The Mozilla Festival (or “MozFest” as we affectionately call it) is coming to London October 25-27, and planning is in full swing. This year we’ll have an entire track on “Science and the Web” and we want you to help us shape the program.
MozFest is where many of Mozilla’s best and most innovative ideas come from, bringing together over 1,000 inventors, hackers, creatives (and now those from the research community) to share ideas and explore how we can forge the future of the web together.
This year’s focus is on the mentors, catalysts and change agents who care about the using the web to make a difference in their respective fields and communities. Individual sessions are organized under the following themes:
- Build Webmaker Together: The web is wild. Co-design its future with hackable projects, new memes and creativity remixed with digital tools.
- Connect Your City: Champion digital making and bring together local communities.
- Look Who’s Watching: Learn how to control who gets your data. Help others protect their privacy and develop long-term solutions to tracking.
- Make the Web Physical: Take sensors, actuators and more to meld the virtual with the actual and make the web work your way.
- Open Games: Ready, Set, Go! Join a community of game makers who use the web as a platform to build open games.
- Science and the Web: Transform how we use the web–a scientist’s invention–to explore, experiment and build on each other’s research.
- Skills and Badges: Challenge conventional skillsharing. Recognize and verify learning in new ways to increase opportunities and make the most of the web.
- Source Code for Journalism: Hack the news: learn, teach, and make journalism that’s native to the open web.
- Teach the Web: Let’s teach the world the web. Discover how to inspire learners and spread digital literacy with hands-on making.
- Webmaking for Mobile: Become a maker in the booming world of the mobile web.
For the “Science and the Web” track, we’re looking for sessions that show how the Web can (/and is) transforming science, and help introduce the MozFest crowd to some of the folks and organizations leading the charge. This isn’t your average conference, where you present to a group. Preference is given to hands-on and collaborative sessions (in terms of groups involved as well as the session content itself). Or, as we say “Less yack, more hack.” 🙂
A few areas to explore as a starter, in case you’re looking for ideas:
- Hacking digital scholarship: How can we use the web to push the limits of how we share knowledge in the sciences?
- Data sharing: Openness is key to advancing discovery. What role does data play and what cool things can we do with open data in research?
- Citizen Science and engagement: From LHC@Home and Zooniverse to things like Microryza, how can we use the web to make research more accessible and use the wisdom of the crowd?
- Tools for better web science: Come show off your open tool to help change the way we do science.
- Badges / Altmetrics for research: How can we use new forms of assigning credit to research to facilitate sharing, collaboration and interoperability?
- Code and data literacy: Hands-on training with tools or other practices to help us better enable a community of digital researchers.
This is just a start, and feel free to stray from this list. We’re currently pulling together the program, and the session call is open through the end of August for you to submit your ideas. Check out last year’s program, and get those proposals in! To submit, fill out this short form (and be sure to select “Science and the Web” track.)
We look forward to your submissions, and don’t forget to get your tickets!
kaitlin thaney 