As we dive into planning for the new year, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on where we’ve come over the last few months, and give you a peek at our plans for 2014.
Since our launch in mid-June, we’ve been busy building a vision of how Mozilla can help support the open research community by addressing gaps where they exist, growing the community of practitioners, and helping projects that show what science on the web is and can do. Back in October, we stopped to reflect on what we’d been up to since our launch. In that post, we described how we had spoken with over 3,000 educators, developers, startups, and publishers around the world to find out how we could help. We also started to test our model through community building, technical work to test new models for doing research on the web, and extending programs like Software Carpentry to teach researchers the technical skills they need to do more open, collaborative, efficient science.
Here’s a look at where we’ve come, and where we’re heading in 2014.
1. We’ve taught the web to over 4,000 researchers (and counting).
Since November 2012, we’ve run over a hundred boot camps in North America, Europe, Australia, the Middle East, and Africa. We’ve reached over 4,200 students, and we’re on track to beat those numbers in 2014. (We’ve even had some instructors battle the polar vortex last week – now *that’s* dedication!)
We graduated a whole new crop of volunteer instructors, bringing the total who are badged and certified to 103. To help with handling the logistics, we recently added another bootcamp facilitator to help Amy (welcome, Arliss!).
Moving forward: This spring, we’ll run our largest bootcamp yet at PyCon 2014 (for over 250 participants), hold our second bootcamp for women in science and engineering, and make a concerted effort to reach into Africa and South America.
We’re also working to make it even easier to join the community. Our biggest bottleneck now is the number of instructors, so we will run our first in-person “train the trainer” event in Toronto this April to explore ways to accelerate instructor training. We’ll continue running the 12-week online course as well, but we hope the “crash course” will be more accessible, and help strengthen ties between instructors.
Finally, we’re continuing work on our basic and intermediate curriculum and exploring new topic areas, such as data science and web programming. We’ll also launch an “affiliates” program for people who want to build their instructional material on top of ours — please keep an eye on the blog for announcements.
2. We’ve launched (and tested) new projects.
Systemic change is hard, especially when you’re working within a system that’s been in place since the 1600s. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, and we’re working on the problem from a few different angles. From our first code review pilot with PLOS to our recently announced “code as a research object” project with Github and figshare, we’re building and testing new approaches to some of the thorniest issues plaguing research. Our primary aim is to connect the pieces we already have, so that open science looks less like an archipelago and more like a continent.
Moving forward: We’ll continue our work with Github, figshare and the community on citing and preserving code as a research object. As a part of that, we’ll look at best practice in open research for code, and test our work with publishers and the research community.
We’ll also continue the conversation about code review in science, digging deeper into the issues raised in our research about the way scientists engage with one another (and their code) on the web. In particular, we want to know what we can learn from how open source projects do code review, and how we can use that as a starting point for a deeper discussion about scientific collaboration in a web-based world.
3. We’ve started a global conversation.
Our main aim for the Science Lab is to serve as connective tissue for a number of communities that are involved in science on the web. We’ve broken conference call technology (a metric of success when it comes to Mozilla) for each of our community calls, and had incredible turnout for our online discussions, monthly community calls, email lists, and in-person events (like MozFest).
But there are still groups around the world that should be part of the discussion but are not for various reasons. We want to do a better job of extending our discussions to new disciplines, new audiences, and new locations.
Moving forward: Over the course of the next year, we’ll be testing out ways to better engage (and in some cases, catalyze) these communities. We will explicitly link the open science community with Software Carpentry’s instructors and participants, and model ways for bootcamp participants to both continue learning new skills, and also contribute their thoughts and work more widely.
If you’d like to get involved, please get in touch. In particular, if you think you have a piece that we could help connect to the larger puzzle, please let us know — we’re here to help.
We couldn’t be more excited about our plans for the new year, made in part thanks to our team (Amy, Arliss and Greg), our contributors and instructors, and the community. Many thanks to all who’ve helped us teach, learn, and build these last few months. Here’s to even more fun in 2014!
