Hundreds of contributors from around the world shared their time, talent, and expertise with one another as they worked on dozens of open projects during Mozilla’s 2017 Global Sprint. Over 40 people joined the Mozilla Privacy Arcade project to invent adventures, games and puzzles focused on privacy, security, and digital inclusion.

Highlights included:

• A trove of adventure ideas for privacy-themed role-playing game adventures.
• A design document for a third-party tracking game set on Mars.
• A connected device puzzle that encrypts clues in music.
• An offline privacy decision-making game from a host site in Brazil.

In our Offline Games Challenge issue tracker, we also saw a very cool hidden-in-plain-sight password creation game that uses a standard deck of playing cards and a password-guessing game that uses cog-like cipher wheels to decrypt opponents’ passwords.

We’re looking forward to seeing how community members follow-up on their work over the summer. Our MozFest Call for Proposals just opened; it would be awesome to see submissions from community member interested in taking their parts of the Mozilla Privacy Arcade on the road.

We’ll also be curating and editing contributions to the Cryptomancer Challenge into the next issue of Code and Dagger, Cryptomancer’s online expansion publication. Look for a special introduction from Mozilla and lots of connection-making between world-building and privacy and security skills players can use in real life.

Of course we’re looking forward to the next sprint, as well! Here are some lessons learned this year:

• Organize early. It was amazing to see 40 people join the Mozilla Privacy Arcade. However, we’d love to invite and recruit even more people to enrich the diversity and inclusiveness of our project community. For this sprint, we started with 6 weeks of lead-time. For the next one, we’ll begin recruiting several months ahead of time to secure partnerships, sites, and opportunities that make sense to community members who need more notice to engage fully.
• Sustain community. We’ve assembled a fantastic, generous core of contributors. We need to keep in contact with them and support their work on games-based projects that teach privacy and security throughout the year. We need to continue supporting this community so we can recruit more projects, co-leads, and site hosts next time.
• Get better at GitHub. This year, we used GitHub’s issue tracker to collect participants’ work so they could link to any file or platform they liked. We didn’t want people to feel excluded from our projects because they hadn’t learned how to make a pull request. Next time, we can make the same invitation but also provide more documentation and support for forking our repos and pushing new work to them. That way we can help contributors learn a little bit about GitHub and a little bit about working open in a way that empowers them to contribute directly to our repos.

If you’d like to download and play with any of the adventures, games, or puzzles contributors created during #mozsprint, just visit our repos and skim the issues to find links to participants’ work. You can also email project lead Chad Sansing or tweet at @MozLearn with questions about how to get involved with the project, MozFest, or the next Global Sprint.

Finally, please let us know what you think. We’d love to hear your suggestions for improving our projects further.

Mozilla Privacy Arcade: A MozSprint Recap was originally published in Read, Write, Participate on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Duncan Washington

Working in the private sector for six years, I have come to learn the importance of organizations collaborating with communities. Especially in product development and delivery in this fast-paced world. The most common models in organizations has been designing and developing products and services then shipping it to consumers. But, what we have learned for instance from software firms who develop their product and share with different communities or individuals to give feedback at the beta stage, is that they have enabled production of products that have solved society needs wholesomely. Communities being groups of people of different backgrounds coming together to solve problems, localizing issues, training and even empowering their societies; they hold insights or capabilities we cannot overlook.

Recently, we have seen the benefits of community groups and how they are influential in the adoption and usage of products from different institutions. For example, if Facebook is to create safe usage of its social platform apart from using bots or algorithms to sift out hate speech or fake news they can engage communities who can be very important in solving this problem. As they are part of the society and can sift facts from fiction or safe posts from abusive posts because they understand the society they live in. They can localize the problem and be of much help to the platform in making it safer and healthy and that gears to safe internet.

Localization here means, ensuring the user experience is made closer to the consumer daily life and it is not just translation. Thus, if I were to propose the collaboration of organizations with community then I would say organizations to engage with community at development stage and implementation stage. Also solving problems from the society by localizing them. Like in Kenya we have CHWs — Community Health Workers, these are community-based volunteers who help health organizations in the delivery of health services or sensitizing the community on health matters. They have been pivotal in reducing the spread of HIV and AIDS.

With the fast pace of innovations and development, organizations are grappling with issues arising after products are shipped to the market. This will reduce issues arising when using the products in community when engaged in the development stage. But, one would ask how do community groups benefit from this engagement? The dynamics of community groups are different; you will find some groups that are born from tech hubs or communities. Some are individuals with zeal to help their societies that they live in or associate with or just volunteers from different backgrounds. When we engage these communities, we end up building individuals capacities, the community group capacities through learning and interactions with the organization. Thus, you end up adding skills to individuals who are in these groups that are still developing themselves and at the same time better the service or product delivery.

Another benefit to the community would be meritocracy; where individuals attain leadership because of their abilities or level of involvement. Group synergies is another benefit, where individuals in a group collaborating with organizations can channel their energy and focus on geared results because of their passions (e.g. Google using Google communities to train digital skill in Africa). Such leaders end up being beacons of lights to various communities and even certain products.

In current times where we have high rates of unemployment this becomes a very big benefit to individuals or groups. As a source of living or putting into practice what they have learned from the engagements they end up being self-employed by providing the organization products. For example if an individual or a group is engaged with a Cloud service organization, these individuals can end up selling these services to consumers as a source of living. This will also be a benefit to the company because the individuals or groups are involved in the product development.

This is not a fit with all models, as we know some development or innovations involve a high level of privacy or confidentiality and thus organizations should be in better positions to work around how best they can collaborate without breaching their core protocols. In addition, the relationship should be mutually beneficial and should not imply one is doing the other a favor.

In conclusion, communities are playing a big part of any development that they are involved in and it is high time we take that advantage. Organizations involving communities can reduce their cost, improve their development and in the end make their product users happy and satisfied.

Duncan Washington is a technology professional, researcher, and digital inclusion activist. He has been active in the internet health movement as a Research Analyst and Project Lead, and is a member of our first cohort of “Network50.” Read his recent interview with Mozilla.

Collaboration with the Community was originally published in Read, Write, Participate on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

To answer this question, we will be holding a Mozilla Open House on Thursday, June 22nd, 9–11 a.m. PDT at the Ford Alumni Center in the Lee Barlow Giustina Ballroom. Come meet local innovators, educators, entrepreneurs, students, and community advocates to learn about what it means to be a Mozilla Gigabit City.

In an effort to build technologies that support a healthy Internet, Mozilla will be providing grant funding to support pilot tests of gigabit technologies such as virtual reality, 4K video, artificial intelligence, and their related curricula. The technologies should address education and/or workforce development opportunities. (Examples of previously funded projects can be found here.) We are looking for diverse ideas and will fund impactful, inspiring, and exciting projects to continue to make the “Silicon Shire” a shining beacon of collaborative community success on the West Coast.

Learn more about the Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund.

Why Eugene?

Home to an extensive portfolio of innovative companies in the Silicon Shire, Eugene offers a rapidly expanding high-speed fiber network, strong community support, and existing technological tools and infrastructure to advance education and workforce development.

Eugene is changing: This brings optimism for some residents, and uncertainty for others. For residents who are hesitant or have strong opinions — jump on board, join the discussion, and come see what we’re up to. In order to make representative change, we need as many different voices at the table as possible.

Eugene cares: Eugene has a long history of entrepreneurship, environmental advocacy, vibrant and livable communities, and social justice. But, like any city, Eugene is not without its issues. One of the most visible is homelessness and lack of affordable housing (53% of our students are currently living in poverty). Rather than ignoring these pressing issues, Eugene is tackling them head-on. We continue to have great opportunities to work together to find innovative solutions to old problems.

Eugene innovates: Thanks to EugNet and other local partners, Eugene 4J School District, 32 schools in total, are all connected to a publicly owned fiber network. Research and innovation between local high schools and the University of Oregon is on tap and rapidly expanding downtown fiber infrastructure is incentivizing entrepreneurship. There are dozens of untapped resources as well, such as the 50-million-pixel PSC Visualization Lab screen at the Allan Price Science Commons & Research Library at the University of Oregon, remote access to usage of the Titan $5 million 3D microscope at Lorry I. Lokey Laboratories, and the expansion of Career Technical Education (CTE) classes including technology-related field trips and computer science training for both educators and students.

Month One: Passionate Eugenians

We have been overwhelmed with the outpouring of excitement about utilizing Mozilla’s partnership to make Eugene a more innovative, equitable, and inspiring community. It’s gratifying to see local planning aligning so closely to the initiatives and goals of Mozilla’s national Gigabit work. Just last month, the philanthropic hackathon Hack for a Cause took place and brought many social issues to light, along with potential technological solutionsideations about how to solve social issues with modern technological tools. This groundwork is a perfect example of the creativity we hope to promote and fund here in Eugene.

We look forward to coming alongside the many amazing organizations and individuals who are already working on formal and informal education issues. These partnerships will not only increase capacity, but will also broaden the community working on solutions and bringing diverse ideas to the table. We also look forward to finding projects that create cross-country partnerships with the other Mozilla Gigabit cities: Austin, Chattanooga, Lafayette (LA), and Kansas City.

Special thanks to Technology Association of Oregon for their initial, and continued, support of the Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund as well as Eugene Mayor Lucy Vinis and Springfield Mayor Christine Lundberg of Springfield. Also thanks to the 21 other organizations who helped secure the selection of Eugene as a Mozilla Gigabit City, and the growing number of community partners who continue to get involved.

Mozilla wants to be a small catalyst to this era of innovation — we look forward to your ideas Eugene!

— — —

Stay Involved

• Follow Gigabit Community Fund news on Twitter.
• Contact local Eugene Portfolio Manager Craig Wiroll.
• Attend the June 22, 2017 “Mozilla Open House”.
• Listen to the “Talk Tech to Me” podcast with the Technology Association of Oregon’s President and CEO, Skip Newberry and Mozilla’s Gigabit Fund Manager, Jenn Beard for more information about the announcement of Eugene as a Mozilla Gigabit city.

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Mozilla Has Landed in Eugene, Oregon was originally published in Read, Write, Participate on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Caitlin Stanton

Not everyone attends a high school whose computer science program is regarded as one of the best in the state. Not everyone has the support to apply for programs and internships to help them learn how to code. Not everyone can spend hours sitting on the floor writing algorithms in Python and designing apps in Swift. I wanted to level the playing field when it came to computer science.

I knew it was up to me to fix this. Who better to change the coding environment for high school students than a fellow high school student? I pulled aside Emily Redler and def hacks( ) was born.

def hacks( ) is a hackathon for high school students, by high school students. Hackathons are coding competitions where you have a certain amount of time to code something new and bold. I’ve always seen these pressurized environments as the best places to learn new skills while figuring out where you can cut corners. However, it can be intimidating when you’re facing off against highly trained college students and kids who have been coding since they could walk.

That’s why I founded def hacks( ): I wanted to create a welcoming environment for high school coders of all levels. I wanted to create a place where students could program their first “Hello World!” program or put their seventh app on the App Store. I wanted to provide 24 hours of workshops and new friends and coding, all just for high school students.

Starting in July of 2015, I was constantly calling and emailing all of the tech contacts I had made through my time at Girls Who Code, AOL, and various hackathons. My partner and I spent hours convincing technology professionals and executives from world-renowned companies to sponsor our event and support the next generation of coders. As high school seniors, we weren’t always taken seriously. Often we would email large companies and not get a response. Undeterred, we went further, calling representatives and sealing sponsorship deals.

By September, we had secured a free venue with ThoughtWorks, a software company located in the heart of Manhattan. Goldman Sachs, Samsung Accelerator, Facebook, #BUILTBYGIRLS, and other companies pledged hundreds of dollars. Shapeways, Mozilla Hive, MongoDB, and more provided free company products for the attendees. Workshops were provided by Spotify, the New York Code and Design Academy, and the Coding Space, to name a few. def hacks() was finally held as a 24-hour event on the weekend of October 24th-25th. More than 70 students attended, ranging from first-time coders to experienced hackathon-ers. They all spent 24 hours attending workshops, meeting new friends, and, most importantly, coding more than a dozen projects using various technologies.

After the success of def hacks() in October, the def hacks() movement expanded to events in New Jersey, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and London. There are students outside of New York who want to code but don’t have the chance, and we want to give them the same coding opportunities. By today, we have hosted nearly 500 hackers at our events, always providing the same kind of fun and friendly hackathon environment we believed in from the start.

Caitlin Stanton is an entrepreneur, a young digital activist and a freshman at Cornell University. She has been active in the internet health movement as a partner and learning advocate. She is a member of our first cohort of “Network50.” Read her recent interview with Mozilla.

A Hackathon for High School Coders was originally published in Read, Write, Participate on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The plan is ambitious and it requires an entire country. But it’s the type of plan that gets you tingling in your toes with excitement.

I’m excited to be working on this project with a group at Mozilla. Together we’ve committed to,

• Training Digital Ambassadors so they can execute the work on the ground
• Creating and supporting curriculum that is to be used by ambassadors when teaching
• Developing Mozilla Clubs in the areas where local individuals can continuously attend and learn

To succeed we need to ensure that:

1. Ambassadors know how to teach basic web literacy. They are able to teach how to use the Internet, apps and resources to first time learners. To people who might not know what the web is or are scared to use it. As well as how to remain protected once they are online.
2. Ambassadors are well equipped to facilitate this learning in low-resources areas. Most of the areas they will be working in have limited bandwidth, few resources and access will likely be only through mobile phones.
3. Ambassadors are able to show individuals how the Internet is relevant to them and the opportunities it provides. This means making the Internet relevant to individuals and their everyday task — how can something like the Internet be used to make them better shopkeepers or access resource from the government.

In May, my colleague Julia Vallera and I traveled to Rwanda to attend Digital Opportunity Trust’s (DOT) Unconference. After which, we were to run a two-day training for 30+ ambassadors who were currently in DOT’s network. We went in with an agenda and what has become normal, we hacked and tweaked that agenda to meet the ambassador’s needs.

Here’s how we met our success metrics.

Ambassadors know how to teach basic web literacy.

We started basic, real basic. We went back to teach the basics of how the Internet works and revisited the terms/ideas that make the Internet what it is. We worked on understanding the definitions behind those terms and how to explain them to others. The curriculum and activities for the two days can be found here.

Ambassadors are well equipped to facilitate this learning in low-resources areas.

Over 70% of the curriculum taught was done entirely offline. This was important for us to model how to teach key digital principles in an offline setting. As we know resources are an issue we wanted to show you could have fun and learn the web without needing the web. We incorporated discussion, games and peer-supported learning that would engage people in different ways.

Ambassadors are able to show individuals how the Internet is relevant to them and the opportunities it provides.

We adapted our facilitation for this audience to allow for more time after activities and workshops that would focus on a reflection of the learning. Specifically, we would ask the ambassadors how they would adapt these activities for their future audience. Our future workshops with this group will focus on taking user profiles and assessing what/how to teach various target audiences.

A post-event survey indicates that,

• Attendees found themselves far more equipped to teach Web Literacy. Before the event they were 61% prepared, versus 90% after the event.
• Attendees felt very passionately about teaching new web users about how to understand the risks of the web including knowing what is fake vs. real.
• 89% of attendees stated that they know more about web literacy issues facing their potential audience and can confidently teach them the skills they need to learn.
• Attendees shared that they learned creative, fun and engaging methods to teach and will use them going forward.

Some favourite quotes:

“I liked how the work was done in teams, I liked the tactics that have been used to teach us the web literacy, like more practices than theories. I liked how facilitators collaborated between them, which made the course so interesting.”

“I really liked the mode of training, which engages everyone and considers how we shall use what we learned to facilitate people from our communities”

“I hope those examples will help me to become a good Digital Ambassador in my community so that web literacy will be an engine to development not only my community but development as whole country.”

We had fun! The Ambassadors and DOT Rwanda team had fun! We will continue learning, sharing and training the next round of Ambassadors.

We had fun! The Ambassadors and DOT Rwanda team had fun! We will continue learning, sharing and training the next round of Ambassadors.

We’re on a Mission to Make Rwanda Web Literate was originally published in Read, Write, Participate on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

During the 50 hour #mozsprint, we saw:

302 pull requests closed
320 pull requests opened
2223 comments & issues
824 commits pushed

For comparison here are the numbers from 2016:

107 pull requests closed
339 pull requests opened
709 comments & issues
360 commits pushed

Want to play with the data yourself? It’s all here: https://github.com/mozilla/global-sprint/tree/master/_data/activity

For tweets and pictures from the event, check out the 2017 Mozilla Global Sprint Storify.

MozSprint by the (GitHub) Numbers was originally published in Read, Write, Participate on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Ariam Mogos

Last year, I had the opportunity to attend and run a workshop at the Scratch Conference at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge. The conference theme was “Many Paths, Many Styles, Many Connections”, inspired by Seymour Papert’s legacy in education theory, practice and advocacy. Meeting, collaborating with and learning from inspiring educators and young people from across the world led me to revisit his groundbreaking book “Mindstorms.” Papert’s critical insights on how the culture of education has compartmentalized and contained the ways in which children build knowledge reaffirms my commitment to a long journey in this space.

When I reflect on my own childhood, I had a strong distaste for math, and not because several attempts to solve an equation exhausted me (I was a tenacious kid), but because when I didn’t solve it the first or second time, I was conditioned to believe I wasn’t “good at it.” Math was numbers, calculations, figures and symbols on the blackboard. Like most children, the culture of our education system inhibited me from recognizing that math was also playing classical music, and smashing in a badminton game.

I think that if I had been equipped with the consciousness that I was doing math all the time to solve problems I found interesting and relevant, it would have had a profound impact on my doubts around my own abilities. Rather than only pursue what I believed to be my strengths, like English and History, I would have recognized that my “intellectual weaknesses” were just activated in different environments or learning situations, not the traditional classroom.

Knowing what I know now, I’ll never be afraid or doubt my ability to learn new things, even when it’s hard, but no child should have to reach adulthood to have this revelation. My commitment to learning is rooted in fostering a universal culture of education in which children are empowered by their own knowledge and style of learning, not discouraged or defeated by it. When young people are nurtured to embrace their differences, anything is truly possible.

Ariam Mogos works as the Learning Lead for UNICEF’s Office of Innovation. She has been active in the internet health movement as a Hive NYC member and MozFest participant. She is a member of our first cohort of “Network50.” Read her recent interview with Mozilla.

Many Styles, Many Abilities was originally published in Read, Write, Participate on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Chris (@otta_chris) is a coding trainer, git evangelist and open source advocate. Chris was selected to join the current cohort of Mozilla Open Leaders with his project Git Push Freshman where he continues to help others learn about Git, open source, and programming.

I interviewed Chris to learn more about Git Push Freshman and how you can help June 1–2 at #mozsprint.

What is Git Push Freshman?

Git Push Freshman is an open introductory course curriculum to teach and train version control system (VCS) concepts in Git and collaborative software development with GitHub. This course targets first year Computer Science students in Maseno University but is also open to any aspiring developer, especially web developers.

Why did you start Git Push Freshman?

Though tools are indispensable for software engineering students, you will rarely find a course on version control systems or collaborative software development in campus curricula, not to mention in software engineering schools and departments.

As a Computer Science undergraduate, I thought I was contentedly endowed with all that pertained a developer’s toolkit until I was introduced to Linux, Git and GitHub — all powered by the open source philosophy, while on internship in my third year at LakeHub. Prior to my placement, I had just completed a course on the Unix OS, but truth be told, I barely took in anything.

It was the compelling nature of my tenure as an intern at LakeHub that led me to learn version control using Git and collaboration using GitHub as projects were built by teams in a distributed approach; most projects were open source. This was totally different from how we managed our group projects on campus where most groups had to physically meet in order to contribute to their shared project — a very inconvenient approach I can now confidently say.

Why is Git important to learn?

First and foremost, being a version control system, Git keeps a record of the history of your project. This means that it is possible for a software developer to fall back to a stable version of their project codebase just in case there is fatal breakdown with the current project under development. Git makes time-traveling through one’s project an easy feat.

Secondly, as a distributed version control system (DVCS), Git encourages many software developers to take a peer-to-peer approach while working on projects without requiring them to share a common network. This is in contrast to my college experience,where a physical meetup of group members would work on a given project.

Additionally, as a DVCS, Git allows you to create a full copy of an original open project upon which you can continue building in your own local environment.

What problems have you run into while working on this project?

Allow me to infer from my experience thus far and call them ‘good problems or challenges’.

Since this is my first big shot making in the open, getting the ‘right’ contributors to help me develop the curriculum was a daunting task. Even though my initial thoughts were to create a curriculum to suit and meet local needs, however, I had to reconsider my approach and ensure that the project took a global perspective. This meant attracting not only local participants to help me craft the curriculum, but also outside contributors to bring an international touch to the entire work. The former approach would have proven easier but with limitations including some form of bias; the idea was indeed anti-open source.

Reliable Internet access is still intermittent in my locale. It has been inconvenient to hold meetings at times. Hence, in some occasions, I have found myself behind schedule in the course of my project timeline. However, I’ve been able to sail through and catch up whenever left behind.

What kind of skills do I need to help you?

Anyone proficient working with Git as a version control tool can help document the open curriculum. As a bonus, having a working knowledge of GitBook will go a long way in your helping out as a co-author in documenting the open book. If you are or have been a project lead, managing open source projects on GitHub, then don’t hesitate to help out. Authors, technical reviewers, educators and anyone who’s worked with or has experience creating open educational resources is most welcome to contribute to the Git Push Freshman project.

In general, if you are working open, this project awaits your invaluable input.

How can others join your project at #mozsprint 2017?

Here’s my hosted project on GitHub. Feel free to read through the CONTRIBUTING.md file and the README.md files to get the gist of the project and how to become a fellow contributor. Be sure to check out the project issues and see exactly where you could start off with the documentation. These include:

1. Instructions on Git branching
2. Instructions on remote branches
3. Instructions on the integration-manager workflow
4. Instructions on contributing to forked public project

There are two options to join the project; in-person or as a virtual contributor. For the former, you can follow 2017 Mozilla Global Sprint, Kisumu-Kenya to register as a participant. You can also join virtually.

What meme or gif best represents your project?

without conflicts…

Join us wherever you are June 1–2 at the Mozilla Global Sprint to work on Git Push Freshman and many other projects! Join a diverse network of scientists, educators, artists, engineers and others in person and online to hack and build projects for a health Internet. Get your tickets now!

Git Push Freshman was originally published in Read, Write, Participate on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

April (@april_cs) is an epidemiologist and methodologist, currently focused on open research training and advocacy. I met April in Montreal at our Working Open Workshop where I was blown away by her vision and drive to further open communication in research. She’s been using her passion and skills to produce The Method.

I interviewed April to learn more about The Method and how you can help June 1–2 at #mozsprint.

What is The Method?

The Method is an open source, peer-reviewed podcast about the state of science. Inspired by how open source has enabled better code, I believe that open communication can make our conversations about science more inclusive, more productive, and better quality. As far as I know, it is the first open source podcast around!

As an open source podcast, our listeners are also our content contributors and producers. All materials, including the releases, raw and edited content, and reviews, are licensed CC-BY or CC0. Processes of contribution, review, and moderation are all open to encourage more diverse engagement. Episodes will be updated with new contributions and re-released to enable continuous, living conversations that can build in specificity and quality over time. Everything we build will be openly documented and evaluated, and reuse will be encouraged and supported. Openness is at the core of how The Method has been developed, how it is being produced, how it will be shared, and how it will allow us to imagine better science.

Why did you start The Method?

I believe that science is the best way for us to solve our biggest challenges. I spend much of my time, both personally and professionally, talking about issues in science with scientists, librarians, funders, and other stakeholders. Over time, I started to feel like these conversations were stunted; they remained vague, disconnected, and unproductive.

These conversations are often an echo-chamber of well-meaning scientists with similar worldviews. Problems and solutions presented by the scientific community remain vague. The weeds of our problems — the specific barriers for individual researchers — remain unexplored.

I want us to be having more inclusive and productive conversations. The same points are raised at every meeting by the same people. New perspectives are not added and our assumptions are not challenged. If anything, we are solidifying our opinions before even including everyone in the conversation. This is not good for science, but it is doesn’t have to be this way. Better conversations are possible!

How have podcasts influenced you?

I am a complete podcast nut. Podcasts are the main way I consume stories today. It is an exciting time to be making podcasts as the number of podcasts and podcast listeners has exploded in the past few years. It is a medium that is accessible, adaptable, and ripe for innovation. It is also an intimate way of telling stories. I think podcasts have been able to use this intimacy to connect listeners with challenging, complex, and personal stories to which they might otherwise have been less open. Without seeing a face with the voice, we focus more on what they are saying and feel as though they are speaking directly to us.

What problems have you run into while working on this project?

I work full-time, and The Method is something I do in my spare time. I have a long list of ideas and interviews I want to complete, but time is always an obstacle. I have learned to break my ideas into small tasks so I am able to stay on track, but it means slower progress than I would like. Similarly, supporting a community of active contributors requires regular communication, and that also means time. So I need to balance time producing with time reaching out and supporting our contributors.

What have you learned about producing an open-source podcast?

The potential of bringing openness into new areas, such as podcasting, is really exciting. But just building the process openly is not enough. Contributors need a reason to spend their time on this project — some fun, or some reward. The fact that is new or interesting is not enough. I have needed to start thinking very specifically about what benefit contribution should offer to contributors, and what benefit The Method should offer to the community. For an open source podcast like The Method to be successful I need to build mutually beneficial relationships within the community of contributors.

What kind of skills do I need to help you?

You don’t need any special skills to help!

How can others join your project at #mozsprint 2017?

We would love to have you join our sprint!

We currently have 2 calls for contribution: Hello World and Your Number Ones, and I am trying to get as many contributions as possible!

For Hello World, we ask contributors to:

• Say “Hello World”!
• Introduce yourself to The Method listeners
• Tell us why science matters to you

For Your Number Ones, we ask contributors:

• What do you think is number one issue in science today?
• What do you think is number one exciting innovation in science today?

Here’s how! To add your audio contribution:

• Join The Method WhatsApp Group and leave a voice note OR
• Leave a voicemail with your contribution at (929) 367–7330 OR
• Email a voice memo to contact.the.method@gmail.com

You can also help with transcription, recommend topics, reviewers, interviewees. Just dive into our issues!

Keep in touch:

• Sign up for our newsletter
• Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4ivyZIcYyw
• Contribute: https://github.com/the-method/podcast
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/methodpodcast
• Website: http://themethodpodcast.com

What meme or gif best represents your project?

Baby sloths in a bucket! Because they are adorable. And because we scientists are siloed and slow moving, like these sweet little sloth babies. Also, baby sloths only care about sloth things and probably only talk about sloth things with their baby sloth friends, just as we talk about the things we care about with people who are like us. Although these sloth conversations are likely adorable, science’s problems are more complicated than sloth problems, so diversity and inclusion are important.

Join us wherever you are June 1–2 at the Mozilla Global Sprint to work on The Method and many other projects! Join a diverse network of scientists, educators, artists, engineers and others in person and online to hack and build projects for a health Internet. Get your tickets now!

The Method: an open-source podcast was originally published in Read, Write, Participate on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hao (@Hao_and_Y) is a postdoc researcher at Scripps Oceanography studying quantitative ecology and dynamic systems. I first met Hao at our Working Open Workshop in Montréal where I learned about his passion for research reproducibility and his project RRROBOTS. Since then, he’s been working on RRROBOTS as part of our most recent Mozilla Open Leaders cohort.

I interviewed Hao to learn about RRROBOTS and how you can help June 1–2 at #mozsprint.

What is RRROBOTS?

RRROBOTS stands for “Reproducible Research in R for Ocean Biosciences: Open-science Training Seminar” (scientists ❤ coming up with acronyms for projects). It is designed to be a kind-of hybrid open science / data analysis course to introduce graduate students to tools and platforms for doing science and computational analyses, in particular, in a reproducible way to share with others (and be citable and recognized for their work)!

Why did you start RRROBOTS?

I realized that I picked up a lot of coding habits through personal experimentation (also many personal failures). I think this is a fairly common experience in graduate school, due to a combination of slowly evolving training practices and general impostor syndrome (which manifests into struggling with something on your own because you’ll be viewed as asking a stupid question if you seek help). But it doesn’t have to be this way!

I learn a lot these days by reading and sharing workflows/code/best practices with different people from academic, data science, and the open source software communities, so I felt the time was ripe to introduce other people to better ways of managing coding for research, as well as more open ways to learn from and collaborate with other researchers.

I see your meetings have started! How is the course going so far?

Pretty well. I think we covered a lot of material that students are able to adopt into their workflows going forward. Git and GitHub were challenging for many (though clickable checklists were a big hit). Having info on how to be recognized for contributions online e.g. by being citable was really important for many people and a major concern. Also, learning about the Open Science Framework, osf.io, (S/O to our guest instructor Reid Otsuji, UCSD LIbrary for that one) was cool, and I think will jump-start some adoption of that platform by labs.

What problems have you run into while working on this project?

Spring quarter is tough — more students have field season during this quarter than any other. In addition, several students are trying to qualify and/or finish their theses, so there are a lot of external obligations in general, and I have had to scale back my expected outcomes.

One of the challenges in general for this type of course is that the range of backgrounds for students is quite diverse, and the material is open-ended. So the goals for individual students, with regards to their projects, are somewhat variable: some are working on thesis chapters, some are reproducing a single figure from a paper, some are trying to get a specific analysis working based off of not-so-well-documented code published by other scientists.

This isn’t a problem, really, but I think one needs to be aware that all of the course material is not going to be relevant for everyone at their current stage. However, I feel that even just creating awareness of the different steps in reproducible research is valuable for students going forward — it’s all about making it easier to adopt new skills and technology.

What kind of skills do I need to help you?

There’s a long list of skills that can help, and any contributions would be greatly appreciated, so I’m going to bullet-point this:

• Unit testing (probably R / python)
• Code documentation (not quite the same thing as unit testing).
• Experience developing research analysis workflows / pipelines.
• Tutorial development (code documentation, Git, GitHub, anything in the tool chain, really)
• Suggestions for other tools/platforms.
• Suggestions for tutorials for tools/platforms.
• Info on exemplar case stories of open science / reproducible research.

How can others join your project at #mozsprint 2017?

Check out our GitHub repo for issues to help out with. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t point people towards the Open Derby project, which has similar goals.

Developing a course from scratch is a lot of work, so I can use a lot of help to fill out some of the course materials and documentation. I have a number of issues marked as “good first bugs” for the Global Sprint, but there’s a whole slew of other tasks that I could use help with, too!

My plan is to be online from 9am-5pm PST on Thursday, June 1, and probably reachable through the mozsprint gitter or through twitter (@Hao_and_Y). The normal schedule for the course has office hours on Fridays 3pm-5pm, so some of us will likely be around to follow-up again during that time.

What meme or gif best represents your project?

Since this project IS about reproducibility and I’m using the Xaringan R package to make slides, I guess a Naruto gif is appropriate:

Join us wherever you are June 1–2 at the Mozilla Global Sprint to work on RRROBOTS and many other projects! Join a diverse network of scientists, educators, artists, engineers and others in person and online to hack and build projects for a health Internet. Get your tickets now!

Reproducible Research in R for Ocean Biosciences was originally published in Read, Write, Participate on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.