A wrap up of mozsprint 2015 in Melbourne

By Damien Irving and David Flanders

The second annual Mozilla Science Lab Global Sprint (mozsprint) has just wrapped up (see the global summary here), so we thought we’d recap the action here in Melbourne:

  • Scott Ritchie and Harriet Dashnow worked on the Software Carpentry teaching materials for Rstat. They received pull requests from all over the globe and even got to chat with the authors of the Gapminder dataset, upon which the materials are based.
  • Damien Irving and David Flanders worked on the ResBaz cookbook, with help from Nick Jones in Auckland and Bill Mills in Vancouver.
  • Flanders also wrote this quick blog post on the number of research tools we are starting to see grow in number, over 250+ from our researcher survey.
  • Isabell Kiral-Kornek and Rob Kerr worked on Isabell’s new D3.js lesson materials. They received pull requests from as far afield as Bangalore and Isabell even found the time to submit her PhD thesis during the sprint!
  • Louise van der Werff worked on her new 3DSlicer teaching materials and with the help of Tim Dettrick she managed to get Slicer working on the NeCTAR Research Cloud.
  • Cobi Smith interviewed everyone in sight about their knowledge of Figshare.
  • Kerry Halupka, Martin Paulo, Tim Rice and Paul Mignone worked on their MATLAB, NeCTAR Research Cloud, LaTeX and AutoDesk Inventor teaching materials respectively.
  • The DevOpps team (Linh, Tim, Justin, Jake and Dylan) did some peer2peer training on the DIT4C engine which powers the resbaz.cloud.edu.au platform.
  • Some of our friends from Monash stopped by - hi Steve Androulakis!
  • Our friends from research technology MDHS (thanks Fiona Smith!) came along to say hi, as did several other researchers around campus to check out this hackery stuff!

This idea of getting our Research Community Coordinators and software developers together in the same space for two days of hacking proved so successful that we are going to run our own internal “ResHack” event every three months (with every fourth coinciding with the annual mozsprint). Thanks again to the team at the Mozilla Science Lab for hosting such a great event!