hub – which we’re piloting with the University of Melbourne to help serve as open science boots-on-the-ground in Australia. Stay tuned for more.

This coming Thursday, February 12 is our next community call, at 11 AM ET. We’ll be hearing from Kathi Unglert on the skills-sharing study group she’s helping out with at UBC, and from the project leads from the upcoming Toronto Open Science Code Sprint, hosted by the Mozilla Science Lab. We’ll be hearing from the Lab’s own Abby Cabunoc on Contributorship Badges for open science; Christopher Ing on Matplotdash, a Collaborate project seeking to build a monitoring dashboard for large scientific computational jobs; Sibyl Gao on WormBase, a successful collaboration and communication platform in the nematode genetics & biology community; Madeleine Bonsma on Pathogens & Disease Immunity, another Collaborate project that seeks to build a database of phage and bacteria genomes for studying how bacteria resist infection, and Max Franz on Cytoscape.js, a graph theory library in JavaScript. The Toronto Sprint promises to be an excellent opportunity to meet the community behind these projects and explore them together; we hope you’ll join us to learn how you can get involved, too!

Get Involved

Check out a few of these projects, from the Science Lab and our friends:

Study Group lessons: looking for short lessons on coding, data management, open science practice, community building and social media in the lab, for use in small, casual study groups.

Open Science Comes to Campus brainstorm & discussion: Shauna Gordon-McKeon of Open Hatch is working with Bill Mills and the rest of the Lab to create a one-day workshop to introduce the skills and ideas of open science and open source projects to students – we’d love to hear your ideas on the project in general on the forum, or join in the ‘How to Start an Open Science Project’ brainstorm etherpad.

Collaborate has a long list of projects to dive in with. Leading up to the Toronto Sprint, have a look at Matplotdash and Pathogens & Disease Immunity.