Mozilla Science Lab to coordinate ResBaz 2016

By Damien Irving.

At the close of the inaugural Research Bazaar conference back in February, we announced our desire to make it a multi-site event in 2016. By running multiple ResBaz’s simultaneously we’ll be able to reach more researchers and create more buzz around the event, which will hopefully translate into increased sponsorship opportunities (keeping the event free is a priority) and also increased exposure of the fact that researchers are crying out for quality training in the latest digital research skills.

Over the past few months we’ve been blown away by the amount of interest we’ve had from not only universities in Australia and New Zealand, but also throughout North America and Europe. While each individual ResBaz site will have a great deal of autonomy, when we made the announcement we had envisaged that we’d provide some central coordination and assistance to help new sites with planning, logistics and general advice. This would have been achievable for a handful of sites scattered around Australia and New Zealand, however tens of sites from all over the globe is a little beyond our capacity! Enter Mozilla Science Lab. The team from MSL were fantastic supporters of ResBaz 2015 and they’ve agreed to be the central coordinator for ResBaz 2016. Given their experience running large and globally distributed events (e.g. MozSprint), we’re absolutely thrilled that they’ve jumped on board. Our next community call for the global network of ResBazadors (yep, that’s what we’re calling the hosts at ResBaz sites) will be later this month, but in the meantime jump on the ResBaz Gitter room to keep up-to-date with the latest happenings and/or contact us at research.bazaar@gmail.com if you’d be interested in becoming a ResBazador!