shares
 

Join us at Mozilla Science Lab's Global Sprint, Jul 22-23

By John Lees-Miller
Mozilla Science - FireFox in a Crowd

The writeLaTeX team will be helping out at Mozilla Science Lab's first Global Sprint, Jul 22–23 — two days of intense work on open source projects in open science and teaching. There are both technical and non-technical projects, and there are 18 (and counting!) sprint sites around the world, so there's one near you!

In the words of the organisers:

The goals of our global two-day sprint are to write and build useful things, and to strengthen ties within the open science community by giving people a chance to work together. Work will begin on the morning of Tuesday, July 22 in New Zealand and Australia. As they are starting to wind up for the day, their colleagues in Europe will come online; they’ll hand off to people in North and South America, who will in turn hand off to the Western Pacific, and around we’ll go again.

The Official Sprint Etherpad hosts the list of over 25 (and counting!) projects, so there's something for everyone. Here are a few of my favourites:

Data Carpentry Lessons
Based on the excellent Software Carpentry, which teaches vital coding skills for science, Data Carpentry teaches vital lessons for data wrangling. Here's the brief.
JotGit: Science-focused git-backed real time collaborative editor
I'll be working on this one! The idea is to let authors collaborate on papers using their choice of WYSIWYG tools (preferred by most human beings) or text editor + version control (preferred by power users). More info here and here.
Scholar Ninja: A distributed search engine for science
A distributed search engine for scholarly literature, which is completely contained within a browser extension. It uses WebRTC and magic! Read all about it.

The Sprint is being organised on the Official Sprint Etherpad, so you can check out the list of projects and find a location near you (or start your own). The writeLaTeX team will be at the London site, and we look forward to meeting you!

Add your details on the Etherpad to join!

Image from mozillascience.org.

John Lees-Miller

Co-founder, CTO

Computer scientist, mathematician and co-founder of Overleaf. I make things that work.