Research Computing Services Blog

Skills, tools and community: MozFest adventures

Mozilla Festival (or MozFest, to its friends) is a weekend-long extravaganza for the open web community. Taking over Ravensbourne Arts College in Greenwich, MozFest 2014 boasted 11 streams of activities, ranging from art and music of the web, open community building and data journalism, to building the open web and, of course, open science as practiced by the Mozilla Science Labs. I was privileged to attend MozFest as part of the Science and the Web stream, where I shared the work that we’ve been doing at the Research Bazaar to introduce the Python Natural Language Toolkit to researchers from the Humanities and Social Sciences. The notes from the session are here - big thanks to all the lovely participants!

As you’d know if you’ve been to our trainings using Python, we’re big fans of the iPython notebook here at the Research Bazaar and we’ve got a great cloud platform built by our own Tim Dettrick. I felt pretty proud to show off our DIT4C to iPython developer Kyle Kelley, who agreed it’s a great way to bypass installation hassles during a workshop. MozFest was also a great chance to meet Software Carpentry instructors from around the world, like Aron Ahmadia, and compare how we’re using the tools.

There’s more to Open Science than Software Carpentry, and the Science track had an amazing array of activities. I went to a workshop on Cleaning Messy Data run by the School of Data, discussed plans for the ideal open journal, and added some post-its to the Open Science Skills Map. In fact, the Science and the Web space, expertly wrangled by Kaitlin Thaney, Bill Mills and Abby Cabunoc, was an incredibly friendly and collaborative place to spend a couple of days.

I’d already had the benefit of a week in London talking Digital Humanities with a number of researchers and practitioners, and was formulating my thoughts about the sorts of digital skills and knowledge Humanities researchers are going to need, so I was really interested to attend the Hacking the Library session, where we started to map out a curriculum to give the librarians of the future the skills they’ll need. Again, I was happy to see that the work we’re doing here in Melbourne puts us in line with international thinking about data literacy and the need for everyone to learn a little code.

Over 1700 people came through MozFest over the weekend, which is a massive number and the experience could easily have been overwhelming. But the Mozilla team know how to put on a good show. There was excellent coffee available (yep, Australian baristas!) and enough space in the college that you could find a spot to chill out between sessions. I learned some new skills and saw some great tools in action, but perhaps the best part of MozFest was the community. Everyone I met was curious and enthusiastic and, even though I was worried about showing basic NLTK to a group of experienced Python users, seeing people light up as they realised that text can be interrogated like any other dataset was a real thrill.

Thank you to Mozilla and in particular the Mozilla Science crew for an amazing experience and see (some of) you in February!