A wrap-up of #mozsprint in Melbourne

By Damien Irving.

As mentioned in a previous post, we were very excited to be one of the official host sites for the inaugural Mozilla Science Lab global sprint. Based on the Random Hacks of Kindness initiative, the event involved people from all around the globe ‘hacking’ on the Software Carpentry teaching materials (and other open science projects) for two days straight. Following the global timezones, the event started in Auckland, Wellington and Melbourne. As our first day came to an end we handed off to Paris and Ljubljana (Slovenia), and then picked things up again on the morning of day two with a hand over from Vancouver, San Fransisco and Austin (Texas).

A full wrap up of the sprint can be found here, which reveals that the Melbourne site made a huge contribution. Highlights included:

  • Damien Irving (with assistance from Nicholas Fauchereau in Auckland) produced a capstone example for oceanography, which has been merged into the official Software Carpentry repository of teaching materials (see here). This new lesson uses data from the Integrated Marine Observing System based in Hobart, which means Australian data will be used in bootcamps around the world!

  • Scott Ritchie assisted in the development of a bioinformatics capstone example using the R programming language. Scott will be leading an R bootcamp at UniMelb in October - watch this space for details.

  • Paul Mignone started the process of making his digital blacksmith course notes available on GitHub (see the repo here), so that the wider community can contribute to them.

  • Matthew Dimmock worked on refining his capstone example for medical imaging (see the pull request here), which was first used at our Monash University bootcamp earlier this year

We’d also like to say a big thank you to Richard Ferrers and Xiaobin Shen from the Australian National Data Service, who dropped by to lend their skills and experience.