Mozilla Science Lab Week in Review, Oct. 20 – Nov. 2

Shoutouts

Many thanks to Vicky Schneider and The Genome Analysis Centre in Norwich, England for hosting the third live Software Carpentry Instructor Training workshop – it was a pleasure for us to help teach and refine this workshop, and a privilege to deliver it at your institution.

Also, a huge thanks to all of our session organizers and participants at MozFest 2014! There are far too many to list, but our gratitude all the same – it’s the vision of our organizers and the energy of our participants that brings MozFest to life.

Shoutouts for exciting projects this week go to Demitri Muna, Max Ogden and the whole Dat team for their recent progress on supporting the Trillian project with a data distribution layer powered by Dat. There’s still plenty to do on Trillian (any linux container or docker pros in the house?) – you can get involved too, at Collaborate!

In & Around the Lab

It’s been two weeks since our last Week in Review, thanks to MozFest in London last weekend. The real magic of this Science Lab’s first MozFest was its ability to help people of wildly different backgrounds come together and combine their skills and practices on novel new projects; read Bill’s reflections on the event in his recent blog post, check out the directory of repos and etherpads of content generated from the festival, and help keep the conversations and projects flying with the Lab.

Also in the last couple weeks, Bill Mills co-taught Software Carpentry’s Instructor Training at The Genome Analysis Centre in Norwich, England. Teaching these workshops is how we’re refining our own curriculum for supporting instructors from all kinds of different projects; as always, we aspire to have our students learn as much from us as we do from them.

Speaking of Software Carpentry, Arliss Collins made a call for instructors this week for our North American workshops being offered over the Winter. If you’re a qualified SWC instructor (and especially if this will be your first time teaching!), head over to the list of workshops and sign up for one you can make. Travel costs reimbursed as always!

Near-Term Forecast

Next week the Science Lab will be heads down working on our content and events for later in November – Bill will be continuing to develop the instructor training material both for Software Carpentry and the Science Lab in preparation for SWC Instructor Training at the University of Washington, in Seattle Nov. 12-14.

Also, we’ll be chasing down speakers and content both for our next community call on November 13, and for our next round of Instructor Hangouts on the 20th! Post any requests or suggestions for either event in the comments below, or on the forum. Recent teaching practices on Google Hangouts have produced such interesting discussions (see Bill’s reflections here), we’ll be focusing on teaching demos and feedback in Instructor Hangouts this month – instructors from any software workshop are invited to come give a 5 minute lesson on their material, and we’ll all provide constructive comments and feedback. If you’d like to reserve a speaking slot, sign up on the etherpad!