Building Open Communities
Best Practices from Open Source
Abigail Cabunoc Mayes / @abbycabs
Thank you Rob Young, Barbara, Dan Sellars! Pleasure to be hear. Looking forward to getting to know this community.
abbycabs.hello();
I work for the Mozilla Foundation where I'm the
Lead Developer for the Mozilla Science Lab.
I want to use the web to move science forward.
I work for the science lab *because* I want to use the web & it's power to make things open.
abbycabs.history();
Lead Developer for WormBase, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research
Bioinformatic Research Specialist, Michigan State University
I was working in research labs, and we were dealing with so much data & analysis. It was easy to see how the openness and collaboration available on the web could make science better.
Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all.
Making research collaborative, accessible, and usable.
Science Lab - applying Mozilla's mission to a very interesting community of practice. What does 'Open' even mean?
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open source
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open access
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open standards
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open government
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open data
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open science
We've seen this used for... and I think the word 'open' is starting to loose it's meaning When I first heard 'open science' it was vague and I thought it meants something like 'free science'.
I want to look back and see how this term came to inspire so many movements and try to bring back some of the meaning & power behind 'open'.
And I would argue that a lot of the fundamental ideas behind 'openness' today originates in science!
Welcome to the scientific revolution!
Colbert Presenting the Members of the Royal Academy of Sciences to Louis XIV in 1667.
At this time, there were a lot of scientific discoveries being made. But people realized they needed a platform to share and collaborate on research.
“Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society”
Established by the Royal Society of London in 1665
“Philosophical” = “natural philosophy” which is equivalent to “science” today
Coming out of the scientific revolution, the first academic journal devoted to science...
Henry OldenburgThe Royal Society’s first secretary, Henry Oldenburg, wrote a series of letters giving us insight into the values driving the creation of the journal.“We must be very careful as well of regist’ring the person and time of any new matter, as the matter itselfe”24 November 1664“…all ingenious men will thereby be incouraged to impact their knowledge and discoverys ”3 December 1664“ … being first revised by some of the members.”Royal Society of London, Council Minutes, 1 March 1665
Credit, Documentation, Sharing & Participation
Need to share discoveries in order to build on them. Science is better with more eyesScience embraced a culture of working together and sharing discoveries to further human knowledge.
This has enabled many scientific breakthroughs. Today, almost all advances in science appear in a journal article.Fast Forward
The Web + Free Software
= New Meaning of 'Open'
some ideas around working open start to appear in the 90s
Essay on the state of free software at the time.
Linux
“Linus Torvalds’s style of development—release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity—came as a surprise. No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here—rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches... out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge…”
Inspired Netscape...
Working Open
Public and participatory. This requires structuring efforts so that "outsiders" can meaningfully participate and become "insiders" as appropriate.
Working Open, Mozilla Wiki
Revisit values behind the first scientific journal:Credit, Documentation, Sharing & Participation
Credit & Documentation
Version control software: more granular attribution & documentation
Sharing
Free software movement & the web: software and data is available immediately and globally
Participation
Open source: radical participation where outsiders can become insiders
How do outsiders become insiders today?
Think of a place you felt welcome the first time you visited
How can we apply this to our software?
Open Source Checklist
Public repository
LICENSE
README
Roadmap (issue tracker with tasks broken down in issues)
Code of Conduct
CONTRIBUTING.md
Mentorship
1. Public repository
Make sure your code is available
4. Roadmap
Minimum: an issue tracker with tasks broken down in issues. Can be: Comprehensive wiki outlining future of the project.
Building Open Communities
Best Practices from Open Source
Abigail Cabunoc Mayes / @abbycabs
Thank you Rob Young, Barbara, Dan Sellars! Pleasure to be hear. Looking forward to getting to know this community.