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Thoughts on Having a Meta Open Science Community

- October 1, 2014 in Mozilla Science Lab, OKFN, OKFN Open Science, Open *, Planet

Over the last week, I started to think about how to improve the collaboration between the Open Science groups and researchers and also between the groups themselves. One of the ideas that I thought about using simple tools that are around in other Open * places (mainly Open Source/Linux distros). These tools are your forums (Discourse and other ones), Planet feeds, and wikis. Using these creates a meta community where members of the community can start there and get themselves involved in one or more groups. Open Science seems to lack this meta community.

Even though I think that meta community is not present, I do think that there is one group that can maintain this meta community and that group is the Open Knowledge Foundation Network (OKFN). They have a working group for Open Science. Therefore, I think, if they take the time and the resources, then it could happen or else some other group can be created for this.

What this meta community tool-wise needs:

Planet Feeds

Since I’m an official Ubuntu Member, I’m allowed to add my blog’s feed to Planet Ubuntu.  Planet Ubuntu allows anyone to read blog posts from many Ubuntu Members because it’s one giant feed reader.  This is well needed for Open Science, as Reddit doesn’t work for academia.  I asked on the Open Science OKFN mailing list and five people e-mailed me saying that they are interested in seeing one.  My next goal is to ask the folks of Open Science OKFN for help on building a Planet for Open Science.

Forums

I can only think of one forum, which is the Mozilla Science Lab one, that I wrote about last a few hours ago.  Having some general forum allows users to talk about various projects to job posting for their groups.  I don’t know if Discourse would be the right platform for the forums.  To me, it’s dynamicness is a bit too much at times.

Wiki

I have no idea if a wiki would work for this meta Open Science community but at least having a guide that introduces newcomers to the groups is worthwhile to have.  There is a plan for a guide.

I hope these ideas can be used by some group within the Open Science community and allow it the grow.


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Mozilla Science Lab Forums Now Open

- September 30, 2014 in Forums, Mozilla Science Lab, News, Open *, Open Science Forums, Planet

I am pleased to announce that the Mozilla Science Lab now has a forum that anyone can use.  Anyone can introduce themselves in this topic or the category.


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Open Science: Improving Collaboration Between Researchers

- September 10, 2014 in Center of Open Science, Improving Collaboration Between Researchers', Mozilla Science Lab, Open *, Open Hardware, Open Notebook Science, Open Science Framework, Open Source movement, OSF, Planet, research community, science community, Science Lab, Skip to toolbar Open Science Federation

The Open Source movement has evolved into other areas of computering.  Open Data, Open Hardware, and ,the topic that I want to talk about, Open Science, are three examples of this.  Since I’m a biologist, I’m deeply connected to the science community but I want to also tie in my hobby of FOSS/Linux into my work.  There are many non-coding (and coding) based things and groups that one can use for research and I want to talk about a few of them.

Mozilla Science Lab

Mozilla, the creators of Firefox and Thunderbird, started a group last year that aims to help scientists, “to use the power of the open web to change the way science is done. [They] build educational resources, tools and prototypes for the research community to make science more open, collaborative and efficient.” (main page of Mozilla Science Lab).

Right now, they are are focusing on teaching scientists the basic skills in research via the Software Carpentry project.  But I know that they are planning to get some projects for the community-building side for non-coders.  I don’t know what those projects are but I know that they will be listed soon on the mailing-list of the group.  For myself, I can’t wait until I get my hands on those projects to help them grow.

Open Science Framework

Another fairly new project within the last two years that was started by Center of Open Science that focuses on creating a framework that allows scientists to use the, “entire research lifecycle: planning, execution, reporting, archiving, and discovery”, (main page of OSF) fully and be able to share that with other people in there teams but thy could be in another place not near the head researcher.

I think this is one of the best tools out there because it allows you to upload things on the site and also from Dropbox and other services.  I played around with it a bit but I have not fully used it, but when I do, I will write a post about it.

Open Notebook Science

This is maybe one of the oldest projects that I think there is for Open Science and it’s Open Notebook Science.  It’s the idea of have the lab notebook publicly available online.  There is a small network of these.

I think, along with the OSF project, it is one of the best tools out there mainly because the data and other stuff is publicly available online for everyone to learn from your mistakes or to work with the data.

Hopefully as the time goes by, these projects will grow and researchers can collaborate better.

 


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