The NEB-1 program

Purpose: Training for early stage researchers and young leaders interested in furthering their Open Science skills

Outcome: Ambassadors for Open Science practice, training and education across multiple European and international bioinformatics communities.

Process: A 15-week mentoring & training program, based on the Mozilla Open Leader program, helping participants in becoming Open Science ambassadors by using three principles:

1. Sharing essential knowledge required to create, lead, and sustain an Open Science project.
2. Connecting members across different communities, backgrounds, and identities by creating space in this program for them to share their experiences and expertise.
3. Empowering them to become effective Open Science ambassadors in their communities.

Goals and Learning Objectives

The vision of Open Life Science program is to strengthen Open Science skills for early stage researchers and young leaders in life science.

At the end of the program, our participants will be able to:

• Describe and define the terms openness, open science, open leadership, community interactions, value exchanges, inclusivity, accessibility, open Science practices in developing resources and training
• Learn how to apply those principles to open leadership and working open in their projects and communities . Learn how to collect, invite, and tell stories that demonstrate how and why openness benefits the communities they serve
• Give original examples for the types of openness in science
• Design
  • Illustrate the need for a project, its vision, and its goals
  • Embrace and communicate the benefits of Open Science and how to strategically apply different open practices to their work
  • Identify the public resources to share their data
  • Identify the different type of Open Access and associated journals
• Build
  • Start any project with openness in mind from day one
  • Setup a project repository on GitHub using best practices for enabling collaboration
  • Choose and apply open licenses appropriately
• Empower
  • Create and enforce a safe working environment
  • Promote the values of Open Science to empower others to lead and collaborate
  • Include a broad range of contributors in their work
  • Communicate their work and vision in a 2min demo of elevator pitch
• Lead an open project in science

Timeline

OLS’s first cohort (neb-1), was conducted from March 2024 until April 2024 with 0 project leaders working on 0 projects.

• **: Start of the program

• **: End of the program

Schedule

During the program,

• Mentors and mentees meet every 2 weeks for a 30 minutes call
• Mentees participate every ~2 weeks to 90-minutes cohort calls during which the program leaders introduce new topics and resources, facilitate break-out discussions, and invite experts from the field to give talks
• Mentees can participate to skill-up, Q&A or coworking sessions in the weeks without cohort calls
• Mentors take part in mentoring workshop and calls

Organizers will inform participants of the week schedule by email.

Subscribe to the OLS calendar

Role Descriptions

Mentees

Participants join this program with a project that they either are already working on or want to develop during this program. More details about the role of a mentee can be found here

For the first round of the Open Life Science program, we are happy to have 0 participants with 0 projects.

Mentors

Our mentees are supported in this program by our mentors’ community who have been paired based on the compatibility of expertise and interests of mentors with the requests and requirements of our mentees. Our mentors are Open Science champions with previous experiences in training and mentoring. They are currently working in different professions in data science, publishing, community building, software development, clinical studies, industries, scientific training and IT services.

Mentors advice and inspire

• Connect: to people, programs, companies
• Recommend: resources, readings, classes, experiences
• Feedback: for the mentee to consider

Mentoring training

Becoming a mentor can be frightening. Mentors will be then guided specially via a mentoring training with 4 calls during the mentorship round:

• 2 training calls in the beginning of the cohort to get participants trained and prepared for their role as mentors
• 1 catch-up call in the middle of the cohort to discuss new topics and challenges that might have occurred and address them
• 1 call at the end to capture experiences of mentors and assess their interest in future cohorts

A public gitter channel will facilitate open discussions among mentors to help them discuss their experiences, challenges and tips and tricks

Our mentors will then gain mentoring skills (active listening, effective questioning, giving feedback) via mentoring training to learn to celebrate successes and approach challenges in mentoring.

Experts

Experts are invited to join cohort calls or individual mentorship calls to share their experience and expertise during the program.

Speakers during cohort calls

Organizers

Irene Ramos

Pronouns: she / her

National Commission For The Knowledge And Use Of Biodiversity (Conabio)

Role in OLS: NASA Cohort Coordinator (contract)

Expertise:

Fair, Open data, Data management, Agrobiodiversity, Sustainability, Transdisciplinary research

More about Irene

I work as data manager at CONABIO where I develop FAIR workflows for biodiversity and agricultural data. I also study a PhD at UNAM, and my research is focused on the challenges for integrating social and ecological data. I love working in interdisciplinary projects that combine my interests in sustainability, data and open research

Bérénice Batut

Pronouns: she/her
@bebatut

University of Freiburg

Role in OLS: Director of Learning and Technology

Expertise:

Galaxy, Galaxy training, Citizen science, Bioinformatics, High-throughput sequencing, Metagenomics, Wordpress, Jekyll, GitHub/GitLab Pages, Designing and developing training material, Collaborating with Git & GitHub/GitLab, Git, GitHub, GitLab, Publishing web content

More about Bérénice

Bérénice is a bioinformatician (post-doc in the Freiburg Galaxy Team), analyzing biological data and developing tools for data analysis, mainly via Galaxy. In her current role, she also serves as a deputy training coordinator for ELIXIR Germany (de.NBI). Bérénice is passionate about training and education. She founded and co-leads the Galaxy Training Material project, and regularly giving talks and workshops on topics like data analysis, and tool development. She is also a founder of Street Science Community, a citizen science and outreach program.

Malvika Sharan

Pronouns: she/her
@malvikasharan

The Alan Turing Institute

Role in OLS: Director of Partnerships and Strategy

Expertise:

Community building, Mentoring, Data Science best practices, Reproducibility, Inclusive and collaborative practices, Python, Version Control, Funding Proposals, Bioinformatics, Algorithm design

More about Malvika

Malvika Sharan is a Senior Researcher at The Alan Turing Institute, where she leads a team of community managers and co-leads The Turing Way, a community-led handbook on data science. She is a co-founder of Open Life Science, and an active contributor of several open source/science projects. Connect with her on topics such as community building, open science, strategic collaboration and representation of marginalised members in leadership.

Yo Yehudi

Pronouns: they/them
@yoyehudi

Role in OLS: Executive Director, Business and Development Lead

Expertise:

Software development, Community building, Mentoring

More about Yo

Yo is the executive director and a co-founder of OLS. As an EngD student at the University of Manchester, Yo is studying pathogen-related data sharing and sustainability of open source software.Yo is a founder of Code is Science, and previously, they were editor for the PLOS Open Source Toolkit, editor emeritus at the Journal of Open Source Software, board member of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation, and a software developer at the University of Cambridge, working on an open source biological data warehouse called InterMine.

Community Participation Guidelines

This project, as part of the Open Life Science community, is committed to providing a welcoming, friendly, and harassment-free environment for everyone to learn and grow by contributing. As a result, we require participants to follow our code of conduct.

This code of conduct outlines our expectations for participants within the community, as well as steps to reporting unacceptable behavior. We are committed to providing a welcoming and inspiring community for all and expect our code of conduct to be honored. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be banned from the community.

Our open source community strives to:

• Be friendly and patient.

• Be welcoming: We strive to be a community that welcomes and supports people of all backgrounds and identities. This includes, but is not limited to members of any race, ethnicity, culture, national origin, colour, immigration status, social and economic class, educational level, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, age, size, family status, political belief, religion, and mental and physical ability.

• Be considerate: Your work will be used by other people, and you in turn will depend on the work of others. Any decision you take will affect users and colleagues, and you should take those consequences into account when making decisions. Remember that we’re a world-wide community, so you might not be communicating in someone else’s primary language.

• Be respectful: Not all of us will agree all the time, but disagreement is no excuse for poor behavior and poor manners. We might all experience some frustration now and then, but we cannot allow that frustration to turn into a personal attack. It’s important to remember that a community where people feel uncomfortable or threatened is not a productive one.

• Be careful in the words that we choose: We are a community of professionals, and we conduct ourselves professionally. Be kind to others. Do not insult or put down other participants. Harassment and other exclusionary behavior aren’t acceptable. This includes, but is not limited to: Violent threats or language directed against another person, Discriminatory jokes and language, Posting sexually explicit or violent material, Posting (or threatening to post) other people’s personally identifying information (“doxing”), Personal insults, especially those using racist or sexist terms, Unwelcome sexual attention, Advocating for, or encouraging, any of the above behavior, Repeated harassment of others. In general, if someone asks you to stop, then stop.

• Try to understand why we disagree: Disagreements, both social and technical, happen all the time. It is important that we resolve disagreements and differing views constructively. Remember that we’re different. Diversity contributes to the strength of our community, which is composed of people from a wide range of backgrounds. Different people have different perspectives on issues. Being unable to understand why someone holds a viewpoint doesn’t mean that they’re wrong. Don’t forget that it is human to err and blaming each other doesn’t get us anywhere. Instead, focus on helping to resolve issues and learning from mistakes.

Diversity Statement

We encourage everyone to participate and are committed to building a community for all. Although we will fail at times, we seek to treat everyone both as fairly and equally as possible. Whenever a participant has made a mistake, we expect them to take responsibility for it. If someone has been harmed or offended, it is our responsibility to listen carefully and respectfully, and do our best to right the wrong.

Although this list cannot be exhaustive, we explicitly honor diversity in age, gender, gender identity or expression, culture, ethnicity, language, national origin, political beliefs, profession, race, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and technical ability. We will not tolerate discrimination based on any of the protected characteristics above, including participants with disabilities.

Reporting Issues

If you experience or witness unacceptable behavior, or have any other concerns, please report it by contacting the organisers - Bérénice, Malvika and Yo. (team@we-are-ols.org).

To report an issue involving one of the members, please email one of the members individually (berenice@we-are-ols.org, malvika@we-are-ols.org, yo@we-are-ols.org).

All reports will be handled with discretion. In your report please include:

• Your contact information.

• Names (real, nicknames, or pseudonyms) of any individuals involved. If there are additional witnesses, please include them as well. Your account of what occurred, and if you believe the incident is ongoing. If there is a publicly available record (e.g. a mailing list archive or a public IRC logger), please include a link.

• Any additional information that may be helpful.

After filing a report, a representative will contact you personally, review the incident, follow up with any additional questions, and make a decision as to how to respond. If the person who is harassing you is part of the response team, they will recuse themselves from handling your incident. If the complaint originates from a member of the response team, it will be handled by a different member of the response team. We will respect confidentiality requests for the purpose of protecting victims of abuse.

Attribution & Acknowledgements

This code of conduct is based on the Open Code of Conduct from the TODOGroup.