MozFest 2014: Spotlight on "Policy & Advocacy"

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This is the seventh post in a series featuring interviews with the 2014 Mozilla Festival “Space Wranglers,” the curators of the many exciting programmatic tracks slated for this year’s Festival.
For this edition, we chatted with Dave Steer, Alina Hua, and Stacy Martin, the Space Wranglers for the Policy & Advocacy track. Participants in this track will help build the web we want by protecting and advancing the free and open web for everyone.
What excites you most about your track?
This is a critical time for the Internet. On one hand, it has become an integral part in the lives of billions of people. On the other hand, it is a fragile resource that is being undermined by interests that want to make it less free and open. We are excited to bring together the heroes of the Internet — the policy and advocacy community of developers, activists, and everyone fighting for a free and open Internet — to work together, share ideas, and celebrate the web we want. We’re excited for everyone to be together in a physical space that is interactive and inspiring, and that enables us to learn from each other.
We envision a space that invites all attendees to share questions and ideas for the web they want, and to feature sessions that invite people to work together to solve problems. Just imagine walls covered with thought provoking, challenging questions and a mass of people working together to answer some of the most vital issues of our times. That will be the Policy & Advocacy track.
We’ll also be running ‘fireside chats’ with leading thinkers about the current state of the web. Our track will aim to bring together the policy and advocacy community, discussing issues and topic areas that are important to the health of the Internet.
Who are you working with to make this track happen?
We’ve seen a ton of participation and collaboration among the community to make the Policy & Advocacy track happen. This participation has been widespread: from advocates in Europe to cyptographers and technologists in North America to Mozilla Reps in virtually every corner of the world. It’s wonderful to see the community come to life. In all, the community pulled together more than 60 submissions for MozFest sessions. It was great to see so many community members actively proposing sessions, and to see the participation of new members, such as the Web We Want campaign, a global effort celebrating the 25th birthday of the Web. As a result, we will have sessions that will teach everything from advocacy skills to anti-surveillance techniques.  We’ll explore the Web We Want, and we’ll see sessions devoted to enabling it for the youngest of people online.
How can someone who isn’t able to attend MozFest learn more or get involved in this topic?
We’re cooking up ideas of how to enable the community to participate in MozFest, even if they can’t physically be there. We have a few exciting ideas planned — stay tuned.
In the meantime, there are lots of things you can do to be an advocate for the open web. Here are a few things to get you started:

Inspired?

Head on over to the MozFest site to register!

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

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Shoutouts

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

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

In & Around the Lab

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

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

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

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

Next Week’s Forecast

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

Reading List

Roundup of what’s new in open science this week from F1000.

Summary of experiences from the British Ecological Society‘s first 6 months requiring data archiving.

Svetlana Belkin on tools & techniques for a Meta Open Science Community.

Emerging themes from Mozilla’s Web Literacy Map.

The Right Metrics for Generation Open, upcoming webinar from Impactstory.

Study on the efficacy of data sharing policy in the life sciences.

Abby Cabunoc on metadata’s role in Code as a Research Object.

Hive Toronto Does Scotiabank Nuit Blanche!

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This Saturday, Oct 4th is the return of the infamous Scotiabank Nuit Blanche festival that will be taking over the downtown streetscape from sunset to sunrise. This year’s amazing line up of special and independent projects is well represented by the Hive Toronto community, including 6 installations happening over at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Reitman Square!

Check out the map below for location details for installations being run by Girls Learning Code, Art Gallery of Ontario, TIFF and one installation curated by Hive Toronto’s Event Coordinator Colin Lacey.

For more information about Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, head on over to the official event page here.

 

 

Installation Details:

Save the Date – Science Lab Meeting October 9

Mozilla

Our next community call will take place this Thursday, October 9. 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.)

The Science Lab meeting is our community call, taking 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 hear from others about their work in and around open research.

This month, we’re pleased to introduce the launch of our forum – please join us there anytime, to find out about upcoming events, get involved in one of our many open projects, or discuss all things open science with the community. We’ll be pointing out a few topics of interest, and as always, taking your feedback on how we can make this project even better.

Also landing this month – the project formerly known as Interdisciplinary Programming is ready for launch as the Science Lab’s contributorship pilot program! Announced at Strange Loop and LXJS last year by Angelina Fabbro and Bill Mills, this initiative to build routes for designers, developers and researchers to work together on open science has evolved into the Mozilla Science Lab’s first pilot study on collaboration in the community. We’ll be hearing from Brian Bot of Sage Bionetworks, one of the science teams participating in this project, on what they’ve learned as an organization participating at the intersection of science and software development, and from Bill on what’s on offer at this program’s launch.

If that wasn’t enough announcements, MozFest is also this month!  Mozilla’s annual festival at Ravensbourne, London, is where passionate thinkers and inventors come together to learn from one another and engage in a conversation about how the web can do more, and do better. The Science Lab will be there hosting the Science & the Web track – we have dozens of sessions examining the potential of the open web to re-define how we experiment, analyze and share scientific knowledge, and we hope you’ll join us for this exciting and interactive event. Joining us on the Science Lab call this month will be Aure Moser, discussing her session on the future of computing for librarians, and Laura Paglione, discussing her session on building a badging framework for scientists.

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’, line ~80). 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.

—

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

Code as a research object: (new phase) standardizing software metadata

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1 response

At the Science Lab, we want to help research thrive on the open web. Part of this is working with other community members to build technical prototypes that move science on the web forward. Earlier this year we saw several prototypes come out of the ‘Code as a Research Object’ collaboration. Since then, there’s been more conversation and effort in this space and we wanted to share our progress and invite the community to give input.

First, a quick look at ‘Code as a Research Object’

Late last year, “Code as a Research Object” was first announced as a new collaboration between the Science Lab, GitHub, figshare and Zenodo to help explore how to better integrate code and scientific software into the scholarly workflow. Since then, we’ve seen community members come together to build prototypes allowing users to easily get a DOI for their code, making it citable and easier to incorporate into the existing credit system.

Next Steps: Standardizing Metadata

At the NCEAS Open Science CodeFest, Sept 2014
NCEAS Open Science CodeFest, September 2014

Coming into the conversation, there’s still room for best practices for code reuse and citation. In particular, some form of standardized metadata would help other repositories understand how they can integrate with current systems.

At the NCEAS Open Science CodeFest, Sept 2014
Matt Jones at OSCodeFest, September 2014

When I was at NCEAS Open Science CodeFest (OSCodeFest) last month, I led a discussion around the work being done here. I was joined by Matt Jones, Carly Strasser and Corinna Gries, and we agreed that some standards need to be set to help more groups store software in a citable and interoperable manner.

Building on the existing discussions and proposals in the community, we compared the exiting schemas for code storage to help create a metadata standard that allows for discoverability, reuse and citation. You can see the notes from our discussion here.

This led to the creation of the codemeta GitHub repo to store a minimal metadata schema for science software in code in JSON-LD and XML. Since then, we’ve worked on refining the proposed metadata schema and creating mappings between some existing popular data stores. Coming soon: Matt Jones will be blogging on some of the more technical aspects of this project.

How to get involved

We’re looking for feedback on our current proposed metadata schema for code discovery, reuse and citation.

MozFest 2014: Spotlight on "Open Badges Lab"

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This is the sixth post in a series featuring interviews with the 2014 Mozilla Festival “Space Wranglers,” the curators of the many exciting programmatic tracks slated for this year’s Festival.
For this edition, we chatted with Laurie Garrison, one of the Space Wranglers for the Open Badges Lab track. Participants in this track will challenge the conventional system of recognizing skills and learning, while celebrating achievements from Open Badge creators and issuers.
What excites you most about your track?
Last year our space was full of opportunities to create and design badges. This year we’re expanding on that by making sure that there will be lots of opportunities to earn badges throughout the weekend. We want to see badges escape from the Open Badge Lab and start interacting in the MozFest ecosystem, ideally providing inspiration for new connections amongst different disciplines, tracks and experts. There will be opportunities to earn a badge for connecting any device to the web on the Open the Web with Things floor, an Open Web Protector badge on the Policy and Advocacy floor, as well as a number of others.

Who are you working with to make this track happen?

We’ll have some impressive facilitators at work on our floor. The iDEA team (a new award for young entrepreneurs supported by the Duke of York and Nominet Trust) will offer the opportunity to create the badge that will be given to those who win the iDEA award. There will also be badge design with University College London staff, a workshop with the Think Big team, an opportunity to design a robot in Minecraft, Sci-Art storytelling with UNSA, mobile game design, wearable computing badges as well as sessions on the latest research and learning projects. We have something for all ages and every interest group!

How can someone who isn’t able to attend MozFest learn more or get involved in this topic?
Badges can be earned remotely before, during, and after the Festival. We’ll share challenges that will be recognized with badges in the lead up to MozFest. So badges will not only serve as documentation and mementos of participants’ experiences of MozFest, but will also help continue the momentum of MozFest after the event. In addition, we’ll be bringing a new, improved Badge the World website with us. We’ll be looking for more pledges to help us badge the world!

 

Inspired?

Head on over to the MozFest site to register!

Creating Instruction: Notes from UVa SWC Teacher Training

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I had the privilege of observing the second-ever live Software Carpentry Instructor Training workshop last week at the University of Virginia; that work continues to refine a solid best-of in educational psychology with which to arm our new instructors. I’ve seen this content several times now, and some themes and patterns are beginning to come together as guiding principles that not only lay the foundations for the SWC instructor pool, but give some direction for our broader skill-building efforts in going forward. Those two themes are feedback and student-driven learning, and they both fall under the umbrella of an adaptive school of teaching.

Much discussion of the importance of feedback for instructors in professional development has come on the heels of Greg’s much-cited blog post of late; the Science Lab’s own Instructor Hangouts is one prong in that effort. The UVa workshop advanced this discussion by helping to operationalize feedback; two strategies were offered:

  • Outside-In analysis, organizing criticism into physical, presentation style, and content-oriented comments, to be addressed in that order, the idea being to quickly address some of the more concrete criticisms, before moving on to the more abstract.
  • Critique Checklists, simply having a checklist of past mistakes to have an assistant watch for while you present, in order to focus the attention on problem areas and get the critic thinking about what to watch for, rather than leaving the assessment practice completely vague and unspecified.

Both these ideas boil down to an effort to make the feedback process more systematic, and thus more exportable to instructors of widely varying experience; by systematizing feedback, less experience and mastery is needed to provide constructive critique, and drastically reduces the conceptual overhead of the process.

But beyond setting up workflows for generating feedback, the idea that came up several times at UVa and which has captured my attention of late is that of the various forms of student-driven learning. Peer instruction, which at its heart creates micro-tutoring sessions between weaker and stronger students, and in-situ course corrections for lectures guided by formative assessments carefully crafted to expose student misconceptions, are not very new ideas anymore. But when taken in context with student’s dramatic preference for collaborative activity over lecture in class, the need to address a skills range that simple oratory cannot accommodate, and the deft success of the PyLadies study group model (all of which we discussed at Instructor Hangouts recently), I begin to wonder: should squad-based learning become our primary vehicle of instruction? For all the positive studies and real-world mileage we’ve gotten out of these ideas, we are still lecturing at our workshops – even though we know that students are more successful when they come and learn collaboratively in groups of peers, even though our classes are often too varied in practice to cater to a particular discipline or a particular skill level with a single broadcast of information. Is it time to change?

The UVa workshop advertised that a good lecture / exercise cadence is to speak for no more than 15 minutes at a stretch before turning students loose on an activity; that balance has come a long way since my undergraduate days. I think the Mozilla Science Lab is positioned to push this trend even further. Lecture will always have a place in our workshops, if only to display the body of knowledge we want our students to reach for; but as we explore other teaching channels, the inclusivity and adaptivity of small cohorts of peers is emerging as our north star.

 

Q&A with MOUSE

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MOUSE is an amazing organization that has been working with the Maker Party since the inception of the campaign in 2012. Through the MOUSE Squad program students learn to become digital media and technology experts in their schools and join a network of youth technology leaders. We had a chance to catch up with Senior Director Marc Lesser to talk more about the organization and how they’re participating in Maker Party this year.
MOUSE

What is your organization and what do you do?

MOUSE is a national non-profit youth organization founded in NYC that focuses on empowering learners from underserved schools to “have fun, do good, and make stuff.” Learners from MOUSE Programs build participatory identities by applying digital solutions to real-world problems.

What is the events will you be hosting or running during Maker Party?

MOUSE and Mozilla are joining forces to ready a WebMaking movement in schools across the US. 14 pioneering MOUSE program educators joined us in NYC for the first ever Summer WebMaker Institute – a 2-day intensive PD event preparing educators to return to their school community to integrate webmaking and empower your learners as mentors, too!

Why did you choose to get involved with Maker Party?

MOUSE has supported Maker Party from the start, and shares its mission to invigorate local and global efforts to help connect people and empower them by engaging with and participating through tools that help enrich learning and life.

Tell us what you’re most excited for at the event?

In 15 years working at the intersection of learning and technology, MOUSE has seen – and been an influencing part of – the field’s evolving obsession with “new literacies” emerging from the tools, practices, and culture of digital life. The Web, however, has long outlived mere faddism and yet the field of education has done little to help frame it’s tools, practices, and culture as a legitimate domain to help educators and learners focus on building critical skills and competencies. No group of educators is better prepared to help further the mission of building web literacies than the Coordinators of MOUSE’s program network.

Why is it important for youth and adults to make things with technology?

Beyond convenience and commerce, technology affords people an ability to extend the way they think and interact with their world. Changing the world will require both, for people to become smarter users and, most importantly to us, also makers::problem-solvers::producers of what comes next.

What is the feedback you usually get from people who attend or teach at your events?

That, while too often underestimated, there’s no substitute for the cognitive, community-oriented, and self-empowering outcomes of simply getting together and making things.

Why is it important for people and organizations to get involved in Maker Party?

Because everyone – people and organizations both – has the capacity to organize, host, teach things and learn things and it isn’t that often that, with such low barriers to entry, we can contribute to something so positive that matters to how we move forward as people.

How can people get in touch with your organization?

MozFest 2014: Spotlight on "Science and the Web"

Mozilla
This is the fifth post in a series featuring interviews with the 2014 Mozilla Festival “Space Wranglers,” the curators of the many exciting programmatic tracks slated for this year’s Festival.
For this edition, we chatted with Kaitlin Thaney, the Space Wrangler for the Science and the Web track. Participants in this track will examine the potential of the open web to redefine how we experiment, analyze and share scientific knowledge.
What excites you most about your track?
This year we’ll build off the momentum of the global hackathon we had in July. We’re hosting a two-day sprint on projects around libraries, authoring tools for research, visualization, open data, and educational resources. I’m very excited to be experimenting with this format, since it worked so well during our summer sprint.

Who are you working with to make this track happen?

We have so many wonderful partners! We’re working with GitHub, CERN, the New York Public Library, iPython Notebook, Zooniverse, the Knight Lab, Propublica, School of Data, BioMed Central, the Wellcome Trust, and a number of others. We’re also thrilled to have mentors from our instructor community joining us.

How can someone who isn’t able to attend MozFest learn more or get involved in this topic?
We’ll be posting links to planning etherpads and repositories so that others can get involved. We’ll also be working to capture as much of the activity into teaching kits, resources, and write-ups to share after the event.

 

Inspired?

Head on over to the MozFest site to register!

Mozilla Science Lab Week in Review, Sept. 22-28

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Shoutouts

Many thanks to our hosts at the University of Virginia for the second-ever live Software Carpentry Instructor Training event this past week, and to all our students that made the event a success; it’s your effort and engagement that let these workshops happen, for which you have our sincere gratitude.

Thanks also to Damien Irving and the rest of the Research Bazaar group for posting a collection of their recent SWC videos for everyone’s perusal; these are great examples of workshop instruction, and a valuable start to our exploration of teaching feedback for all our instructors.

Last but not least, my personal thanks to Rachel Sanders of PyLadies and Naupaka Zimmerman from SWC for their enlightening comments at Instructor Hangouts, and to all those that attended; I always come away from our conversations with too many ideas to keep track of!

In & Around the Lab

Bill Mills was off adventuring at the University of Virginia early in the week, sitting in on the SWC Instructor Training course on the 23rd and 24th. Each time we observe this course and take its ideas out in the wild, a picture of reaching students becomes clearer; stay tuned for more thoughts & take-home lessons on this work over the coming weeks.

This week was also round two of Instructor Hangouts! Detailed thoughts from our roundtable were posted here yesterday; to summarize, after comparing notes with PyLadies, a picture is emerging of the crucial value of students teaching students in the spirit of peer instruction, the PyLadies study group model, and as an answer to the bugbear of serving a class of students who arrive at many different skill levels. Later in the conversation, we explored the idea of taking reverse instructional design’s practice of imagining student knowledge profiles (a guess at what a student knows before they come to class, so the instructor can teach to that foundation), and expanding it to include the student’s more general experience, so that reactions to opinions, demeanors, and framing can be anticipated, and instructors can predict how to deftly meet not only knowledge, but professional perspectives and emotional needs, too.

We also tried our first instructor video review at the Hangouts this week – but sadly no one came out to that event. Let us know in the comments, by email or on our brand new discussion forum how we can facilitate useful feedback sessions for instructors going forward!

Next Week’s Forecast

We’re just crossing t’s and dotting i’s on Interdisciplinary Programming, our pilot project to bring a diverse collection of science coding & design projects to you. You saw some previews of our projects at the Mozilla Science Sprint and Codefest – we’re hoping to have a solid (and imminent) launch date for the full program in the coming days.

Bill has been doing a lot of thinking lately about the practice of not just writing code, but building software to do the science you want to do; over the coming weeks, he’ll be launching a battery of blog posts and lesson material on what he’s learned on the topic. The first lands next week!

Also next week, Mozilla Science’s new discussion forum will be in full effect! No need to wait for us – the forum is up, feel free to start posting now – but we’ll be starting a spectrum of conversations, feedback threads and fun challenges to go along with all our offerings next week. Check back soon!

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