WOW! Introducing Working Open Workshops and the Open Leaders Cohort

Mozilla

At Mozilla Science Lab, we hold regular community events like Global Sprints and MozFest; we host open research projects and facilitate contributions from volunteers via our Collaborate platform; we’ve got an amazing cohort of open research leaders in our newly launched Fellows program. But we wondered, how can we coordinate these efforts (our events, Collaborate, and Fellows) to do more, particularly for emerging leaders and up-and-coming projects? 

To that end, we’ve designed a new model, the Working Open Workshop (or WOW) and the Open Leadership Cohort (OLC). At the Working Open Workshop, MSL staff and Fellows will run a set of initial trainings to help up-and-coming project leads prepare for a strong project launch on Collaborate and a wildly successful Global Sprint in spring of 2016.

We’ll convene our first WOW in Berlin in early February 2016.  We’ll be kicking off the WOW with a community event/mixer for project leads, potential contributors, citizen scientists, study group participants,  local like-minded organizations, and really anyone who’s curious about open research. This community event will feature lightning talks by our Fellows and other key community members.

We’ll follow this up with 2 days of small, invite-only workshops and work sessions led by Mozilla staff and Fellows, aimed at providing the skills and structure to get contributor-friendly open research projects ready for Collaborate and for our springtime Global Sprint. In these workshops, we’ll cover the essentials of Working Open, bringing on contributors, using collaboration tool such as Git and GitHub, and growing an active community around an open project. Our approach is hands-on, and project-based: we’ll set aside plenty of time for participants to do real, meaningful work on their projects.  

The graduates of this workshop will be our first Open Leadership Cohort. MSL staff and Fellows will continue to support these new leaders in the run-up to the Global Sprint, providing project guidance, support in the form of mini-grants, and assistance organizing small local events, such as mini-sprints and hacky hours. We’re inviting a group of 10-15 participants for this first round of OLC, with special consideration for projects with co-leads, and for groups of participants working in the same or nearby cities. Our aim is to activate regional communities interested in fostering open research.

Watch this space for more information on WOW and the OLC! And if you’re in Berlin or nearby and would like to check out (or help out with) the kickoff community event, let us know! Contact aurelia [at] mozillafoundation [dot] org.

mozfest-sciencefair

science

Hive 2015 recap & Learning Pop-Up!

Mozilla

The end of 2015 is just around the corner, and again we’ve had a fantastic year of the Hive Learning Pop-Up since our launch in 2014.  Here’s how 2015 went down!

Since our launch in fall 2014, in partnership with our awesome community partner – the Vancouver Maker Foundation, we’ve managed to organize a series of smaller-scale, community-based, quarterly Maker Education Salon to sustain engagement and interest with the local Maker Education community.  The #MakerEdBC community has definitely grown and expanded since the Hive Pop-Up kick off in 2014.

In Summer 2015, our wonderful community partner from the Vancouver Public Library approached us, asking for the Hive Vancouver team to put together another Hive Learning Pop-Up because of the success from 2014.  Though we’re down 1 person with Kat pursuing her PhD in the UK, Dethe & I persisted and managed to rally up local Mozillians and volunteer contributors to put the event together.

On November 14, a rainy Saturday afternoon, our rock star volunteer contributors & Hive community partners came together at the VPL and we’ve pulled together another year of a successful Hive Learning Pop-Up for 2015!  Here’s just some of the highlights from this year’s event:

 

After a full year of community effort, I can proudly say that we’ve definitely surpassed ourselves from last year.   To pat ourselves on the back, we’ve managed to double our number of community partners participating in Hive Learning Pop-Up, nailed the #MakerEdBC hashtag on Twitter, and gained traction by increasing interest from local communities.

Hive Featured in U.S. Department of Education Report

Mozilla

We’re excited to share the news that Hive is featured prominently in the U.S. Department of Education’s new National Education Technology Plan. It’s a big deal, and a major source of pride that the work our Hive communities are doing is influencing how the United States thinks about technology and education.
The National Education Technology Plan — available in website form here, and as a PDF here — is an educational technology policy document that outlines a vision of equity, active use and collaborative leadership for improving learning. This plan is an update from the previous 2010 NETP. The influential report draws on the findings of educational researchers, classroom teachers, developers and nonprofits.
NETP16The Hive model plays an important role in the section “Leveraging the Power of Networks: Cultivating Connections Between Schools and Community Institutions.” The report notes Hive’s ability to bring together educators, youth, technologists and others for powerful connected learning.
“Hive Learning Networks, a project of the Mozilla Foundation, organize and support city-based, peer-to-peer professional development networks and champion connected learning, digital skills, and Web literacy in youth-serving organizations in urban centers around the world,” the report notes.
A report from the Hive Research Lab about building connected learning pathways in Hive NYC through brokering future learning opportunities is also cited in the Plan, and Hive is included in learning recommendations throughout the report. And that photo on the report’s cover? That’s from a Hive NYC Maker Party at Brooklyn Public Library!
This isn’t the first time the Hive community has contributed to the conversation on how educator networks can collaborate and build web-enabled solutions for their communities. On Digital Learning Day in March, Hive participated in the Department of Education’s monthly roundtable on techquity, or the effort to achieve equity for learners through technology.
This is a major moment for Hive communities around the world. Our approach to collaborative, community learning is making a major positive difference. Congratulations!

Looking back on 2015

Mozilla

It’s been a busy year for the Science Lab. We’ve shipped working prototypes, welcomed our first class of Mozilla Fellows, grown the team and added programmatic supports to both catalyze collaborative, open source software development as well as sustain those communities through leadership training and mentorship.

Below are some of the highlights from our 2015 End-of-Year Report. It details our 2015 activities, specifically our efforts to connect with the community, build capacity, and develop prototypes with the community. The full report can be downloaded from figshare.

Connecting with the Community

We provide members of the research community with the supports needed to advance open science practice in their communities. In 2015 we built out additional programmatic and technical supports to facilitate this, from advances to our website to running our second global sprint. In 2016, we’ll continue this work and explore models for incentivizing and engaging researchers worldwide to join us in furthering open science.

Some of our stellar Community
  • Global Sprint: In June, we hosted our second annual Mozilla Science Global Sprint. Over 40 project leads participated and over 100 meaningful code contributions were made (measured through pull requests on projects) in the course of two days. Sprint activity nearly doubled from last year, with 170 community members coming together in more than 30 cities around the world for over 53 consecutive hours of collaboration and innovation on tools, curriculum, and resources for open science!

sprint3

  • Local Sprint: We piloted a smaller, local sprint in the Mozilla Toronto offices in March 2015, to build a city-based community that would sustain open projects throughout the year . This sprint featured five local open source projects and brought together researchers, designers, and developers for two days of hacking. 

MozSprint Tweet

  • Community Calls: We continue to run monthly public calls around open science, featuring the work of the community and exploring ways to bridge efforts and increase awareness around new projects. Over the course of this year, we had over 290 participants join us for these calls, 164 for the very first time.
  • Collaborate: We launched Collaborate as the main project repository in September 2014. After just over a year, we have 41 projects listed on the site, predominantly community-led endeavors, with over 280 contributors across the platform. We’ll continue to use this collection of projects to develop, refine, and model open source best practices. 

 Paper Badger Badges

Building Capacity for Open Research Practice

This past year, we shifted our focus to supporting open source and open data training, building on our learnings from previous collaborations and feedback from the community. We brought on our first Instructional Designer in August (Zannah Marsh) and Open Data Training Lead in September (Stephanie Wright), as well as a Community Lead (Aurelia Moser) in December. This set up the foundation (and team) for our work moving forward. 

Trainings for Science
  • “Working Open” & the Open Science Leadership Summit: Our lead developer, Abby Cabunoc Mayes, created The Working Open Guide which provides a framework and resources for running successful open source projects, both software and curriculum based. We tested the materials in this guide in a live workshop setting in September 2015. The 2.5 day event – called the “Open Science Leadership Summit” – brought together 15 project contributors, study group leads, and librarians to collaboratively craft and test workshop resources and better understand their needs. 

Fellows + Staff Teambuilding

Looking Forward

This year, we invested more time on 1-on-1 mentorship for project leads and community members, in order to help them build more prototypes and expand their contributorship base. This included mentorship in the lead up to the Global Sprint and MozFest, as well as the Open Science Leadership Summit and Fellows onboarding. What we learned from those events is that there’s a strong desire for community and project management support, for tasks such as roadmapping, facilitation, managing contributors and understanding your community. In 2016, we’ll move towards supporting prototyping in the community rather than leading our own, through in person workshops, a cohort-based model, and mentorship. 

MSL Staff

 For more, download the full End of Year Report from figshare.

Animation in header image from one of our fellows Richard Smith-Unna (@blahah404) – see it on CodePen!

 

A/B Test: Additional ‘ask’ for some channels

Mozilla

2 responses

We ran this A/B test because conversion rates from the Firefox Snippet seem to be much better than conversion rates from many other places where we ask people to donate. And in some cases, we would expect the opposite to be true, so we are testing our assumptions.

Context for this test:

Most of the donations for our end of year appeal come from the promotional feature in the Firefox about:home snippet. The experience for these donors looks mostly like this.

snippetflowBut we also promote the appeal across other Mozilla ‘channels’ and ‘properties’. For example, we have a banner on the mozilla.org homepage.

otherflowAlong with many other asks in less prominent places like the ‘About Firefox’ window in your Firefox browser.

Our assumption/hunch is that people on the mozilla.org site are one step closer to the Mozilla Mission than people who use Firefox but may not know about Mozilla and the fact that we are a non-profit. In marketing terms, the people closer to the Mission would be ‘warmer’ to a fundraising appeal. We would expect visitors responding to a fundraising ask on mozilla.org to have a higher conversion rate than we see in other channels.

However, while we see excellent conversion rates for many channels, the conversion rates for our ‘warmer’ channels are often much lower than we expect. We can’t make a direct comparison though, because of the differences in the user experience and the point at which we think of someone as signalling interested in donating.

On the snippet flow shown above. A user only makes it to the donation form after actively engaing with a decision to make a donation (ie selecting a donation amount and clicking a Donate Now button). The audience arriving on the donate form from the snippet are pre-filtered because we’ve pushed the donation ask further up in the flow. So these conversion rates look great in isolation.

In many other flows, the user might click a small donate link, or a donate banner without much context and then land directly on the donation form. These users are not converting as well (by comparison with the pre-filtered snippet traffic, and also by benchmarks from our team’s experience working on other fundraising campaigns).

So that’s the context.

The test we ran

If you look closely at the two donation flows shown above, one of the most important differences (at least in theory!) is easy to overlook when you’re close to Mozilla, and the campaign. In the second example, there is no fundraising ‘ask’. There is no ‘reason to give’.

So our hyptohesis was that giving these users more information about who we are and why we need your donations would increase our conversion rate.

So for users arriving from mozilla.org, or clicking our Firefox directory-tile (which was a simple donate graphic) we A/B tested these two form variations.

additionalinfotest

And the result was…

Screenshot 2015-12-17 11.20.54

…no impact!

So is our hypothosis wrong? Perhaps.

But, there are too many variables in play to give up on the current line of testing yet. So we’re going to test this page further.

Next steps

The first variable we are going to play with on this new ‘additional info’ form is the language of the fundraising ask. Words are powerful (see this for example) and the language used on this first iteration had not been tested previously. Making a donation is largely an emotional decision and those particular words might not motivate people to give.

So we’ve started a follow up test to use the most effective language from our snippet testing in 2014.

As always, we’ll share what we learn here.

Keep Calm and Thimble On

Mozilla

It’s been an exciting year for Thimble. Since we relaunched at the end of August, we’ve heard from many of you that you love the new look, the multi-file tree, and the slew of new features. We’ve also seen fantastic projects, and received useful bug reports and feature requests from many of you. Thank you!

Hour of Code

As we near the end of 2015, we want to make sure we don’t lose steam. So, we were thrilled to partner with Hour of Code for the third year in a row. It was a blast to see how people were using Thimble to demonstrate that anyone can learn the basics of code.

Hour of Code, which is the largest learning event in history, inspired hundreds of thousands of people to give coding a try. We’re proud that Thimble was a part of it. If you want to try your hand at coding in less than an hour, check out the remixable projects on thimble.mozilla.org.

Introducing the Inspector

We wanted to be sure to end the year by delivering one of the most-requested features from the community. We’re excited to share a new Inspector tool that allows you to hover your mouse over elements in the preview, and see the associated code that was used to make them in the editor.
The Inspector is useful for trying to understand how a page works, or where exactly to make changes. When the Inspector is enabled, move your mouse within the preview to highlight elements and code, or click on a specific part of the page to turn off the Inspector and focus just on that code.
gif showing Inspector in action

Tell us how you use Thimble

We love hearing from Thimble users about how the tool is working for them.

We were delighted to see Thimble featured in YTV’s Code Week in Canada

And we appreciated Rafranz Davis’ feedback on Thimble in this Graphite review:

I love that it is self-guided and is about creating something that can be recreated. Again, for beginners, I do recommend tackling several projects before jumping in blindly but I do recommend eventually jumping in as Thimble has proved that doing so is the most effective way to learn.

 

Want to help make Thimble?

Thimble is a community-driven, open source project. That means that anyone can contribute—whether that’s writing source code, filing issues (i.e. requests for new features or bug reports), or creating and sharing new Thimble projects for others to remix. If you’d like to get involved, here are a few places to start:

  • File bug reports and feature requests in our github repo.
  • Tweet at us @mozteach with your questions or comments.
  • If you’re a developer, feel free to jump into the repo and pick up a ticket.
  • If email is your jam, feel free to email teachtheweb@mozillafoundation.org. We’ll help you get connected to the project.
  • If you’ve created a cool Thimble project, please share it with us! Tweet @MozTeach or add a topic to the Project Remixes thread on our Discourse forums.

Mozilla Study Groups December Update

Mozilla

Every month, we round up what’s new and what’s coming in the Mozilla Study Group program, a globe-spanning network of meetup groups for scientists and researchers to get together and share ideas, skills and stories in open research. If you’d like to find out more, check out the Study Group Handbook, start your own with the website template, or email the Science Lab.

Welcome New Study Groups

Welcome to our newest Study Group at Rhode Island! More Study Groups are spooling up around the world; we’ll note them here and add them to the Study Group Map as their first events come on line. Have you started a new group recently? Make sure to let us know so we can get you on the map!

Mozilla Study Groups Year One

With the New Year almost here, I took a minute to look back on what we’ve done together in our first year: you have delivered over 140 events and 46 open lesson plans at over 20 sites in less than a year. Each and every one of you has done tremendous work, and should be really proud of the communities you have helped create in your home towns and around the world. This was your energy, your skill, and your enthusiasm that built this; well done all!

To celebrate, I hope everyone has a party planned! I know Vancouver and Toronto do – this time of year is a great chance to invite your community to get together for a Hacky Hour or other get-together to look back on what you accomplished this year, thank them for participating, and reflect on how we can do even better next year.

Planning for 2016

Speaking of going even further next year, with a new semester already coming up in just a few weeks, now is a great time to figure out how we can do better than ever before; a couple of to-do’s for everyone:

  • Participants: We want to make contributing to Study Group as fun and rewarding as possible for you, so we’re working on a draft of some Contributor Guidelines – help us out by adding any questions or challenges you’ve had trying to contribute or participate at the bottom of the draft, so we can try and weave in as many solutions as possible.
  • Organizers: The Study Group Handbook is where we collect everyone’s experience running a Study Group; it needs your input to get better! If you’ve helped organize a Study Group (and especially if you’re just starting out!), open an issue here describing one thing you wish you’d known when you first started. By updating the Handbook to address all these, we can make starting a Mozilla Study Group even easier for all our new colleagues we’ll be meeting in 2016.

Once more – a huge THANK YOU to everyone who has jumped on board with Mozilla Study Groups in its first year; this program was founded to bring people together to share their skills and experiences, and you have all helped make that a reality and a huge success – and I am confident that these past successes are only to be outdone by our future ones.

Mozilla Science Lab Week in Review: Nov 29 – Dec 06

Mozilla

The Week in Review is our roundup of what’s new in open science from the past week. If you have news or announcements you’d like passed on to the community, be sure to share on Twitter with @MozillaScience and @arlissc99, #openscience or join our mailing list and get in touch there.

Articles & Blogs

Events & Conferences

Resources

At the Science Lab

Want the Week in Review mailed to you every Monday? Sign up for our mailing list, and join the conversation.

A/B Test: New UI – No news is good news

Mozilla

I’ve just wrapped up another A/B test on our new donation form.

In it we were testing a new UI (User Interface) treatment that Jordan developed for us this year.

As a team, we liked the new design and how it better connected with the design of the fundraising ask on the Firefox Snippet, but because even small tweaks to this form can have significant impact on our campaign we wanted to test it before making it the new default for all our users.

Old UI

Old UI

New UI

New UI

It’s always more fun when a test finds a big win that increases conversion rates, but in this case the most important thing to check was that the new form didn’t decrease conversion rates.

And it didn’t.

No statisitcally significant impact on conversion

No statistically significant impact on conversion

This allows us to clean up another bit of the code base, and makes the UI of our donation form a little more consistent from start to finish which is always good news.

Celebrating An Hour of Code Around the World

Mozilla

We’re thrilled to be partnering with Hour of Code for the third year in a row. Hour of Code aims to introduce computer science to students around the globe, designed to show that anybody can learn the basics of code. This is the largest learning event in history (175,000 events and counting), and we’re excited to contribute! In addition to the rich offering of hour-long activities found on Code.org, we also hope teach.mozilla.org serves as a useful resource for educators to find free activities, tools and lesson plans to help teach their learners how to read, write, and participate on the web.

Participate in Hour of Code (or just warm up) with these two fun activities:
1. Thimble’s Homework Excuse Generator
Mozilla’s online code editor, Thimble, is a big part of our Hour of Code offerings – and it’s big fun, as well. With Thimble you can make or remix a web project like the Homework Excuse Generator with helpful cues from the program itself. Thimble ‘reads’ your code as you type it and offers suggestions about how to complete each line. Serious, silly, and in-between, Thimble projects and web literacy lessons created by Mozilla and the #teachtheweb community offer something for everyone, from remixing memes to making art online.
ThimbleHere are a few fun Homework Generator remixes from the community:

2. HTML Puzzle Box Activity (No-Fi)
Even when connectivity is limited, it’s still possible to teach the web and participate in Hour of Code! This activity teaches the basics of HTML using nothing but paper (papercraft pattern available), scissors, and glue. After assembling the boxes, students use them to build HTML tag structure in the correct order. Timing them and creating competitive teams boosts the excitement level!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=39&v=0lj_nkmwMF4
More Ways to Get Involved

Global Web Literacy: Looking Beyond Hour of Code
Global web literacy isn’t just a pie-in-the-sky goal for us, but rather a practical, get-your-hands-dirty daily effort. There are countless individuals and teams that are working towards that goal, getting one step closer every day. Will you help us take more steps towards achieving global web literacy? If you’re interested in helping us translate Web Literacy Basics I so we can reach schools where students or teachers don’t speak English, click here.
Looking to get plugged into an Hour of Code event in your community? You can find a robust list of global events here. You can also share your #teachtheweb experiences during Hour of Code on our forum.