Sharing ILRI’s open research at Mozilla Science Lab meeting | Research Utilization: Putting it into practice
abernard102@gmail.com 2014-03-23
Summary:
"Yesterday evening, I had the opportunity to take part in a Mozilla Science Lab community call where I talked briefly about some of our work at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) on open access to research outputs, code and data. [Evening, because the call was at 1100 hours Eastern Time, which was 1800 hours in Kenya].
Kaitlin Thaney, the director of Mozilla Science Lab, was also a speaker at the workshop I attended last week on discoverability of African scholarship, and she kindly invited me to speak at this month’s Mozilla Science community call and share a bit about ILRI’s work on open research.
The Mozilla Science Lab meetings are normally held monthly and provide a forum for the team to discuss the latest developments and projects around open science. It’s essentially a telephone conference combined with the use of Etherpad, an online real-time editing platform, to type notes or questions in the course of the meeting.
Participants dial into a toll-free 1-800 number, enter a password and a conference room number and then listen in to the call. When you dial in to the call, you are automatically on mute to reduce background noise. To speak, you press *1 on your keypad to unmute, then *1 again to mute once you’re done speaking.
It was my first time to participate in a conference call of this nature, and I found the Etherpad interface a bit strange at first. In addition to the main section for live editing and note-taking, there is a chat box on the right side of the page, so it was a bit distracting at first trying to follow the live notes and chats and focus on the speaker but all went well in the end :)
Also on the call was Michelle Willmers, the program manager of the OpenUCT Initiative, who organized the two-day #scholarAfrica workshop in collaboration with Carnegie Corporation.
You can check out the meeting notes on the Etherpad.
I’m grateful to Kaitlin for the opportunity to share, and I look forward to continued conversations and information sharing! ..."