Supercharge your open project with leadership training
This post is co-authored by Bérénice Batut, Malvika Sharan, Emmy Tsang, and Yo Yehudi.
In 2016, Mozilla launched a program to help grow the skills of people interested in working openly and empower a generation of open-inspired leaders. The program has been through several stages of evolution, from early Working Open Workshops, and eventually to regular twice-yearly cohorts, mentoring project leads from all around the globe. Projects spanned a broad number of domains, but included a large number of research/science and tech-oriented projects, including PREreview, an initiative to get people involved in scientific preprint journal clubs; Outbreak science, a nonprofit using technology to support disease outbreaks; MBac, a computer vision tool for bacterial motility assays; and DuraCloud, an open-source digital preservation storage service.
In 2019 the Open Leaders program has re-branded: rather than training promising project leaders, it set its sights to a broader goal, creating Open Leaders X, a train-the-trainers program, supporting ten teams to build open leader programmes in various areas concerning Internet Health, from science hardware to digital inclusion. These ten programmes were officially launched on October 26 at the Mozilla Festival and will run from early 2020.
We would like to draw the open science and research software communities’ attention to two of the Open Leaders programmes. Both programmes aim to equip participants with the knowledge and experience to lead their own projects openly through 1:1 mentorship and learning from peers, experts, speakers and other members in the programmes.
The table below summarises the similarities and differences in the curricula of the two programmes:
| Topic | Open Life Science | Innovation Leaders |
|---|---|---|
| Open leadership | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| GitHub – bringing in contributors and Community Building | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Open science (open access, publications, open data, open-source) | ✔️ | |
| Financial sustainability | ✔️ | |
| Product design & marketing | ✔️ | |
| Career path in Academia | ✔️ | |
| Duration | 15 weeks beginning January 2020 | 14 weeks beginning February 2020 |
| More information | openlifesci.org | elifesci.org/InnovationLeaders |
| Application deadline | December 8, 2019 | |
The Open Life Science programme is designed for early-career researchers and young leaders in life science to further their open science skills. Participants will receive training in open science advocacy and work on their projects to promote best open science practices in life science (from solving technical questions, to creating an open data project or report, developing Open Source software project, writing open publications, facilitating community/team culture movements, advancing open educational resources or contributing to other existing projects/community)
The eLife Innovation Leadership programme targets innovators who wish to create tools/platforms to advance open research communication. Participants will learn to develop their ideas into sustainable beta products through a curriculum covering topics from basic product design to communication and promotion. Some of these projects could receive support from eLife beyond the programme.
We encourage interested readers to find out more about these programmes by visiting their respective websites. If you have any questions, please contact:
- Bérénice, Malvika, Yo at hello [at] openlifesci [dot] org for Open Life Science
- Emmy at innovation [at] elifesciences [dot] org for eLife Innovation Leaders
Organisers of both programmes will also be at the upcoming Biohackathon-Europe.
To answer any questions related to these programs, an online information session (webinar) will be held on 27 November 2019 at 4pm GMT via this Zoom room. Agenda and notes can be found here.
If you are interested in contributing to the programmes as a mentor or expert, please don’t hesitate to get in touch using the contact details above.