This Thursday and Friday, you are invited to be part of an international “global sprint” in which sites around the globe will see participants collaborating on open science, ranging from developing educational materials to building prototypes for scientific tools, under the auspices of the Mozilla Science Lab.

You do not need to be a programmer, designer or scientist nor do you need to work at CERN to participate! Remote participants can also connect via video conference or chat. If you have never been involved in a “hackathon” before, we hope this global sprint will serve as a taster and whet your appetite for more. Hackathons aren’t new to CERN, with the lab previously hosting events such as the Summer Student Webfest and THE Port. The event will take place in the IdeaSquare building at CERN, located behind the Globe of Science and Innovation, to work on one (or more!) of a variety of projects:

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 Cosmic Pi, CRAYFIS 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

You may also contribute to projects being hosted at other locations as part of the sprint.

If the hacking aspect itself doesn’t appeal to you but you would like to learn about open-science tools, a special education session on Friday morning will give you an overview of available tools (including ones deployed at or developed by CERN) and provide you with tips on making your research materials citable (bring your conference poster PDFs and data to the session).

Registration details and more information are available at http://indico.cern.ch/e/mozilla-sprint. We hope to see you on Thursday!