Mozilla Science Lab Week in Review, Sept. 29 – Oct. 5

Shoutouts

Many thanks to everyone who’s jumped on board with pull requests and comments in our new Code Review lesson, building off our pilot! Special thanks to SVAKSHA for being the first to PR this module with thoughts on documentation, and shoutouts to Daniel Chen and Sheila Miguez for their thoughts in the issue tracker – those conversations are really interesting, and will shape the direction that module takes as it evolves.

Also, a big thanks to Svetlana Belkin for her great ideas and leadership around establishing our new community forum, and conversations & blog posts about other techniques for bringing our community together – more ideas are always being discussed on the forum and mailing list, we hope you’ll join us there.

In & Around the Lab

The Mozilla Science Lab is very very pleased to welcome our newest member, Arliss Collins! Arliss has been working with the Science Lab for some time to help bring Software Carpentry workshops worldwide to life; looking forward, Arliss is going to help us study and design ways of making the workshop experience better for everyone involved, both instructors and students, and carry the workshop experience beyond the two-day bootcamp. Welcome, Arliss!

Our lead developer Abby Cabunoc has been hard at work on our Code as a Research Object project for some time now. A collaboration between the Science Lab, GitHub, figshare and Zenodo, this project seeks to find ways to make scientific software an established member of the scholarly workflow. Recently, the discussion has taken up the role of metadata in supporting the integration of code, publishing and open science – more details and ways to get involved are in Abby’s blog post from earlier this week.

Also new this week – the Mozilla Science Lab Forum is live and running! Join us on the forum to discuss news and events in the open science universe, find projects that you can participate in, see what the Science Lab is working on, or just say hi – we’d love to hear from you. Jump in anywhere, or feel free to start a new conversation; this forum is the first step in work to make the Science Lab’s web presence more interactive, supportive of discoverable projects and hands-on education initiatives, and driven by you!

Bill Mills has been sneaking time here and there out of his community manager duties this week to put on his instructor hat, and get rolling on a new project – check out the first few commits on our new Code Review lessons, and jump into the issue tracker or forum to offer your thoughts. In it, we’re exploring the challenge of not only introducing the practice of code review to the research process in an efficient manner, but thinking about how to teach & learn the idea of what makes code good. We’re trying to capture these ideas not just in prose lessons, but in hands on and interactive activities, meant to be explored with your lab group, friends and colleagues without requiring the overhead of workshops or lectures. Stay tuned for more content in the coming days!

Next Week’s Forecast

Next week (October 9, 11 AM Eastern) is our monthly community call! Join us to hear about plans for our Science and the Web track at MozFest, and the launch of our collaboration pilot, (formerly known as) Interdisciplinary Programming. We’ll be joined by Aure Moser (Knight-Mozilla Open News Fellow) and Laura Paglione (ORCID, CTO) to hear about their plans for MozFest, and by Brian Bot (Sage Bionetworks) to discuss his group’s participation in Interdisciplinary Programming, and lessons learned at the intersection of software development and science.