Open Leaders 7 is almost finished. Join us for a Sprint!

In a previous post, I mentioned that I was a part of Mozilla's Open Leaders program, which is dedicated to working open and improving the overall health of the internet. Each Open Leader worked on an open project over the duration of the 14 week program, which in my case is an open educational curriculum for the DevoWorm group and the OpenWorm Foundation more generally.

Purpose and Outcomes from the Mozilla's POP (purpose, outcomes, process) standards for project management). Click to enlarge.

The purpose of building this curriculum is twofold: to encourage contributions to the organization, and to create educational opportunities that enrich people's contributions. Therefore, our curriculum combines topical tutorials with course materials focused on interdisciplinary topics (bridging data science, computer science, and biology) and training in niche topical areas. The curriculum has a front-end (managed at Eliademy) and a back-end (managed in a Github repository). You can make contributions to the front-end by either enrolling in the course or making notes in hypothes.is.

Examples of the front-end, back-end, and course content. Click to enlarge.

Another way to contribute is to attend the Sprint for Internet Health. Last year this was referred to as the Global Sprint, and gives people an opportunity to engage in open source creation as well as consumption. Our project already has two contributors (Asmit Singh, Vinay Varma, and Uggwal Singh, who are also Google Summer of Code applicants to the organization) who have been refining the materials by way of pull requests. More details to come!

Details on how to get involved. Click to enlarge.

UPDATE (5/25): An interview with project lead Bradly Alicea (by Robert Schafer) is now available on the Mozilla Open Leaders Medium blog.

April is Documentation Month!

This content is cross-posted from OpenWorm Foundation blog.

Based on popular demand, April will be “Docs Month” within the OpenWorm Foundation. The month will be filled with reevaluating our organizational docs, in addition to putting together a proposal (in conjunction with INCF) for the inaugural Google Season of Docs. 

If you have a technical writing background, we can work on a community contribution, which can include (but is not limited to) the following current organizational needs:

1) building an OpenWorm Wiki, which might reference special topics and within the subprojects. 

2) website redesign so as to make it easy to find key information (e.g. people, how to get to Slack, Github, Docker and Blender models). 

3) help refine a reference document started by Senior Contributor Gopal Sarma. 

4) an inventory of projects and docs that align with current organizational goals. 

5) a reorganization of all project docs, mainly merging DevoWorm, NeuroML, Geppetto, and other assorted docs into one location. 

6) help with the educational curriculum. 

7) find and write specs for “casual contributor-friendly” contributions.

Let's get working! 

UPDATE (4/26): We submitted an application by the deadline that incorporates many of these elements. If you are interested in learning more, please join our Slack team and join the #documentation channel, or contact me via e-mail.