Open-science projects get kickstarted at CERN

CERN is one of the host sites for the Mozilla Science Lab Global Sprint to be held on 4 and 5 June, which will see participants around the world work on projects to further open science and educational tools.

IdeaSquare will be hosting the event at CERN.

The Mozilla Science Lab Global Sprint was first held in 2014 to bring together open-science practitioners and enthusiasts to collaborate on projects designed to advance science on the open web. The sprint is a loosely federated event, and CERN is participating in the 2015 edition, hosting sprinters in the hacker-friendly IdeaSquare. Five projects have been formally proposed and CERN users and staff are invited to participate in a variety of ways. A special training session will also be held to introduce the CERN community to existing open-science and collaborative tools, including ones that have been deployed at CERN.

1. GitHub Science Badges: Sprinters will work on developing a badge-style visual representation of how open a software project on GitHub is and to what extent it has been used in research. Usage will be tracked through DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) assigned to the codebases. More information: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/pojjcLQEVD

2. Open Cosmics: Several projects exist to bring the study of cosmic rays to students in particular and citizens at large, including CRAYFIS, Cosmic Pi and HiSPARC amongst others. The aim of Open Cosmics is to establish a common data format and storage mechanism for collective analysis of data recorded across all of the independent projects. More information: https://cernsprints.etherpad.mozilla.org/3

3. Geotag-X: This data sprint seeks volunteers to beta-test the Citizen Cyberlab's Geotag-X platform, developed by UNITAR/UNOSAT at CERN. Geotag-X relies on volunteers analysing photographs from disaster-affected areas in order to gather data crucial to providing humanitarian aid. More information: https://cernsprints.etherpad.mozilla.org/6

4. iSpy and other LHC event displays: The open-source iSpy tool is used to produce event displays of collisions recorded by the CMS detector, which are used for education and outreach. The objective of this project is to enhance the capabilities of iSpy and possibly build native apps for mobile devices, as well as to work on other open-source event displays. More information: https://cernsprints.etherpad.mozilla.org/4

5. Extreme Energy Events (E3): E3 was a project born at THE Port's hackathon at CERN last year, with the aim of providing objective, real-time data on extreme-energy events, such as explosions, around the world, so that appropriate life-saving actions can be taken by both professional organisations and individuals. At the sprint, a first prototype of the web interface will be built, demonstrating the user experience and data visualisation of E3 data. More information: https://cernsprints.etherpad.mozilla.org/5

Details about logistics for the event can be found here. If you wish to participate, please add your name to the linked document below the appropriate project, and you will be contacted by the organisers closer to the date.

by Achintya Rao