Expanding the Hive Map

Mozilla

In 2014, Hive Learning Networks went global. We crafted a developmental model that addressed a real demand from individuals and organizations who were interested in bringing Hive to their city. We created an informational hub site that began to lay the framework for local networks becoming globally connected by a shared set of values. We also hosted our first-ever Hive Global meet-up at MozFest, with over 100 attendees from nearly 20 cities around the world.
map
To achieve these goals this quarter we have been focused on the following:
Getting more clarity  about how we determine when a city moves into the Hive Learning Community phase. Building on the developmental model, we’ve identified a few additional benchmarks by which individuals or teams working together become ready to take on official Hive status. First, they have a team in place to help drive the work forward, and a stated mission that is at once connected to Hive Global but also highly localized, to meet the needs of their community, or to address specific local concerns or opportunities. They may even have a few community partners on-board as collaborators who also help facilitate programs and events. They are meeting with some regularity and are making concerted efforts to seek funding or other means for growing and sustaining their community. In this specific case, we’ve heard that having a presence on the global hub site is an integral asset that lends credibility and marks their connection to a larger effort. 

Bringing Meghan McDermott on-board as Director of Hive City Strategy. She works closely with Mozilla staff and Hive leadership to envision how to sustainably impact current Hive locations as well as to develop strategy to support growing Hive activities in 30 cities by the end of 2015. Explaining her role, she shared that “alignment with municipal policies, the philanthropic community, and other stakeholders who range from colleague networks to community organizers will be key to Hive’s ambitious goals to mobilize more educators, create amazing content and projects, catalyze innovations across cities, and to grow its national presence as a network for new learning.”

Continue reading …

Get To Know the Teach The Web Talks

Mozilla

Our goal at the beginning of this year was to support  our incredible community by finding an interesting and accessible way for mentors, and those who share a passion for education and web literacy, to connect and develop their skills.
After speaking to community members, Hive leaders, and partner organizations we decided to create our very own speaker series, inspired by the likes of Ted Talks, where we would invite industry leaders from organizations around the world to share a skill that mentors could take back to their communities to become better makers and teachers of the web.

The Talks

When we launched the Talks in winter 2014 it was really important for us to find topics that would be engaging to individual Webmaker mentors, but also to those working libraries, code clubs, and schools who wanted to grow the skills of their organization; and to find speakers who are inspiring in their work, and in their presentation styles.
When piloting the program, we invited Evan Jones from the Connected Learning Alliance to present on the basics of building an online community (watch here). Since then we also celebrated Data Privacy Day with Mozilla’s Director of Privacy, Stacy Martin, who discussed being smart about privacy and how to teach privacy in your community (watch here).

The pilot Teach The Web Talk with Evan Jones

The pilot Teach The Web Talk with Evan Jones


We’re quickly learning what’s working (and isn’t working) for our audience. For example, we’ve moved from an online hangout with a formal presentation to an interview style talk which allows for much more engagement during the talks. Our priorities are making the talks interesting, accessible and valuable and we’re continuing to experiment and improve those aspects moving forward.
You can now listen to and subscribe to the Teach The Web Podcast!

You can now listen to and subscribe to the Teach The Web Podcast!


Of course, we also learned that many individuals tune into the talks after the fact to watch the recordings. For their easy digest, we introduced the Teach The Web Podcast which is an edited, storied version of the live talks which you can listen to and subscribe to here.

Upcoming

The next Teach The Web Talk is February 26th where we will be talking to Angela Popplewell, and JP Pullos from 100cameras about how you can use photography to share the story of your event. This talk will focus on helping our community improve their photography skills to tell the best story and deliver the best pictures. You can find more details on how to attend the live talk at mzl.la/100cameras.
Feel free to share your questions for 100cameras with us on Twitter using #TeachTheWeb or  Discourse and listen to the Podcast version which will be released in the first week of March at mzl.la/TTWpodcasts.
In the next few months we are excited to continue to experiment with the format and to explore new topics with new speakers and would love to hear your ideas about topics  or people you would like to see on the talks in the future. Please email us at info@webmaker.org.

We’re Hiring!

Mozilla

The Mozilla Science Lab is very pleased to announce that applications are now open for three new staff positions – a Data Training Program Lead, a Training Lead, and a Curriculum Designer.

Data Training Program Lead

Open data is poised to make a tremendous positive impact on how we do research, but many questions still remain on how best to maximize this effect, and on how researchers can get started using and producing open data as part of their standard toolkit in the lab. The Data Training Program Lead will have the opportunity to explore questions around open data concerning discovery and metadata, reuse, analysis and data preservation, and will focus on building innovative teaching & learning strategies to help early career researchers get up to speed on data discovery, management, and sharing with a focus on the open, participatory practice that Mozilla believes will enhance and empower science on the web.

Training Lead

For the past year, the Science Lab’s education efforts have focused on short starter events, like workshops and coding sprints. While these events are great launchpads for building interest and getting started on the skills and best practices for enabling open research, it takes sustained practice and engagement to become fluent in the wide array of ideas necessary for doing science effectively in the open. The Training Lead will be responsible for crafting and launching the Science Lab’s flagship initiative to enable leaders in the open science community by scaffolding this learning over the long term, with ideas based both on the study groups, meetups and code and lesson sprints we’ve been iterating on, as well as on brand new strategies the Training Lead will bring to the table, with an aim to foster more champions of open practice in traditional research settings.

Curriculum Designer

In order to reach as broad an audience as possible, and in order to deliver on the very wide range of skills needed for practicing research in the open effectively, the Science Lab wants to diversify both the content of the curriculum it offers and supports, and the form it takes. The Curriculum Designer will work closely with the other two training leads to not only build curriculum on a wide range of topics, but innovate on the curriculum model itself to create resources flexible and remixable enough to support participation from many styles and scales of learning, from individual learners, to small, conversational study groups, all the way to larger and more conventional workshop style delivery. This role will lead resource design and program support to create a clearer, more achievable path for researchers to become open practitioners, with materials targeting the computational, data, and collaboration skills they need to succeed and work together in the open.

Education at the Science Lab

The Science Lab’s education initiatives to date have focused on starting communities of practice & collaboration around the tools and techniques that allow openness to amplify research – from building basic coding literacy together with Software Carpentry, to encouraging skill-sharing and communication in grass-roots Study Groups, to our remixable teaching kits on Code Review & Usability Testing, to our support for hands-on learning and engagement at Collaborate, we are building a model of education driven by being inclusive, participatory, collaborative, and interdisciplinary. If this vision of skill-building among a community of researchers and peers resonates with you, then I strongly encourage you to apply; further details for the Data Training Program Lead, Training Lead, and Curriculum Designer are available on the Mozilla hiring portal, where you can also submit your application for each. As always – I hope you’ll join us.

A Very Large Tent: Connections at the first Research Bazaar

Mozilla

Last week marked the inaugural run of the Research Bazaar Conference (ResBaz) at the University of Melbourne, a three day training-cross-discussion circle between scientists, researchers, students and administrators on the tools, best practices and at times, aspirational goals of a research community with its eyes squarely on a future of reproducibility and openness. Kaitlin Thaney and I attended on the heels of the Instructor Training event we ran the previous week, and were very impressed with the result.

By the book, ResBaz consisted of three days of workshops (including a whopping three concurrent Software Carpentry workshops, in Python, R and Matlab), as well as an array of trainings in everything from the Python Natural Language Toolkit to CAD for research to CartoDB to social media for scientists (led by the tremendous Katie Mack, with hopefully more on this soon). Trainings, however, all wrapped by 3 PM each day, and attendees reconvened under a big pavilion tent on the lawn of the university. During this time and into the evening, informal discussion circles formed to talk not only about what everyone was working on, but what opportunities, experiences and future goals people were pursuing – and how we could collaborate to realize them.

There are a lot of players in the open, reproducible science space, with distinct but compatible goals and identities. The real power of ResBaz was to bring them together under a big tent (both figuratively and literally). Software Carpentry, for example, has hit its stride and knows who it is with its evolving-but-canonical curriculum; while this has allowed that group to define an identity, iterate and progress on a focused stable of content and thus deliver a high-quality workshop, there’s always more to learn & teach and not always a clear place to put it. The big tent of ResBaz lets us assemble lots of independent players together in a format that preserves distinctions between offerings, but minimizes the barriers students are confronted with to participate in the mix that serves them best. In this way, ResBaz created cross-disciplinary interactions and opportunities for communication strongly reminiscent of the model that made last year’s Mozilla Festival and NCEAS Codefest such successes for the science & research community. Once again, many of our problems with discoverability, reuse and collaboration are instantly vaporized when we move into the post-silo world.

Looking ahead, the thing I’m most excited by for the future of the Research Bazaar is the announcement made during the conference that next year, you can freely hold a Research Bazaar event in your home town. Details on the ResBaz open franchising model are available on their site, and I think this is a brilliant decision on the part of the organizing team. As fantastic as the event was at bringing people together, any event that is confined to one geographic location suffers from major hurdles to accessibility – hotels and plane tickets are expensive (though some were subsidized for this event), parents can’t easily take travel time away from their families, and the time commitment of travel competes with all the other demands on a researcher’s schedule. In 2016, we hope to hold Research Bazaars around the world – stay tuned for more, and please reach out to Research Platforms or us here at the Science Lab for information and support on how you can hold a ResBaz in your home town.

During the conference, attendees were encouraged to write a tweet on a streamer describing their aspirations for their research (follow the Research Bazaar on Twitter to hear these tweets over the next few weeks). The thing I love so much about this community, is that though they might all be wildly different, everyone wanted something beyond the status quo; the vision of this community is boundless, and cross-sectional events like the Research Bazaar help push that vision towards concrete reality. I hope you’ll join us in your home town for ResBaz 2016.

Instructor Training at the Research Bazaar

Mozilla

With contributions from Damien Irving and Kaitlin Thaney.

Last week, as a precursor to the Research Bazaar Conference which concluded earlier this week in Melbourne, Damien Irving and I trained over 45 new instructors from universities across Australia and New Zealand, in an effort to build up supports for Software Carpentry and open science training in the region. Last week’s workshop represents the culmination of the last several months of iterating on the instructor training process after months of working with Greg Wilson and a number of other instructors to run live trainings at research institutions such as the University of Virginia, TGAC, the University of Washington and UC Davis. We tested out a few new approaches and twists to help new instructors get familiar with the material (specifically from Software Carpentry, as many are helping with workshops in the near future) as well as make the training more collaborative and team-based. By all reports, these were welcome additions, and I wanted to take some time to share back with the community what we tried out.

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About 45 new instructors attended Instructor Training before ResBaz – thanks to all who came! Image Credit: Research Platforms

 

Software Carpentry Instructor Training has from the beginning been based squarely on the primary research in educational psychology and instructional design compiled by Greg – because, to paraphrase him, how can we expect to be taken seriously as scientists and researchers if we won’t take equally seriously the findings of education research? But, what we struggled to connect with in the past was helping new instructors get comfortable with the Software Carpentry curriculum itself in a way that allowed them to leave instructor training feeling confident and prepared to teach their first workshop, as well as comfortable contributing back to the lesson materials themselves. Here are a few things Damien and I tried out with this latest run:

  • Come prepared, and dig deep. Before the workshop, we asked students to read closely one of Software Carpentry’s main lesson units: R, Python, Bash, Git or SQL. This way, the students would come prepared to do all their exercises on one of these topics, and get a chance to dig into the material and familiarize themselves with it as they practiced teaching.
  • Practice, Practice, Practice. One of Instructor Training’s high points has always been an exercise where students teach on camera for three minutes, so they can see their own performance – always an eye-opening experience. This time around, we decided to turn this up to 11, packing in six rounds of this exercise, each emphasising a different teaching technique, and requiring the students to teach on the topics they did their pre-reading on. And, at the end, we had students go through the longer exercise on lesson development and delivery, hashed out by Warren Code and myself after the workshop at UW.
  • Cut Hard and Stay Focused. In order to turn our attention to practice and practical pedagogy, we cut hard on some of the peripheral topics; stories about Software Carpentry’s past iterations, details of the reading list, and other interesting anecdotes were left for the pub. We wanted to get the participants working together more – helping each other troubleshoot, swapping tips and tricks, and even planning their next workshop (which we set aside time for on the third day).
  • End with a Hack Day. In the past, Instructor Training has done a good job of introducing new instructors to the technical details of interacting with the materials, in terms of Aleksandra Pawlik‘s intro to website setup at UC Davis, and Tracy Teal‘s intro to pull requests and lesson contributions at UW. Damien amplified this by leading a full half day of hacking on content after the two days of pedagogy and practice I led, which, as Ethan White observed, resulted in a whopping 16 SWC repositories updated inside of a day, as well as a cohort of students feeling accomplished and comfortable contributing back in the way we all hoped for. Another nice hack from this activity: get students to set up not just a dummy website, but a speculative one for their upcoming first workshop, thus getting some momentum going before even leaving Instructor Training. (Note: part of the support from ResBaz – the event this preceded – is rooted in a workshop deliverable, held by the participants at their home institution.)

In total, students were very satisfied with the results. The energy and enthusiasm in the room was huge, the content was well-received, and both advisors/senior staff and their students were engaged in all the exercises; the classroom was never quiet, a key learning heuristic we only half-joke about in the training. More concretely, not a single participant gave feedback saying they felt unprepared or unfamiliar with Software Carpentry’s content on leaving – which is huge. In the past, this was the most common criticism we received and (in my opinion) our biggest hurdle to overcome. By asking students to do the pre-reading and focusing all their exercises on it, they went home with a big chunk of preparation for teaching their first unit already done – a major hurdle defeated for getting in front of that first classroom (which many were doing only a few days following the training). Many comments were made afterwards that the pedagogical content was so substantial and so usable, that it would enhance teaching not just in the workshop, but in the participants’ more conventional teaching, as well.

Another hack worth continuing in the future was the timing of the instructor training (Wednesday to Friday), with a call for the participants to help in live workshops the following week (Monday to Wednesday). It helped contextualize the learnings and put them into practice for the students, and provided an opportunity for groups formed in the instructor training to build additional ties and camaraderie, as many helped with their first workshop this week. One thing I value from the Software Carpentry program is the sense of community across discipline in the instructor pool, and setting in the time to build that at this event in Australia was wonderful to observe as a bystander.

Of course, there are still things to do better. It’s clear that a heavy emphasis on practice is valuable for new instructors, but it would be good to make room for another longer, 10-minute teaching activity, at the expense of a couple of the shorter, three-minute lessons; there’s a certain non-linearity in teaching, where the first three minutes are mostly set-up – practice will be much enhanced with more chances to get past that phase of the lesson, so I’ve recombined a couple of the exercises in the Feedback section into one longer practice session.

Another thing we can do even better next time, is to introduce the concept of a ‘learner’s license’ for new instructors once they complete the training. With so much teaching practice already baked into Instructor Training, doing five more minutes as a review exercise as is part of the standard certification procedure doesn’t add so much anymore. Instead, it might work better to give our new instructors a graduated certification, allowing them to teach under the supervision of a more experienced instructor, to be graduated to a full instructor after some number of such supervised runs. This will scale more easily than the current model, give local communities more ownership of their instructor pool, and allow us to send new instructors off from Instructor Training rewarded with a clear and solid new certification.

You can see the curriculum and exercises we taught from here – these closely follow the Software Carpentry repo on the same (with updates to land there very shortly). The schedule we followed is also available (with the clarification that the last hack day was more of a half-day). We look forward to doing this all again, either at next year’s Research Bazaar, or much sooner; and as usual, our sincere appreciation goes out to all their students, whose effort and engagement are what truly helps to advance skills training in research. And special thanks to Greg for his work in sharing the Software Carpentry instructor training model, and to Damien, Flanders and the team here in Australia for their work in modelling it for this event.

Mozilla Announces Additional $17,000 in Gigabit Funding; Two Teams Heading to US Ignite App Summit

Mozilla

Mozilla’s Hive Chattanooga is excited to announce awarding an additional $17,000 in supplemental funding to projects originally supported during the first two rounds of the Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund. Adagio, the Creative Discover Museum and Spartan Systems Inc. partnership, devLearn, Hixson High School, the Public Library’s GigLab and Viditor will receive varying amounts of funding to help sustain and expand their work into 2015.
Two of these project teams, Adagio and Viditor, have also been invited to demo at the US Ignite App Summit this March, a yearly showcase following the GENI Engineering Conference in Arlington, VA. Three Chattanooga innovators – Jonathan Susman, Andrew McPherson and Stuart French – will have the ears and eyes of the country’s leading gigabit pioneers.
Plans for the supplemental funding are as follows:

Adagio's Jonathan Susman at the Mozilla Festival in London in October 2014

Adagio’s Jonathan Susman at the Mozilla Festival in London in October 2014


Adagio will produce a video illustrating some of the potential educational uses of their remote audio mixing tool. Originally piloted in music classrooms, the team is also exploring new applications of the technology in science classes and beyond.
The Creative Discovery Museum and Spartan Systems are using the funding to build out the functionality of Critter Catch, their immersive-learning app for young museum-goers. Teen volunteers are working with Spartan Systems developer James Candan and a team of seniors from UTC to finish the project.
devLearn, the Android learn-to-code app developers Jonathan Williams and Tim Coy first proposed at Hackanooga, is – thanks to development funded in the supplemental round – now available for iOS; download it now (free of charge!) from the Apple Store.
Hixson High School teachers Ashley Patterson and Joyce Perdue have created an after school club for students interested in the Wireless Earth Watchdogs project, as well as learning more about programming for microcontrollers. Students from the original pilot, who designed and built real-time water monitoring devices, are helping with instruction. (The class itself was so popular, Hixson now offers it as an elective – with 26 students enrolled this semester.)
The Public Library’s GigLab will be working with Carbon 5 developer Chris Keathley to help build a more detailed version of the Chattanooga Minecraft world, using the lidar data originally used to print a 3D map of downtown. With a pair of Oculus Rift headsets, patrons will be able to explore, edit and play in this virtual Gig City; the project will also connect with the Kansas City Digital Media Lab, building cross-city interaction through virtual reality.
Viditor received funding to help facilitate their work as a capstone project in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UTC, where a group of students will be helping the Viditor team develop the cloud-based video rendering engine of their editing platform.
About Hive Chattanooga
Mozilla’s Hive Learning Community in Chattanooga champions both digital literacy and innovation through next-generation development and connected learning.
About the Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund
A partnership of Mozilla, the National Science Foundation and US Ignite, the Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund in Chattanooga and Kansas City supports the development of gigabit applications and associated curricula to explore the impact of next-generation networks on learning.

Matplotdash | Toronto Open Science Code Sprint

Mozilla

Join us in Toronto this March at our first ever Mozilla Toronto Open Science Code Sprint on Sat/Sun March 07-08 2015. At this 2-day event we will be bringing together researchers working on open science projects with developers, designers and other scientists from the community to collaborate on tools helping further science on the web. Every day this week, we’ll feature a guest post on one of the projects we’ll be sprinting on: Contributorship Badges, Cytoscape.js, Matplotdash, Pathogens & Disease Immunity, WormBase.

Today’s guest post is from Chris Ing, a PhD candidate at University of Toronto working at the Hospital for Sick Children. Don’t forget to register to collaborate with us on open science!

Who are you?

I’m Chris Ing, a PhD candidate at University of Toronto working at the Hospital for Sick Children. I study the dynamic motions of proteins using simulations that run on supercomputers. A simulation gives you a “virtual microscope” to get a glimpse at the 3D structure and function of proteins at an atomistic level. By running a simulation for months or years, computational biophysicists can study how disease and drugs affect proteins in a way that is not accessible by any lab bench experiment. Over the course of my studies, I’ve made it a personal mission to use as much of the scientific python stack as possible to accelerate my research.

What is your project?

My project is an analytics dashboard designed for real-time visualization of scientific data. Analytics dashboards are ubiquitous in business and marketing analytics, made famous by the boom of software start-ups. However, these dashboard solutions are either closed-source “software as a service” solutions, or not designed with scientific visualization in mind. The aim of this project is to develop a science-agnostic web dashboard to assist computational scientists in performing routine analysis and rare event detection with arbitrary time series data sources.

Why do you enjoy working on this project?

Biomolecular simulations are inherently high-dimensional datasets, but they can be reduced to extremely simple metrics for meaningful monitoring. It’s enjoyable to work on this project because our lab can immediately reap the benefits. With the availability of large-scale computing resources, a significant portion of my days are spent manually doing routine analysis and plotting for a number of datasets. This is a task completely devoid of scientific value, and begs for automation.

How does this project benefit the research community?

Even with basic functionality, Matplotdash could greatly improve research efficiency over a range of scientific disciplines. A dashboard saves time by regenerating plots and summarizing a collection of data in one view, but it also encourages a more open and transparent form of research. There’s no question that lead scientists and principal investigators would be interested in tracking simulation progress, but public dashboard views may also be possible. Future functionality of this software could allow web visitors to share in the task of monitoring, potentially flagging unusual or anomalous regions of plots, assisting research. More generally, unexpected insight may be extracted from a dataset by observing its time evolution rather than analyzing it once as a static entity.

What is your technical stack (if you have one)?

The project is codenamed “Matplotdash” as an homage to matplotlib and the general python-driven nature of the project. Python is my language of choice, and I’ll be attending PyCon 2015 later this year if you want to find me. However, in this project, Python resides on the back-end with the RESTful APIs that provide our dashboard with data. A bootstrap based dashboard framework called KeenIO (https://github.com/keen/dashboards)/Django or perhaps just Django-Dashing (https://github.com/talpor/django-dashing) will be used on the front end. As we must exceed the limitations of a traditional dashboard, support for widgets with one or more large data-set visualization libraries would be required. Those packages include: Bokeh+Bokeh Server (http://bokeh.pydata.org/en/latest/), VisPy (http://vispy.org/), and Lightning-Viz (http://lightning-viz.org/).

What do you hope to accomplish during the code sprint?

Getting a working prototype is certainly achievable within the timeframe of a sprint. It’s unlikely that is project could be deployed on a real compute cluster during the sprint, but remote plot/data servers with test data could be used to illustrate the functionality of the code.

What kind of volunteers are you looking for (developers, designers, biologists, etc)?

Developers, designers, and scientists would all be appreciated.

How can people get involved? (link to repo, issue tracker, etc)

People can get involved by watching our code repository (https://github.com/pomeslab/matplotdash) and keeping an eye on our issues to help us make some better informed design decisions at this early stage of development. Note that we haven’t entirely transitioned away from the previous project name: HPCDash.

The Mozilla Science Lab has a new website

Mozilla

You may have noticed that we recently rolled out the first version of our new website! When we began this project, we knew we wanted the site to serve the open research community and help enable others to learn, solve problems and build new tools together. This led to us building a cleaner and clearer resource with new features supporting open science. I wanted to take some time to introduce some of the updates and motivations, and also invite feedback as we continue to iterate on the design and functionality over the coming months.

First things first – a cleaner homepage

First impressions matter. We wanted our landing page to communicate what we do and show others how they can join us as we bring together a community to help research thrive on the open web.

You’ll notice some bold new imagery and our mission statement placed front and center to help bring some clearer messaging about the Science Lab. We have also added a ‘Join us’ button in both the front page and navigation. When you click on the button, a modal appears summarizing what we do as a community to help others see where they can fit in.

Putting community at the forefront

The Science Lab has, since it’s launch, worked to help support and connect the researchers, librarians and developers advancing open science on the web. Community is at the core of our work, and we wanted the new site to really showcase the people behind the work globally.

If you visit our new About page, you’ll notice the names of contributors from the blog, live events, as well as Collaborate – a project we launched in the fall of 2014. Each name links to a contributor page listing all Collaborate projects they lead, events they’ve helped facilitate and articles they’ve written for our blog. We’re still testing out ways to make this even more representative of the community powering open research, including those involved with live events (sprints, workshops, the Mozilla Festival). We’d love to hear your thoughts – feel free to add them here: https://github.com/mozillascience/site/issues/10

Integration with GitHub

Back this fall, we launched Collaborate, a curated list of open projects from the community furthering science on the web that you can get involved in. Over the last few months, we’ve worked with a handful of project leads to work out the kinks for spinning up these projects and engaging with the research and developer communities.

We’ve also used the pilot as a testbed for GitHub integration – a code hosting service heavily used in the research and software development community. You’ll notice that each project on Collaborate directly links to an open repository, as well as shows the contributors alongside it. You can also favorite / star a project, and join projects (both on the Science Lab site and in your GitHub account).

We’ve also added to the “Join” button a social hack for those new to GitHub. When you hit the button, you’ll be prompted to introduce yourself in the project’s “issues” section (essentially a forum but in the project repository). We’ve seen some incredible conversation starting there, separate from code contributions, welcoming newcomers to the project, sharing ideas, and furthering ties among different communities.

Over the coming months, we’ll be weaving in further integration to the blog to make it even easier to interact with the projects and resources on the site, and contribute. Stay tuned for more.

Opening the call for Collaborate projects

Oh, and we’ve also added a submission form to Collaborate to make it easier to add your project to the list. Just start by selecting a public GitHub repository. There are a few questions to answer and pieces needed to get going which we’ll be writing about soon, but that process will be more open and straightforward soon.

What’s next?

We’ll be updating our blog to make it easier to incorporate more community contributions and tie into the trainings we support and Git and version control. We’re in the process of designing a system that will let anyone submit a blog post for review via GitHub Pull Request. We want to build something that will help us surface interesting work and projects in the community while also helping researchers learn some software development best practices, like version control and code review.

We’re still iterating on this new website. Please let us know your thoughts on how we can better support the open research community!

You can leave your feedback in our GitHub issue tracker.

Understanding Personal Information: The Anonymizer Badge

Mozilla

This guest post was written by Tamara Shepherd, collaborator on the “Co-Designing Open Badges for Privacy Education with Canadian Youth” project.

We currently have a draft version of the Anonymizer badge activity kit posted on the Webmaker site.

Anonymizer Prototype

The idea behind the Anonymizer Badge is to be able to practically understand what is meant by the Canadian privacy policy term “Personal Information” (PI). This term gets used in policy documents to distinguish between specific types of information that may require extra privacy protection within the larger category of all the information about someone. In other jurisdictions, this is called “personally identifiable information,” which emphasizes how certain kinds of information such as an address or employee number can be used to identify one individual out of all other people. In Canada, the idea of PI is even more expansive, where personally identifiable information is added together with even less specific but still personal details such as a photograph of a person’s home. This broad interpretation of PI is at the heart of privacy protection in Canadian law.

The Anonymizer Badge enables learning about what kinds of information might be included in PI through a webmaking activity. The activity associated with the badge involves using Mozilla’s free tool X-Ray Goggles to temporarily alter the code of a famous person’s Wikipedia page so as to remove any information that is can be used to determine her or his identity. X-Ray Goggles enables participants to see what changes to a webpage would look like, without permanently changing the page on Wikipedia, in a trial-and-error process. This process supports a kind of iterative learning that generates discussion on the key features of PI.

Teen peer researchers from the privacy badges project wrote an earlier blog post that described their experiences with the Anonymizer Badge learning activity. Kathryn Meisner and Leslie Shade presented a draft version of the learning activities associated with the badge at the Association for Media Literacy Conference on October 18, 2014.

After engaging in the activity and gaining a better understanding of PI, participants earn the Anonymizer Badge as a marker of their learning. But more than this, the badge signifies a more practical engagement with the meaning of policy terms such as PI. Without actually doing this kind of activity, it’s difficult to envision what the consequences for regulating privacy around PI would entail. In the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) for example, PI has a special status where it legally must be:

  1. collected with consent and for a reasonable purpose;
  2. used and disclosed for the limited purpose for which it was collected;
  3. accurate;
  4. accessible for inspection and correction; and
  5. stored securely.

This legislation has many consequences for the fate of PI in everyday online interactions, such as using social media sites, and the growing implementation of new technologies, such as biometric scanning or cloud storage. Understanding how anonymous or identifiable personal information can be is a crucial component of knowing one’s rights under current privacy law.

A final version of the Anonymizer learning activities will be available soon.