Mozilla Foundation

Toward an Internet of Hugs

Apr 13 2016

How can we create tangible reminders of one another’s presence in our lives, even across great distances? How can we send a hug across the internet? How can physical computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) make those things possible?
Those are the questions we worked to answer on our April episode of the Mozilla Curriculum Workshop.

We were joined by an awesome audience and incredible guests including:

Natalie Freed, a computer science and digital fabrication teacher at Lick-Wilmerding High School in San Francisco, CA.
Andre Garza, a Mozilla Clubs Regional Coordinator and educational technologist based in Rio.
Jie Qi, a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab in the Responsive Environments group.

Our fourth guest, Jeremy Boggs, a design architect at the University of Virginia’s Scholars’ Lab, could not make it, but we look forward to hearing from him on a future episode of the workshop dedicated to IoT.
Highlights of our conversation included:

Making the case for physical computing in the classroom as a source of wonder and agency for learners.
Finding places to begin with physical computing.
How to move from being a physical-computing beginner to being an intermediate or advanced user.

A big take-away from our conversation (which you can see evolving in the animated .gif above) was that the power of physical computing comes from putting the magic and wonder of making stuff work into learners’ hands. Figuring out how to wire and program a physical computing project doesn’t take away that magic or wonder; rather, it gives learners a sense of control, agency, and decision-making over the technologies they build, buy, learn, and use.
About half-way through the episode, we switched to prototyping an “Internet of Hugs” kit (drawing from past work done by Natalie Freed and Jie Qi) that would help teachers and learners create something like a light or little machine that another group of learners could turn on and off from somewhere else in the world to send a virtual hug.
You can find that prototyping work on this shared document and in our episode’s GitHub repo. Please feel free to comment and ask questions in either place and to use the materials in your own work, as well. We’d love to see this kit develop further to include:

A list of materials needed for building circuits with microprocessor boards (like arduino).
A list of at-hand materials that could be recycled for this project.
A facilitation guide for teaching physical computing and Internet of Hugs projects.
A handbook showing the assemblies and code needed for basic Internet of Hugs projects.

Please help! Let us know to how improve the kit for you and your learners. Also, let us know how to improve the workshop for you, our audience and guests.
Our next episode is schedule for Tuesday, May 10th, at 5 PM PT, 8 PM ET, and 9 PM BRT. We’ll be looking at the National Writing Project’s Letters to the Next President 2.0 (#2nextprez) campaign as a pathway into discussing and prototyping youth civic engagement resources on the web. Mark your calendar and join the fun!
In the meantime, if you’re curious to learn more about physical computing and IoT, join this month’s community call and Twitter chat to explore the wonder, magic, and agency of making software you can touch.

You can check out the community call here. It’s on Wednesday, April 20th, 2016 at 8am PT/ 11am ET/ 3pm GMT/ 5pm SAST/ 8:30pm IST.
Follow @MozTeach to get involved with the teach-the-web chat (#TTWchat) on Thursday, April 28th, 2016.

We’ll see you on the Internet of Things and Hugs!
Are you on the go or unable to tune in at our normal broadcast time? Is audio better for you than video? Listen to our March and April episodes as podcasts! Download the links for .mp3 versions of each Mozilla Curriculum Workshop.

Everware: Reproducible and Reusable Science | #mozsprint 2016

Apr 13 2016

Mozilla

Tim Head and Igor Babuschkin are two particle physicists who want research to be more reproducible and reusable. I met Igor in after his team won the 2014 CERN Webfest. The following year, Tim pitched Everware, letting you easily run other people’s code, and together with the team who joined won ‘Best Technology’ at the 2015 CERN Webfest.

Since then, the two have been part of the team working on Everware which lets your run jupyter notebooks directly from a GitHub repository. I interviewed Tim, Igor and the rest of the team to learn more about Everware and how you can help during our Global Sprint, June 2-3.

Why did you start Everware?

We were frustrated by how hard it is to try out other people’s research code. People expect to spend a day or two (or even longer!) trying to get code that has been shared with them working. There had to be a better way. The idea to build a web platform to easily launch jupyter notebooks was born.

Several of us are based at CERN. Every summer there is a hackathon: the CERN webfest. In the summer of 2015 Tim decided that instead of just talking, the webfest was the perfect occasion to start prototyping. He got together with @anaderiRU to construct a pitch. We persuaded several more people to join us: @OmeGak, @ibab, @ndawe, @uzzielperez, and @AxelVoitier.

After the weekend we had a little demo and collected the prize for best technology.

Can we make it easier to create reusable science?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Some parts of science are really, really hard to make reusable. We are targeting data analysis and other science done using computers. A large fraction of this research could be much easier to share.

Right now it is still pretty hard to make the code for your research easy to reproduce and reuse. You have to be an expert on a lot of technical stuff. This is where we come in. We are building figuring out for you which tools to use and how to combine them. The goal is to come up with a winning recipe that is useful to researchers while they are doing their research project. As a side effect they are making their code easier to reuse by others.

Our approach is centered around git repositories. All your code goes into it, together with a text file (Dockerfile) that describes how to create the environment in which your code runs. This means a computer can now recreate exactly the environment you used. Your code is guaranteed to work, and behave like it did when you last used it.

For example, my research code from CERN uses several big software libraries that are foreign to most non-CERNiacs. As a result getting others up to speed takes a long time. However if I bundle my code in an everware-compatible way I can send a GitHub link to my new collaborator and they can get going understanding the science instead of battling with libraries and compilers.

How is this different from Binder?

Everware and Binder both allow you to take a GitHub repository and run it “in the cloud”. From the user’s perspective, they are very similar. The differences appear when you try and setup your own instance of Everware, for example for your university group or team at work. Everware is an extension of JupyterHub which means it only has very few dependencies. So it is very easy to set up and get running.

We are also working on building tools so you can run code locally on your computer using all the goodness of Everware without being tied to using a particular server.

Can I try Everware now?

Yes! Visit https://everware.rep.school.yandex.net and sign up for our beta. As we are letting you run arbitrary code on our computing resources we need your email address and name, because: security. You can also visit our GitHub repository https://github.com/everware/everware to learn how to setup an instance for you and your friends.

What do I need to make my GitHub repository Everware compatible?

The magic sauce used by Everware is docker containers. These are like super lightweight virtual machines. To make your repository work with Everware you need to create a Dockerfile in it that describes how to set up all the libraries and tools needed to run your code. Check out our Getting Started guide for some instructions.

What kind of skills do I need to help you build Everware?

If you are a graphic designer or UI person, we would love to hear from you. We realise that we are better at crafting pretty code than good looking UIs ;) Obviously programmers and techies are also welcome. Some of the tech we use: python, jupyter, docker, git, HTML, CSS and JS.

We would love for lots of normal people to try and use Everware. That way we learn what works and what doesn’t work, needs improving, and what new features people want.

What are you hoping to do at the Mozilla Science Global Sprint, June 2-3? Can others help you here?

At the Global Sprint we would like to help as many people as possible to “everware-ise” their research code and help them setup their own Everware instances.

We will also work on the tools for running Everware compatible repositories on your local machine. We have only just started thinking about what they should be able to do, so there is a lot to do.

As usual, while working on the project we will discover lots of things that don’t work or need improving. So we will sprint on those issues as they come up.

Bonus question: Where is your Research Fox sticker?

Tim’s is sitting on the dinner table waiting for Tim to buy a new laptop.

Igor’s sticker is on his laptop, where it has received countless compliments and where-can-I-get-thats.

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Come join us wherever you are June 2-3 at the Mozilla Science Global Sprint to work on Everware and pick up your own Research Fox! Have your own project or want to host a site? Submissions are open for projects and site hosts.

The White House Science Fair is today

Apr 13 2016

Mozilla

Today, for the sixth consecutive year, President Obama is celebrating all things STEM with students from across the country at the White House Science Fair. View the White House press release, full release can be found here. You can join us at the fair virtually by watching the live webcast or by sharing your inventions and ideas on Twitter using the hashtag #WHScienceFair.
From robots to rockets, Mozilla loves science, technology, engineering and math. Add in gigabit technology and you get STEM education projects that wouldn’t be possible with traditional broadband internet connections, making learning more immediate, immersive, and accessible. Move over baking soda volcanoes.
Here are a few of the projects we’ve supported through the Gigabit Community Fund:
[Chattanooga] The brainchild of Gig City Production’s Jonathan Susman, Adagio is a cloud-based remote audio mixing tool co-developed with UTC Computer Science Professor Craig Tannis and several of his graduate students. Utilizing Chattanooga’s gigabit network, Adagio’s cloud-based platform drastically lowers the financial and technological barriers to mixing audio, granting students and professionals alike access to studio-quality tools right in their browser.
[Kansas City] The Gigabots from Big Bang bring connected robotics and devices to classrooms using existing educational robotics platforms. A Gigabot is a combination of hardware, software and a cloud platform. Each Gigabot is connected to others from any location in real-time. This project takes robotics to a new frontier in science and engineering through programming, all while teaching kids how to share innovation in collaborative ways.
[Chattanooga] GigBridge, proposed by Girls Preparatory School (GPS) senior Anjali Chandra, connects students via streaming video at Chattanooga Girls Leadership Academy and East Lake Academy, two Title I schools in Hamilton County. With the help of Jill Pala, GPS’s Chair of Computer Science, the Spanish department and her classmates — as well as support from UTC and TVA — Anjali ran an after-school program focusing on English as a second language and healthier lifestyle skills through app design, developing a publicly-available digital literacy curriculum along the way. Students learned the basics of and built mobile applications over the course of eight weeks, creating English and Spanish versions. Anjali has since received additional funding from Causeway to help continue the project.
You can learn more about these projects and others in Chattanooga and Kansas City. Living in a city where you can leverage gigabit technology for education? Join us at the Gigabit City Summit, May 16-18 in Kansas City, exclusively designed for leaders in current and emerging gigabit cities.

To Empower People Online, Mozilla Launches Interactive Web Literacy Map

Apr 6 2016

Mozilla

By 2025, five billion people will be online, further cementing the Web as an essential tool to inspire, unite, and improve the lives of those who have the knowledge and skills to wield it.
To this end, Mozilla is working to ensure the Web remains open and accessible for all. We’re empowering people with the skills they need to utilize the Web. We’re helping advance policies and practices for an open Web. And we’re developing leaders who can build, teach, and advocate for it.
The Web has become this generation’s defining technology, enabling us to access and share information almost instantly. Yet, as powerful as this resource is, there are far too many people who aren’t equipped to use the Web in ways that make their lives and communities better.
We believe that when people are given access to the right tools and are taught basic web literacy skills — like reading, writing, and participating online — it opens new opportunities in their personal and professional lives.
Web Literacy 2.0 Map

In 2013, the Mozilla Foundation and a community of volunteer educators, researchers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and others established the Web Literacy Map as a framework. It detailed the core skills needed to fully participate in the digital age, including how to navigate and understand the mechanics of the Web, as well as how to meaningfully contribute and share information online.
Over the last six months, Mozilla has engaged a diversity of stakeholders through focus groups, interviews, and surveys with the goal of making the Web Literacy Map more approachable, accessible, and applicable. The skills within can be summed up as the ability to read, write, and participate online. Read is about how we explore and evaluate web content. Write outlines the skills needed to build and contribute to the Web. Participate refers to how we connect with others online.
EXPLORE MOZILLA’S NEW WEB LITERACY MAP»
In addition, the Map has evolved to include 21st Century skills (21C Skills). As people learn to read, write, and participate on the Web, a cross-cutting set of 21C Skills emerge as critical to success in today’s world. They enable individuals to leverage and advance the web as an open and public resource. The 21C Skills, combined with the web literacy skills, are the nexus for entry-level digital-age skills. They are a set of abilities — problem solving, creativity, collaboration, and communication — that people need to develop in order to succeed in the information age. These skills have always been critical, and even more so in an information-based economy.
How to use the Web Literacy 2.0 Map
The interactive map consists of the skills and competencies needed to be web literate, and links to activities and curriculum for teaching and learning web literacy skills. Each skill will eventually be linked to credentials that individuals can earn for mastering the skills.

Mozilla community members teach the Web in Indonesia. Credit: Laura de Reynal

Want to get involved?
We contend that knowing how to read, write, and participate in the digital world has become the 4th basic foundational skill next to the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Having these skills on the Web expands access and opportunity for more people to learn anytime, anywhere, at any pace. Whether you’re a first time smartphone user, an educator, an experienced programmer, or an Internet activist, the degree to which you can read, write, and participate on the web shapes what you can imagine — and what you can do — in your own lives and in the world around you.
We encourage you to sharpen your own skills and become a mentor in the community. Use the Web Literacy Map to plan learning activities for others. Reflect on this work in your own online spaces by blogging about it. Include the #teachtheweb and/or #webliteracy hashtags in your posts across social media to contribute to the dialogue. And join the Mozilla Learning community calls each month to engage and participate in practical discussions about web literacy.

WorldBrain: Verifying the Internet with Science | #mozsprint 2016

Apr 6 2016

Mozilla

Oliver Sauter has a vision where our society can make decisions based on verifiable facts instead of misinformation and rumours. I met Oliver at the Berlin Open Science Meetup where he presented WorldBrain, his plan for a browser plugin that verifies the trustworthiness of an article.

His idea was so compelling that Richard, a Mozilla Fellow for Science, approached me before Oliver had left the stage and suggested we add WorldBrain to our collection of open source software for science. We not only listed WorldBrain Webmarks, but we made space for Oliver to join our first Working Open Workshop and have been working with him ever since!

I interviewed Oliver so you can learn more about WorldBrain and how you can help during our Global Sprint, June 2-3.

Why did you start WorldBrain?

I started WorldBrain because I was frustrated to see how our world is torn apart by misinformation. I consider it as one of the (if not the) most fundamental structural problems our hyperconnected society has today.

It was clear that the source of all this is the content we consume every day in form of articles, blog posts and videos on the internet. There, people have the first contact point with bad information and this is where WorldBrain has to interfere to make a difference.

Why is WorldBrain the solution to misinformation online today?

Right now, people have to proactively research to get facts checked, that seems suspect. To do so they can use various sites like snopes.com, politifacts.org or factcheck.org. But this leaves out the majority of the content we just passively consume without checking it. And this is where misinformation can creep in easily – on everyone of us.

With WorldBrain’s plugin, we want to make it transparent to the users which statements are correct and get a glimpse on the overall trustworthiness of the content they currently consume. All that without them having to leave to another site. With that, our goal is to prevent misinformation from being consumed, shared and eventually integrated into a person’s and our society’s belief systems.

This is an extremely complex problem that will be hard to pull off. After a year of talking to dozens of experts in various relevant fields, we have a promising approach on making this plugin a reality. As a first step, we are developing a bookmarking service for the literate crowd needed to make the verifications trustworthy, namely skeptics, science journalists, STEM students and scientist.

Tell me about WorldBrain Webmarks. How will this help web researchers and skeptics?

To verify millions of articles and videos with tens of millions of claims, it’s clear that WorldBrain cannot be another volunteer run platform like Wikipedia. We have to provide a fact verification service that gives value to the user while they are producing valuable data for the community. .

This service is an advanced bookmarking tool for scientists, skeptics, (science)journalists and STEM-students that lets people annotate, share and discuss bookmarks directly on the web. For the first time, web researchers and skeptics will be able to save bookmarks with annotating text, images or videos and add comments, images, files tags and metadata to them – all directly on the website itself.

On this endeavour we are collaborating with Hypothes.is, which already has developed much of the needed functionalities. In fact, for the coming months, the WorldBrain team will contribute to the development of Hypothes.is, so that become the platform it needs to for us and can be for many other projects like ours in the future.

This service, WorldBrain’s Webmarks, will lay the foundation to enter a stage of collaborative text analysis, which will allow us to develop algorithms to find the most common claims on the internet. With the help of the crowd, we then can verify in crowd sourced templates and link them back, where we found them. This will allow us to scale up fact-checking to millions of articles.

What roadblocks or problems have you run into while working on WorldBrain?

The biggest roadblock so far was to get the concept laid out so that it is a doable approach.

It took me over a year and dozens of conversations with experts in the fields to get it “right”.As you can imagine, just the idea of the plugin is 0.005% of the actual project. Without a clear concept it was hard for people to see that it can be pulled off. Because of this, it was equally hard to get people motivated to invest time in me and the project.

This has fortunately changed in the last months as people see the validity of the WorldBrain approach to tackle the sheer amount of content to verify. Persistence, laborious investigation and consistency are starting to pay out :)

And at the moment?

The most pressing roadblock at the moment is to improve the installation time for Hypothes.is.

To install hypothes.is in a local developer environment at the moment, it can take 1-2 hours.We want to develop a docker compose file that reduces this to a few minutes.Here we actually could need some help from people experienced with Docker, Ansible or CircleCI.

How can I keep up to date with the work you’re doing on WorldBrain?

Every 2nd Wednesday, we publish a 2 minutes sprint report video and a blog post, where we talk about what we have been working on in the last 2 weeks and what we are up to in the coming 2.

In the coming weeks, we will also add a public sprint call via a Live Google Hangout.

What skills do I need to help you build WorldBrain Webmarks?

Right now we are mainly looking for PHP, Javascript and Python developers and people experienced with working on and managing open source projects. To get an overview, just visit our CONTRIBUTING.md

We want to build a vibrant developer community around WorldBrain and Hypothes.is. Basically with both projects we are working around the idea of improving the structure of the internet by increasing transparency and quality.

On a technical level, Hypothes.is and Webmarks are built with Javascript(AngularJS) and Python. But the language and frameworks are not as important as a drive for solving the problem and the strong urge to learn new things. So just jump in and we’ll find something for you to unleash your potential!

What kind of tasks can others help you with during the Mozilla Science Global Sprint, June 2-3?

We are just figuring out the first pilot task, to test how our collaboration with Hypothes.is in the development process works ideally.

When the Global Sprint starts, we assume, that there are quite some features, we will have in the pipeline. If you want to contribute already now, just visit our GitHub repo for more information. To stay updated, you can subscribe to our 2 minutes sprint report video, we publish every 2nd Wednesday.

Bonus question: Where is your Research Fox sticker?

haha. On the left side under the apple :)

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Come join us wherever you are June 2-3 at the Mozilla Science Global Sprint to work on WorldBrain and pick up your own Research Fox! Have your own project or want to host a site? Submissions are open for projects and site hosts.

April Mozilla Learning Events

Apr 5 2016

Mozilla

In March, we successfully launched our Curriculum Workshop, Community Call, and #TTWchat. Thank you to all who participated, supported, and helped spread the word about the new ways to connect with us and our network around the globe.

Thought-provoking discussions will continue this month, as we explore the Internet of Things.

Mozilla Curriculum Workshop: Tuesday, April 12 – 5 PM PT, 8 PM ET, 9 PM BRT

Consider how the Internet of Things might impact our lives and learning and prototype resources to teach about the ways wearables and household items connect to the web.

Guests include:

Jie Qi, a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab in the Responsive Environments group.
Jeremy Boggs, a design architect at the University of Virginia’s Scholars’ Lab.
Natalie Freed, a computer science and digital fabrication teacher at Lick-Wilmerding High School.
Andre Garza, a Mozilla Clubs Regional Coordinator and educational technologist.

Mozilla Community Call: Wednesday, April 20th, 11 AM ET/ 4pm UTC/ 5pm CET/ 9:30pm IST

In this call, we’ll explore how we’d like to control our personal data in the home, especially as homes become increasingly connected. We’ll compare how people from India, Scotland, Germany, the UK and beyond are engaging with these questions and how we can build provocative prototypes that bring these ideas to life.

Guests include:

Rikta Krishnaswamy, user researcher from Quicksand in Bangalore, India
Jon Rogers, professor of product design from the University of Dundee, Scotland.

#TTWchat: Thursday, April 28
We’ll continue the great discussion that begins in the curriculum workshop and community call on Twitter via @MozTeach. Follow us for details!

Community call – Apr. 14, 11ET

Apr 4 2016

Mozilla

The Science Lab community call takes place each month, highlighting recent developments and work of the community relevant to science and the web. Join us to hear more about current projects, find out how you can get involved, and listen to others (or yourself!) discuss work in and around open research.

Our next community call will take place this Thursday, April 14th. The call is open to the public and will start at 11:00 am ET. Call in details can be found on the call etherpad (where you can also find notes and the agenda) and on the wiki. (If you have trouble with the toll-free number, try one of the numbers at the bottom of this post.)

This month, we’ll explore open science asset makers, featuring speakers who contribute to open souce and open science by design, community development, and project management. We’ll hear from Sumana Harihareswara of ChangeSet who provides project managment consulting for non-profits, the team at FairPixels who design open source logos for the public domain, and Audrey Eschwright of the Recompiler who authors event resources and codes of conduct via Safety First PDX. We’ll also hear updates from our 2015 Mozilla Fellows for Science. Should be a great call!

Have an update, blog post or event you’d like to share relevant to open science? Add it to the etherpad (see ‘Non Verbal Updates’). It’s a great way to share what you’re working on and/or interested in with the community. Don’t be shy. Have a look at last month’s notes for an idea of what others contributed to the conversation.

Mark your calendars, tune in and help us spread the word – everyone is welcome. For call-in details and links to the etherpad, visit our wiki page. We hope you’ll join us!

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Note: Having trouble dialing in? Try one of these numbers. (Note that they are toll calls and you’ll be charged by your telephone company if the number is long-distance.)

After you enter the extension, you’ll be asked for the conference ID, which is 7677.

US/California/Mountain View: +1 650 903 0800, extension 92
US/California/San Francisco: +1 415 762 5700, extension 92
US/Oregon/Portland: +1 971 544 8000, extension 92
CA/Vancouver: +1 778 785 1540, extension 92
CA/Toronto: +1 416 848 3114, extension 92
UK/London: +44 (0)207 855 3000, extension 92
FR/Paris: +33 1 44 79 34 80, extension 92
DE/Berlin: +49 30 983 333 000, extension 92
NZ/Auckland: +64 9 555 1100, extension 92

March #TTWchat – Women & the Open Web

Apr 1 2016

Mozilla

If you missed out on yesterday’s inaugural #TTWchat, don’t worry! You can still join in the conversation on our forum and/or read the entire discussion here.
The #TTWchat wrapped up Mozilla Learning’s month-long celebration of women & the open web, which included a Curriculum Workshop and Community Call. The Tweetchat aimed to continue the amazing discussions that grew out of those events, which included ways to improve mentorship programs for women in tech, how to create a safe place for women online and at events, and how to encourage women to identify as readers, writers, and participants on the Web. Many thoughts were gleaned as great content to ponder, remix, and utilize in our pursuit of increasing women’s engagement on the web.
We had 60 individuals from 13 countries (Germany, France, Australia, Denmark, Ireland, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Argentina, Denmark, India, South Africa, Canada, U.K., & U.S.) join us in real time for the conversation.
Here are a few highlights:

[View the story “Women & The Open Web #TTWchat; March 31, 2016” on Storify]

Keep your calendar up-to-date with #TTWchats and other Mozilla Learning events by signing up for our monthly newsletter. You’ll not only receive event notifications, but featured activities with tips to remix them for your community, community spotlights and other relevant announcements.

Applications for Hive Toronto 2016 are now open!

Apr 1 2016

Mozilla

Become a Hive Toronto Member!

We are excited to announce that Hive Toronto is now accepting new members! At Hive Toronto, members network with each other, share best practices and pedagogies, learn about and play with new technologies, participate in events, and most importantly, collaborate to design and implement transformative learning opportunities for Toronto youth.

To learn more about our members, check out our MEMBERS page

Please find our application here

Why become a member?

To support youth learning, Hive supports member organizations by providing opportunities for educators to develop skills, share knowledge, and collaborate through the following mechanisms:

Cultivating a community of practice: Community calls, meetups, online communication platform, consultation on program and curriculum development
Facilitating professional development: Digital literacy trainings, cultivating and sharing training opportunities
Acting as a conduit: To other organizations, to funders, to opportunities for youth, promotion
Seeding collaborative partnerships: Informal partnerships, pooling funding from outside funders for cross-member to develop new digital learning opportunities for youth

By joining Hive Toronto, members commit to contributing to a collaborative community of practice. We often explain Hive as a potluck: members have different needs, or “appetites,” but like any good potluck, you take what you need while contributing what you can.

With this being our fourth membership application process, Hive Toronto strives to curate a network of diverse members that serve and are reflective of Toronto and the surrounding areas. Based on member feedback, this round of membership application was open to for-profit organizations with youth programs. The reasoning behind this was twofold: These orgs are offering quality programming to youth and/or educators and current Hive members were already collaborating with several of these for-profit organizations, indicating that they have skills and expertise that could benefit the network.

Requirements for application:

Must be a registered not for profit in Canada
Organizations applying to Hive Toronto must serve youth in some capacity
Is able to commit to monthly, in-person meet-ups and conference calls that allow for members to share program updates, best practices, and learn about new opportunities
Be able to host a professional development session in the first 6 months of membership with the support of the Hive Toronto team. A professional development session is an opportunity to showcase the work and programming of your organization to the rest of the membership
Organizations must identify and name at least one individual who will be the point person for their engagement

Next Steps:

Applications are open from April 1-April 29, 2016
You will be notified if your application was successful by May 12, 2016
If your application is successful, we ask that be available to attend our June community meet up on June 16, 2016 at the Mozilla space at 366 Adelaide Street, Toronto, ON

If you have any questions, please contact simona@mozillafoundation.org

We thank all those that apply.

openSNP brings genetic data to everyone | #mozsprint 2016

Mar 30 2016

Mozilla

openSNP (pronounced “open snip”) lets you share your personal genetic data from DNA testing services like 23andMe, so scientists can discover genetic links to traits like diseases and you can read the latest research to better understand your genome and how it affects you.

Bastian Greshake, Helge Rausch and Philipp Bayer make up the core team building openSNP. This diverse group includes a PhD student in Frankfurt, a web-developer in Berlin and a researcher in Australia. They came together through a shared interest in the advancement of open science by making data freely available to both researchers and laymen.

We interviewed the team behind openSNP to learn more about the project and how you can help Bastian, Helge, Philipp and many others during our upcoming Global Sprint, June 2-3.

What is openSNP and why did you start it?

Generating a personal genetic report (aka getting genotyped) became available to the public around 2011. Genotyping looks at large parts of your genome for genetic variation. Small changes at a single point are called Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms, SNPs for short (pronounced “snips”). These tests look at what’s different in your genome compared to the standard human genome. Some of these changes, or SNPs, may cause differences in your phenotypes, meaning any “observable characteristic” like your blood pressure, your hair color, or your medical conditions. This makes genotypings medically useful – some variations in your genome may be linked to an increase in something like heart diseases.

23andMe is one of the biggest companies that sells genotypings to consumers and holds a wealth of medical information, but you can’t directly access this data since it’s not publicly available. While 23andMe does some research for users who explicitly opt-in, the closed nature of the data still hinders research.

To alleviate this situation some customers of 23andMe and similar companies made their genotypings publicly accessible. For example, Bastian uploaded his 23andMe data to GitHub, but there was no nice way to annotate the data with phenotypes at the time, and open genotypings from others were scattered all over the Internet with no central place collecting them.

Without phenotypes the genotyping data isn’t very useful: you have the genetic variations, but you don’t know what they do in the body. Researchers who want to link genetic variations to various traits need to know the phenotypes – you can’t link the moon to the tides if you’ve never measured the tides.

In 2011 Mendeley and PLoS started a competition called Binary Battle to promote their APIs providing access to the latest research around the individual SNPs. We made a new website that combined the user-supplied genotypings with information about SNPs: openSNP was born.

Initially we thought maybe a few hundred people would upload their genotyping, but we’re now at more than 2500 genotypings!

How does openSNP help individuals?

openSNP provides the latest research around each SNP to help you understand what the changes in your genome could mean in terms of symptoms or other characteristics.

Many people use the data-mining side of openSNP to learn more about their genomes and how their SNPs are linked to certain symptoms, especially those who are either already familiar with human genetics or potentially have a genetic disease. The latter group tries to find others with similar genetic variations and symptoms, which can be useful for rare symptoms. Sometimes volunteers run analyses on our users’ data, providing further insight to our users on what they can learn from their genome.

How has the scientific community responded to openSNP? How is it helping them?

We’ve been contacted by medical researchers who wanted to add their phenotypes of interest to our system, or by social scientists who wanted to do surveys and interviews, researching the effects of genomic sharing. We’ve usually added new phenotypes for them, or included them in our newsletter so that users could reach out to them. The user feedback to those surveys is usually pretty good.

openSNP data is also used in teaching. There are bio-ethics courses discussing openSNP, hands-on human genetics classes using the data as well as MOOCs that put the data to good use. We’re aware of at least one project that used openSNP data in experimental music.

Our publication in PLOS about the platform is getting cited more and more over time.

What problems have you run into while making openSNP?

When we started working on openSNP the biggest problem was getting into programming in the first place. We had no real background in programming prior to the project, so that was a bit hard. Having a concrete goal we wanted to achieve really helped. Another problem we face to this day is how a community-driven project, located completely outside traditional academia can still play in the scientific space. It’s not only the culture that’s different but also policy surrounding publications which can make it hard to join forces.

What kind of skills do I need to help you build openSNP?

Thanks for the interest! If you want to join us for a chat, to find out what’s going on behind the scenes of openSNP, you can find us most of the time in our gitter channel. We’re located in different time zones so there’s usually someone online.

We can use all sorts of help: Whether you’re a programmer, a designer or just someone who has a better knowledge of the English language than we do (because none of us are native speakers!).

Our User Interface could benefit from lots of love to make it responsive and more intuitive, allowing a more diverse crowd to use openSNP easily. Our site could also benefit from copy-editing. Of course there are always new features that could be developed.

For the programmers: The code hosted on GitHub is a Ruby On Rails application that talks to a Redis and a PostgreSQL server, so it’s primarily web-design, JavaScript, Ruby (on Rails), with a bit of “big data” database design due to the large number of SNPs that come with each genotyping.

Can I contribute financially to openSNP?

Yes, running the platform requires quite a bit of computing power by now. It’s distributed over a set of machines to keep everything at acceptable speeds. If you want to help us with paying for that you can either tip us through Gratipay or become a contributor through Patreon.

What are you hoping to do at the Mozilla Science Global Sprint, June 2-3? Can others help you here?

In general if you are looking to help us out (thanks for that!): We have a CONTRIBUTING.md with an introduction for people new to the project and some project ideas, a code of conduct, and a long-term roadmap.

We have several open issues on GitHub that we hope to tackle during the Global Sprint: https://github.com/opensnp/snpr/issues

There are a few big topics right now: First of all our user interface is broken in some places, so people with CSS/JavaScript skills are very appreciated, as we’re kind of amateurs when it comes to UI in general. ;-)

Secondly there’s our commenting and messaging system. These go way back to 2011 when we started the website and it hasn’t aged well. Unifying the commenting and messaging system and making them more accessible are high on our priority list.

Bonus Question: Where is your Research Fox sticker?

Philipp: In the mail! [Editor’s note: yes, it’s on its way!]

Bastian: Mine is on my paper notebook which I carry everywhere.

Come join us wherever you are June 2-3 at the Mozilla Science Global Sprint to work on openSNP and pick up your own Research Fox! Have your own project or want to host a site? Submissions are open for projects and site hosts.